A feeling arose that the limit had been reached, and it arose in those very men who had advanced furthest in pictorial accomplishment, adapting and making their own all the ability of the old masters. Painters believed that they had learnt enough of technique to be able to treat subjects from modern life in the spirit of these old masters, not handling them any longer as laboriously composed _genre_ pictures, but as real works of art. And a group of realists came forward as they had done in France, and began to seek truth with scientific rigour and an avoidance of any kind of anecdotic by-play. The greatest pupil of the old masters, _Franz Lenbach_, stands in a close and most important relationship with these endeavours of modern art, through some of his youthful works. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ LENBACH. PORTRAIT OF WILHELM I.] The public has accustomed itself to think of him only as a portrait painter, and he is justly honoured as the greatest German portraitist of the century. But posterity may one day regard it as a special favour of the gods that Lenbach should have been born at the right time, and that his progress to maturity fell in the greatest epoch of the century. His gallery of portraits has been called an epic in paint upon the heroes of our age. The greatest historical figures of the century have sat to him, the greatest conquerors and masters in the kingdom of science and art. Nevertheless this gallery would be worthless to posterity if Lenbach had not had at his disposal one quality possessed by none of his immediate predecessors, a sacred respect for nature. At a time when rosy tints, suave smiles, and idealised drawing were the requirements necessary in every likeness, at a time when Winterhalter painted great men, not as they were, but as, in his opinion, they ought to have been--without reflecting that God Almighty knows best what heads are appropriate for great men--Lenbach appeared with his brusque veracity of portraiture. That alone was an achievement in which only a man of original temperament could have succeeded. If a portrait painter is to prevail with society a peculiar combination of faculties is necessary, apart from his individual capacity for art. Lenbach had not only an eye and a hand, but likewise elbows and a tongue which placed him _hors concours_. He could be as rude as he was amiable, and as deferential as he was proud; half boor and half courtier, at once a great artist and an accomplished _faiseur_, he succeeded in doing a thing which has brought thousands to ruin--he succeeded in forcing upon society his own taste, and setting genuine human beings of strong character in the place of the smiling automatons of fashionable painters. In comparison with the works of earlier portrait painters it might be said that a touch of pantheism and nature-worship goes through Lenbach's pictures. [Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._ LENBACH. PRINCE BISMARK.]