a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein; while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in being--Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint that is pleasing and attractive, "_s'il continue à laisser errer son imagination à travers les formes diverses créées par l'art de tous les temps_," as the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ said of him on the occasion of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ KAULBACH. THE LUTE PLAYER.] After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an historian of the next century. "_Être maître_," says W. Bürger, "_c'est ne ressembler à personne._" But these were the works of painters who merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth century will be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art, as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way. [Illustration: FRANZ LENBACH.] By the labour of his life each one of them helped to make a place in Germany for the art of oil-painting, which had been forgotten under the influence of Winckelmann and Carstens, and in this sense their works were very important stations, as one might say, on the great thoroughfare of art. Through systematic imitation of the finest old masters, the Munich school had in a comparatively short time regained the appreciation of colour and treatment which had so long been lost. At a hazy distance lay those times when the distinctive peculiarity of German painting lay in its wealth of ideas, its want of any sense for colour, and its clumsy technique, whilst the æsthetic spokesmen praised these qualities as though they were national virtues. These views had been altogether renounced, and a decade of strenuous work had been devoted to the extirpation of all such defects. Such an achievement was sufficiently great, and sufficiently important and gratifying. This last resuscitation of the old masters was capable of being turned into a bridge leading to new regions.