International studio (22.1904)

DESIGN FOR TAPESTRY BY W. LEISTIKOW

atmosphere than that of every-day life, and the
actual scene fades away to give place to some
dreamy vision. Leistikow is before everything a
local painter, an interpreter of the immediate and
more distant environs of Berlin, and he has ren-
dered scenes from that solemn, quiet, essentially
German district, both in painting and lithography,
with all their magic charm, and in some cases also with
all their dreary harshness. These landscapes, with
their rigid outlines ; these forests, with their sombre
gloom, so unlike those of the South; these lonely
sheets of water, none of them of any great expanse
or of depth enough to be dangerous to the bather,
set in the wide-spreading meadows; these vast
stretches of untenanted plains, with none of the.
cheerful beauty of more favoured regions, which
are yet so dear to the home-loving Germans, have
been, so to speak, newly discovered by the rising
generation of Teutonic artists, their predecessors
having thought it necessary to seek their inspiration
on the other side of the Alps in the less forbidding
subjects to be found in Italy. There is, indeed, an
unique charm about the paintings of Leistikow,
who renders with conscientious and intuitive faith-

fulness, the colouring, the light, and the atmospheric
effects of his native land, far from fascinating though
they often are. Even when he goes farther afield,
and represents Norwegian fjords instead of the
woods and lakes of Germany, he in every case
catches the very spirit of the scene depicted,
realising with rare skill its distinctive peculiarities.
There are no high-pitched notes in Leistikow's
scale of colouring, no A7%7* yiwM so to speak ; and
dazzling or startling effects must not be expected
from him. His forte is rather in the translation of
subdued and sombre chiaroscuro, the charm of
his work depending less on line and colour than on
his feeling for tone and his appreciation of the
beauty of widespreading plains, with which he may
be said to be thoroughly in touch. In this respect
there is great sympathy between Leistikow and the
modern Glasgow school, and in the case of both
the cause is not far to seek, for Scotland and
Germany are not unlike in the general character of
their scenery, about which there is none of the
brilliant and dazzling colouring of countries with a
more genial climate. The typical examples of the
work of Leistikow, here reproduced, will bear out this
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