If realism consisted in the dry and sober illustration of selected fragments of reality, if upright feeling, loyalty, and honest patriotism were serviceable qualities in art, a lengthier consideration should certainly be accorded to _Anton von Werner_. In his _genre_ pictures of campaign life everything is spick and span, everything is in its right place and in soldierly order: it is all typically Prussian art. His portraits are casino pictures, and as such it is impossible to imagine how they could better serve their purpose. From the spurs to the cuirassier helmet everything is correct and in accordance with military regulation; even the likeness has something officially prescribed which would make any recruit form front if suddenly brought face to face with such a person. In his pictures of ceremonies his ability was just sufficient to chronicle the function in question with the conscientiousness of a clerk in a law court. The intellectual capacity for seeing more of a great man than his immaculately polished boots and the immaculately burnished buttons of his uniform was denied him, as was the artistic capacity of exalting a picture-sheet to the level of a picture. Equipped with a healthy though trivial feeling for reality, _Carl Güssow_ ventured to approach nature in a sturdy and robust fashion in some of his works, and exhibited in Berlin a few life-sized figures, "Pussy," "A Lover of Flowers," "Lost Happiness," "Welcome," "The Oyster Girl," and so forth. Through these he opened for a brief period in Berlin the era of yellow kerchiefs and black finger-nails, and on the strength of them was exalted by the critics as a pioneer of realism or else anathematised, according to their æsthetic creed. He had a robust method of painting muscles and flesh and clothes of many colours, and of setting green beside red and red beside yellow, yet even in these first works--his only works of artistic merit--he never got beyond the banal and barbaric transcript of a reality which was entirely without interest.