_Claus Meyer_, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich painters by his "Sewing School in the Nunnery" of 1883, is worthy of remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full of _nuances_, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm, quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books, and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life, the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events, has taken the place of the adventures dear to _genre_ painting. Old gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers--such were the quiet, passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine old Dutch pictures. _Holmberg_ became the historian of cardinals. A window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins, the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and purple robes of cardinals from the artist's rich wardrobe, are displayed, together with the appropriate models. In _Fritz August Kaulbach_, the most versatile of the group in his adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves, in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein, Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably graceful and _chic_. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ DIEZ. RETURNING FROM MARKET.] [Illustration: CLAUS MEYER. THE SMOKING PARTY.]