DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62133#0256
240
AN ART-STUDENT IN MUNICH.
ticular, belonging to the Hogarthian class, I must refer
more in detail. This is his design entitled “ The Mad-
House,” universally known throughout Germany, and a
design which is interesting from the history of its origin
as well as from its intrinsic genius. Kaulbach’s childhood
and early youth were a season of bitterest poverty; his is
the old and affecting story of glorious genius putting forth
its tender roots and germinating in an arid and rocky soil.
“ The Mad-House” takes its origin from the time, when
Kaulbach was a lad of fifteen studying at the Diisseldorff
Academy. The physician of an asylum frequently visiting
the house where Kaulbach lodged, proposed to him that
he and a fellow-student should decorate the church of
the Asylum with frescoes from sacred subjects. They
were to be paid in food. The youthful decorators com-
pleted their work; and then the physician, with a secret
and benevolent intention in his heart, the purport of which
only in later years revealed itself to the painter, proposed
to show them over the Asylum. He led the two youths
through the desolate wards of that house of woe, relating
as he went along the mournful histories of the miserable
inhabitants. He wished to recompense the boys for their
labour, not alone by food for the body, but by food for
deep thought and reflection j he wished to read them a
deep and impressive life’s lesson, and he related therefore
these miserable histories to them in an extraordinarily
vivid and poetic manner. The impression made by his
words upon one of his listeners was profound. Those
mournful histories and forms haunted young Kaulbach’s
imagination like ghosts for ten years then, in order fairly
to lay the phantoms, he made his design of the “ Mad-
House.”
The design represents the patients as grouped together,
men and women, in the desolate yard of the Mad-House :
here is an awful commentary upon human life—upon the
AN ART-STUDENT IN MUNICH.
ticular, belonging to the Hogarthian class, I must refer
more in detail. This is his design entitled “ The Mad-
House,” universally known throughout Germany, and a
design which is interesting from the history of its origin
as well as from its intrinsic genius. Kaulbach’s childhood
and early youth were a season of bitterest poverty; his is
the old and affecting story of glorious genius putting forth
its tender roots and germinating in an arid and rocky soil.
“ The Mad-House” takes its origin from the time, when
Kaulbach was a lad of fifteen studying at the Diisseldorff
Academy. The physician of an asylum frequently visiting
the house where Kaulbach lodged, proposed to him that
he and a fellow-student should decorate the church of
the Asylum with frescoes from sacred subjects. They
were to be paid in food. The youthful decorators com-
pleted their work; and then the physician, with a secret
and benevolent intention in his heart, the purport of which
only in later years revealed itself to the painter, proposed
to show them over the Asylum. He led the two youths
through the desolate wards of that house of woe, relating
as he went along the mournful histories of the miserable
inhabitants. He wished to recompense the boys for their
labour, not alone by food for the body, but by food for
deep thought and reflection j he wished to read them a
deep and impressive life’s lesson, and he related therefore
these miserable histories to them in an extraordinarily
vivid and poetic manner. The impression made by his
words upon one of his listeners was profound. Those
mournful histories and forms haunted young Kaulbach’s
imagination like ghosts for ten years then, in order fairly
to lay the phantoms, he made his design of the “ Mad-
House.”
The design represents the patients as grouped together,
men and women, in the desolate yard of the Mad-House :
here is an awful commentary upon human life—upon the