DOI Heft:
No. 32 (November, 1895)
DOI Artikel:Studio-talk
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.17295#0135
Studio- Talk
" You have got something to say, and you're
trying to say it without the aid of colour. Why
don't you engrave or etch instead of drawing huge
cartoons ? " He replied that he had tried it, but
that it was not in his line. He told me he
felt like a caged wild beast while he was sitting
over a thumb or a toe one-eighth of an inch in size,
and when he couldn't stand it any longer he threw
the graver aside, fetched out his beloved crayon,
and drew his own hand, " three times life-size."
That soothed his temper. He sees things big and
wants to make them so. His ideal would be to
cover a wall twice the size of Michel Angelo's Last
Judgment. _
People do not order cartoons that size; so,
after all, he had to turn to painting. Almost a
year has been taken up by experimenting with
techniques. He tried them all, from distemper
down to the latest Musini colours ; none of them
were satisfactory for monumental work; he says
they will not stand the test of time. There is a man
at Rome, named Ludwig, who has invented the
tone lasting painters' medium, and written a book
about it and its application. Schneider swears by
him at present, and some of the pictures now
exhibited are done according to the Ludwig recipe.
To be sure the colours look as if they would
last for ever, but that seems also to be their chief
recommendation. _
William Strang has been here for a fortnight for
the purpose of etching several portraits which, it is
unnecessary to say, are entirely successful.
The competition for the Ludwig-Richter monu-
ment, to be erected upon Dresden's far-famed
Briihl'sche Terrace, has come to a close, and the
prizes have been awarded. Paul Kirchheim, of
Brunswick, received the first prize, and Poppel-
mann, of Dresden, the second. About thirty-five
models in one-tenth life-size were sent in. Pro-
bably no other artist in the world has depicted the
life of the peasant and the " small man," as he is
called here, so beautifully as Richter. He was of
the people and for the people; there was no senti-
mentalism, no affectation, really no vice at all in
his art, for even the excessive simplicity of his
style is no more than in keeping with the subjects
that he handled. He was never a painter of note;
of his fine qualities as an illustrator every Londoner
can form an opinion, since the print-room of the
British Museum has come into possession of
several hundred woodcut proofs of his drawings.
122
The difficulty with regard to the monument lay in
avoiding the slightest touch of the heroic without
sacrificing style. Some of the designs were too
ambitious for this simple and naive artist; others
were mere genre pictures in stone. Poppelmann's
model showed Richter seated with a little boy and
girl, and his favourite spit-dog before him.
The committee that decides upon the annual
purchases of modern pictures for the Dresden
Gallery has recommended a landscape by Baum,
The Flying Fish by Grethe, and Thoma's portrait
of himself. The funds are derived from the Prcell-
Heuer bequest, and are available only for pictures
by living German painters exhibited in Dresden at
the Academy exhibition or at private shows.
Baum, a Dresden man, has recently evolved a
style something like Raffaelli's. Grethe paints a
man swimming after a flying fish in a highly
coloured sea. Both are very good pictures, and
the Thoma is magnificent. H. W. S.
PARIS.—The International Exhibition to
celebrate the centenary of lithography
claims all our attention this month.
As complete as it is possible to be,
and including examples of all the
schools and all the aesthetic principles which have
followed 'one another since the invention of this
delightful process, this collection is in itself, to
those who see it, a thorough initiation into the
history of an art which, by a capricious fate, in less
than a hundred years, was born, died out, revived,
and now is flourishing anew in strong and lively
growth. Starting with Aloys Senefelder and Simon
Schmidt (represented at the Champ de Mars by
some thirty of the rarest specimens from the Royal
Library at Munich), and coming down to the pre-
sent day—to Fantin-Latour, and Willette, and
Toulouse-Lautrec—the exhibition covers all that
has been produced by draughtsmen and artists for
a full century, and the interest attaching to such a
display may easily be imagined. To name all the
masters represented on these walls were to produce
a complete record of a hundred years of art.
