Any one who would interpret a theory based upon the idea that an artist is the result of influences might, while he is about it, speak of Boecklin's apprentice period in Düsseldorf and Schirmer's biblical landscapes. That "harmonious blending of figures with landscape," which is the leading note in Boecklin's work, was of course from the days of Claude Lorraine and Poussin the essence of the so-called historical landscape which found its principal representatives at a later period in Koch, Preller, Rottmann, Lessing, and Schirmer. Yet Boecklin is not the disciple of these masters, but stands at the very opposite pole of art. The art of all these men was merely a species of historical painting. Old Koch read the Bible, Æschylus, Ossian, Dante, and Shakespeare; found in them such scenes as Noah's thank-offering, Macbeth and the witches, or Fingal's battle with the spirit of Loda; and sought amid the Sabine hills, in Olevano and Subiaco, for sites where these incidents might have taken place. Preller made the _Odyssey_ the basis of his artistic creation, chose out of it moments where the scene might be laid in some landscape, and found in Rügen, Norway, Sorrento, and the coast of Capri the elements of nature necessary to his epic. Rottmann worked upon hexameters composed by King Ludwig, and adhered in the views he painted to the historical memories attached to the towns of Italy. Lessing sought inspiration in Sir Walter Scott, for whose monks and nuns he devised an appropriately sombre and mysterious background. Schirmer illustrated the Books of Moses by placing the figures in Schnorr's Picture Bible in Preller's Odyssean landscape. Whether they were Classicists appealing to the eye by the architecture of form, or Romanticists addressing the spirit by the "mood" in their landscapes, it was common to all these painters that they set out from a literary or historical subject. They gave an exact interpretation of the actions prescribed by their authors, surrounding the figures with fictitious landscapes, corresponding in general conception to one's notion of the surroundings of heroes, patriarchs, or hermits. Their pictures are historical incidents with a stage-setting of landscape. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ ARNOLD BOECKLIN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]