The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to narrative _genre_ painting, since his entire organisation preordained him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was realism incarnate--rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest, high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye and hand. "He had," as a French critic wrote of him, "one of those organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from painting." [Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._ LEIBL. IN THE STUDIO.] [Illustration: _American Art Review._ LEIBL. THE VILLAGE POLITICIANS.] Even his first picture, exhibited in 1869, and representing his two fellow-pupils Rudolf Hirth and Haider looking at an engraving, had a soft, full golden harmony, which left all the products of conventional _genre_ painting far behind it, and came into direct competition with the refined works of the Dutch painter Michael Swert. His second picture, a portrait of Frau Gedon, made an impression even in Paris by its Rembrandtesque beauty of tone, and was awarded there in 1870 the gold medal which the judges had not ventured to give him the year before at Munich, because he was still an Academy pupil. Yet 1869 was the decisive year in Leibl's life. The Munich Exhibition gave at that time an opportunity for learning the importance of French art upon a scale previously unknown. Over four hundred and fifty pictures were accessible, and the works of the smooth, conventional historical painters were the minority. Troyon was to be seen there, and Millet and Corot. But Courbet, to whose works the committee had devoted an entire room, was chiefly the hero, and one over whom there was much conflict. Opinions were violently at odds about him in the painters' club. The official circle greeted the master of Ornans with the same hoot of indignation which had been accorded him in France. But for Leibl he became an adored and marvellous ideal. His eyes sparkled when he sat opposite him at the _Deutsches Haus_, and in default of any other means of making himself understood he assured Courbet of his veneration by sturdily drinking to him: "Prosit Courbet--Prosit Leibl." He stretched his powerful limbs, and threw himself into vigorous attitudes to evince in sanguinary quarrels, when necessary, his enthusiasm for the great Frenchman. How false and paltry seemed the whole school of Piloty, with