But what the history of art has forgotten in estimating the fame of the portrait painter Lenbach is, that in the beginning of his career this very man paved the way for the "Realistic" movement in German painting which later he confronted so haughtily and with so much reserve. The first of these works of his, which have for Germany much the same significance as the early works of Courbet have for France, is the well-known "Shepherd Boy" in the Schack Gallery. Stretched on his back, he lies in the high grass where flowers grow thickly, and looks up while butterflies and dragon-flies flutter through the dusty air of a Roman summer day. Such a frank, an audacious, naked realism, breaking away from everything traditional in its representation of fact, was something entirely novel and surprising in Germany in the year 1856. Up to this time no one had seen a fragment of nature depicted with such unqualified veracity. The tanned shepherd lad, with his naked sunburnt feet, covered by a dark crust of mire from the damp earth, seemed to be lying there in the flesh, plastically thrown into relief by the glowing midday sun. The next of these pictures, "Peasants taking Refuge from the Weather," which appeared in the exhibition of 1858, called down a storm of indignation on account of its "trivial realism." Every figure was painted after nature with blunt and rigorous sincerity, and no anecdotic incident was devised in it. [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ HIRTH. THE HOP HARVEST.] After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In the days when he worked in Couture's studio _Victor Müller_ had taken up some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863 in Munich, Müller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however, in his subjects. "The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by the Music of a Violin," "Venus and Adonis," "Hero and Leander," "Hamlet in the Churchyard," "Venus and Tannhäuser," "Faust on the Promenade," "Romeo and Juliet," "Ophelia by the Stream"--such are the titles of his principal works. But how far they are removed from the anæmic, empty painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, Müller appears, in the manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor Müller's pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of