Side by side with the Due de Montpensier, the
Due de Bordeaux, Horace Vernet, Baron Gerard,
Gericault, Gros, Decamps and Goya, comes a
dazzling list of the masters of the art—those epic
poets, Charlet and Raffet; Deveria; Bonington
(who, in my opinion, was one of the precursors of
Impressionism); Delacroix, pouring out his mighty
" You have got something to say, and you're
trying to say it without the aid of colour. Why
don't you engrave or etch instead of drawing huge
cartoons ? " He replied that he had tried it, but
that it was not in his line. He told me he
felt like a caged wild beast while he was sitting
over a thumb or a toe one-eighth of an inch in size,
and when he couldn't stand it any longer he threw
the graver aside, fetched out his beloved crayon,
and drew his own hand, " three times life-size."
That soothed his temper. He sees things big and
wants to make them so. His ideal would be to
cover a wall twice the size of Michel Angelo's Last
Judgment. _
People do not order cartoons that size; so,
after all, he had to turn to painting. Almost a
year has been taken up by experimenting with
techniques. He tried them all, from distemper
down to the latest Musini colours ; none of them
were satisfactory for monumental work; he says
they will not stand the test of time. There is a man
at Rome, named Ludwig, who has invented the
tone lasting painters' medium, and written a book
about it and its application. Schneider swears by
him at present, and some of the pictures now
exhibited are done according to the Ludwig recipe.
To be sure the colours look as if they would
last for ever, but that seems also to be their chief
recommendation. _
William Strang has been here for a fortnight for
the purpose of etching several portraits which, it is
unnecessary to say, are entirely successful.
The competition for the Ludwig-Richter monu-
ment, to be erected upon Dresden's far-famed
Briihl'sche Terrace, has come to a close, and the
prizes have been awarded. Paul Kirchheim, of
Brunswick, received the first prize, and Poppel-
mann, of Dresden, the second. About thirty-five
models in one-tenth life-size were sent in. Pro-
bably no other artist in the world has depicted the
life of the peasant and the " small man," as he is
called here, so beautifully as Richter. He was of
the people and for the people; there was no senti-
mentalism, no affectation, really no vice at all in
his art, for even the excessive simplicity of his
style is no more than in keeping with the subjects
that he handled. He was never a painter of note;
of his fine qualities as an illustrator every Londoner
can form an opinion, since the print-room of the
British Museum has come into possession of
several hundred woodcut proofs of his drawings.
122
The difficulty with regard to the monument lay in
avoiding the slightest touch of the heroic without
sacrificing style. Some of the designs were too
ambitious for this simple and naive artist; others
were mere genre pictures in stone. Poppelmann's
model showed Richter seated with a little boy and
girl, and his favourite spit-dog before him.
The committee that decides upon the annual
purchases of modern pictures for the Dresden
Gallery has recommended a landscape by Baum,
The Flying Fish by Grethe, and Thoma's portrait
of himself. The funds are derived from the Prcell-
Heuer bequest, and are available only for pictures
by living German painters exhibited in Dresden at
the Academy exhibition or at private shows.
Baum, a Dresden man, has recently evolved a
style something like Raffaelli's. Grethe paints a
man swimming after a flying fish in a highly
coloured sea. Both are very good pictures, and
the Thoma is magnificent. H. W. S.
PARIS.—The International Exhibition to
celebrate the centenary of lithography
claims all our attention this month.
As complete as it is possible to be,
and including examples of all the
schools and all the aesthetic principles which have
followed 'one another since the invention of this
delightful process, this collection is in itself, to
those who see it, a thorough initiation into the
history of an art which, by a capricious fate, in less
than a hundred years, was born, died out, revived,
and now is flourishing anew in strong and lively
growth. Starting with Aloys Senefelder and Simon
Schmidt (represented at the Champ de Mars by
some thirty of the rarest specimens from the Royal
Library at Munich), and coming down to the pre-
sent day—to Fantin-Latour, and Willette, and
Toulouse-Lautrec—the exhibition covers all that
has been produced by draughtsmen and artists for
a full century, and the interest attaching to such a
display may easily be imagined. To name all the
masters represented on these walls were to produce
a complete record of a hundred years of art.
Side by side with the Due de Montpensier, the
Due de Bordeaux, Horace Vernet, Baron Gerard,
Gericault, Gros, Decamps and Goya, comes a
dazzling list of the masters of the art—those epic
poets, Charlet and Raffet; Deveria; Bonington
(who, in my opinion, was one of the precursors of
Impressionism); Delacroix, pouring out his mighty