They no longer recognised the end of their calling, as the _genre_ painters had done, in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher spheres of art than the commonplace humour of _genre_ painting, and this recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw, mediæval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer "invented," but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place before the artist's eyes. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ PETTENKOFEN. A WOMAN SPINNING.] [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ PETTENKOFEN. IN THE CONVENT YARD.] That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability, _Diez_, the Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of engravings where he studied Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt, and all the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons, peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture "To the Church Consecration" recalls Beham, his "Merry Riding" Schongauer, and his "Ambuscade" Dürer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs. Diez knows the period from Dürer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt, Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and sometimes--for instance in his "Picnic in the Forest"--he has even drawn the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such proximity. Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more in _Harburger_, the talented draughtsman of _Fliegende Blätter_, the undisputed monarch of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures like "The Peasants' Doctor," "The Card-players," "The Grandmother," "By the Quiet Fireside," "In the Armchair," and "Easy-going Folk" were masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows distinction and temperament; they have deep and fine _chiaroscuro_, and are soft and fluent in execution. _Loefftz_ with his picture "Love and Avarice" appeared as Quentin Matsys _redivivus_, and then attached himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.