_Max Michael_ seems to be somewhat influenced by Bonvin. Like the latter, he was attracted by the silent motions of nuns, juicy vegetables, dark-brown wainscoting, and the subdued light of interiors. He was, like Ribot in France, although with less artistic power, a good representative of that "school of cellar skylights" which imitated in a sound manner the tone of the old Spanish masters. One of his finest pictures, which hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, represents a girls' school in Italy. A nun is presiding over the sewing-lesson; the background is brown; the light comes through the yellow glass of a high and small window (like that of an attic), and throws a brown dusky tone over the room, in which the gay costumes of the little Italian girls, with their white kerchiefs, make exceedingly pretty and harmonious spots of colour. No adventure is hinted at, no episode related, but the picturesque appearance of the little girls, and their tones in the space, are all the more delicately rendered. A refined scheme of colour recalling the old masters compensates for the want of incident. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ MENZEL. THE IRON MILL. (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the copyright._)] [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ MENZEL. SUNDAY IN THE TUILERIES GARDENS.] In Vienna _August von Pettenkofen_ made a transition from the ossified, antediluvian _genre_ painting to painting which was artistically delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon's pictures and Millet's confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers' work shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to sentimentality or the curiosity excited by _genre_ painting. There are delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the fruit-sellers' stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep, dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low, white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street, or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen