Boecklin has no more rendered an exact portrait of the scenery of Italy than the Classic masters of France sought to represent in a photographic way districts in the forest of Fontainebleau. His whole life, like theirs, was a renewed and perpetual wooing of nature. As a boy he looked down from his attic in Basle upon the heaving waters of the Rhine. When he was in Rome, in 1850, he wandered daily in the Campagna to feast his eyes upon its grave lines and colours. After a few years in Weimar he gave up his post to gather fresh impressions in Italy. And the moods with which he was inspired by nature and the phenomena he observed were stored in his mind as though in a great emporium. Then his imagination went through another stage. That "organic union of figures and landscape" which the representatives of "heroic landscape" had surmised and endeavoured to attain by a reasoned method through the illustration of passages in poetry took place in Boecklin by the force of intuitive conception. The mood excited in him by a landscape is translated into an intuition of life. In many pictures, particularly those of his earlier period, the ground-tone given by the landscape finds merely a faint echo in small accessory figures. In such pictures he stands more or less on a level with _Dreber_, that master who died in Rome in 1875, and was forgotten in the history of German art more swiftly than ought to have been the case. Franz Dreber was not one of those Classicists dispersed over the face of Europe, men who were content with setting heroic actions in the midst of noble landscapes in the fashion of Preller; on the contrary, he was the lyricist of this movement, the first man who did not touch the epical material of old myths in a manner that was merely scholarly and illustrative, but developed his picture from the original note of landscape. In his pictures nature laughs with those who are glad, mourns with those who weep, sheds her light upon the joyful, and envelops tortured spirits in storm and the terror of thunder. If the golden age is to be represented, the scene is a soft summer landscape, where everything breathes peace and innocence and bliss. And the life of those who inhabit this happy region runs by in blissful peace also. Fair women and children rest upon the meadow, and gather fruits and pluck roses. If he paints Ulysses upon the shore of the sea, looking with yearning towards his distant home, a dull, sultry haze of noon broods over the district, wide and grey like the hero's yearning. A spring landscape of sunny blitheness, with butterflies sipping at the blossoms of the trees and sunbeams sportively dallying on the sea, are the surroundings of the picture where Psyche is crowned by Eros. And if Prometheus is represented chained to the rock and striving to burst his fetters, all nature fights the fight of the Titan. Lurid clouds move swiftly through the sky, ghostly flashes of lightning quiver, and a wild tempest rakes the mountains.