Studio: international art (33.1905)

Paul Schwltze Naumburg

"A MOONLIGHT NIGHT " BY PAUL SCH U LTZE-N AUM BU RG

with its thickly-wooded ranges of hills, extensive art, is proved by his personal action. He did not

table lands, quiet valleys, beautiful rivers with copy their forms of expression, but rather remodelled

ancient castles on the heights above them, vine- them for himself, face to face with nature, with that

clad hillsides, snug little towns nestling in hollows, same thoroughness and studious devotion that had

with all the varied beauty that a German country- guided those others before him.
side can show. The picture had now to be developed from the

For this he needed new modes ot expression. preliminary sketch. However useful his previous

It is a very different matter whether one sees in schooling in plein air problems was eventually to

forest, meadow, mountain, and sky only the chance prove, for the moment it was a hindrance to him.

vehicles for tone and colour values, or whether one For the study of colour in nature according to the

wishes to present the things themselves as they practice of that day tended to reduce his large

live and as they appeal to the heart. It was in formal conceptions into quite other proportions,

drawing that he first embodied these new views. dependent on the accidental disposition of the

By delineating the forms of his landscape with the light. Only one kind of light really showed him

sharp point, deliberately and carefully guided in natural objects simplified, brought together,

long clear lines, he was most successful in setting separated, just as his inner conception demanded

forth all its characteristic features distinctly and of them, and that was the twilight of evening. In

individually, freed from any appearance of insub- that wonderful hour when day has ended and night

stantiality. It was an irksome and a lonely path not yet begun, he recognised once more on the

that he pursued in his studies. Such strivings were banks of the Saale, the picture that from his

at that time looked upon by living men as inartistic, earliest years The River (page 211) had meant

and it was only the great dead that could here to him, with the whole spell of secret mystery that

point the way : J. A. Koch, Tischbein, Preller, surrounds the word.

Ludwig Richter, Rethel. That he recognised In another experiment, A Moonlight Night

them for the mighty masters they were, and for the (illustrated on this page), the impossibility of

patterns they should be to all specifically German direct study from nature led him a step further

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