When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the Renaissance style: harmless _genre_ pictures _à la_ Beyschlag--the joys of love and of the family circle--but not being so banal as the latter he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm. Certain single figures were found specially acceptable--for instance, the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen's, with their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet. Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were they transformed into "ladies in old German costume"; and Kaulbach understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with fine artistic feeling: in his "May Day" he has revived the pastoral scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his "St. Cecilia" he created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo Dolci and Gabriel Max; his "Pietà" he composed with "the best figures of Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian," just as Gerard de Lairesse had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail flower-like girls _à la_ Gabriel Max, charming little angels _à la_ Thoma, children in Pierrot costume _à la_ Vollon, and little landscapes _à la_ Gainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their beauties only the flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of course, a really _chic_ painter of women, like Sargent, is not to be thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of indifferent health, and breathed an _odeur de femme_ which found very wide approval. In his "Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival" he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such