After he had returned to Scotland he occasionally painted pictures of ceremonies, "The House of Commons," "The Wedding of the Princess Royal," and so forth, but he soon returned to subjects from Spanish life. Gipsy-looking, cigarette-smoking women, with sparkling eyes and jet-black hair, young folks dancing to the castanets, bull-fighters with glittering silver-grey costume and flashing glances, dark-brown peasants in citron-yellow petticoats, hollow-eyed manufactory girls, potters, and glass-blowers.--such are the materials of Phillip's pictures. They give no scope to anecdote; but they always reveal a fragment of reality which emits a world of impressions and an opulence of artistic ability. As painter _par excellence_, John Phillip stands in opposition to older English _genre_ painters. Whilst they were, in the first place, at pains to tell a story intelligibly, Phillip was a colourist, a _maître peintre_, whose figures were developed from the colours, and whose creations are so full of character that they will always assert their place with the best that has ever been painted. Even in England, the country of literary and narrative painting, art was no longer an instrument for expressing ideas; it had become an end in itself, and had discovered colour as its prime and most essential medium of expression. CHAPTER XXIX REALISM IN GERMANY In Germany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it, was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm. Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of