The History of Modern Painting, Volume 2 (of 4) Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century — Context and Discussion

The Draughtsmen as Pioneers of Modern Life

Muther argues that before painters fully embraced contemporary subjects, it was the caricaturists and illustrators who first brought modern life into art. In England, he names Gillray, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank; in Germany, figures like Johann Adam Klein and Wilhelm Busch; in France, Daumier, Gavarni, and Guys. These artists, he claims, worked outside the 'general alienation of painting from the interests of life' that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. Their focus on everyday scenes, social satire, and urban types provided a necessary 'incitement' for painters to rediscover the world around them. Muther's own diction here is brisk and categorical, grouping artists by nationality and emphasizing their collective role as a corrective to academic detachment.

Romantic Landscape and the Reversal of Classical Ideals

Muther traces how Romantic landscape painters deliberately inverted the classical canon. Where Lairesse had praised 'well-fed cows and sheep' and 'stately palaces,' the Romantics sought 'ill-formed trees,' 'sharp-cut hills,' and 'dilapidated buildings.' He cites Alexander Humboldt to note that antiquity found nature beautiful only when 'kindly, smiling, and useful,' whereas the Romantics valued nature in its 'tameless and awe-inspiring savageness.' The light of simple day was rejected in favor of 'the gloom of night and of the mountain glens.' Muther links this aesthetic shift to specific locations: Tieck, living in Berlin's 'cold daylight' of rationalism, yearned for moonlight forests; Lessing, from Breslau, first gave that yearning pictorial form. The passage is dense with quoted criteria, showing Muther's method of letting historical voices define the terms of debate.

Mood and Accessories in Early Romantic Painting

Muther observes that early Romantic painters lacked the technique to express 'mood' through nature alone, so they relied on 'accessories'—figures and props that illustrated the intended emotion. In Lessing's early works, he notes, the melancholy is externalized through 'knights, squires, noble maidens, and other romantic requisites.' The landscape itself is piled with 'rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and ruined castles, swamps and sombre woods, old, decaying trees, half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones.' The sky is 'veiled with a dark grey cerement.' Muther's own prose here mirrors the accumulation of gloomy detail, and he anchors his analysis in a specific example: Lessing's first picture of 1828, which showed 'a desolate churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven' with a single sunbeam illuminating a grave. This concrete reference grounds the broader argument about the shift from line to color and from understanding to spirit.

The Military Picture and the Costume Question

Muther contends that the victory of modernity on the Continent came only gradually, and that painting learned to treat contemporary costume by first dealing with uniform. He groups French military painters—Gros, Horace Vernet, Bellangé, Pils, Protais, Charlet, Raffet, Meissonier, and others—as key figures in this transition. The chapter's title, 'The Military Picture,' signals Muther's interest in how subject matter drove stylistic change. He implies that the uniform, with its standardized and recognizable form, offered a bridge between the historical costume of academic painting and the everyday dress of modern life. The list of names is extensive, but Muther does not dwell on individual works; instead, he uses the category to illustrate a broader pattern: that the depiction of contemporary warfare and soldiers helped painters break free from romanticized or classical subjects.

Muther's volume is organized as a series of national and thematic surveys, each anchored by specific artists and their works. Readers will find that his judgments are often conveyed through juxtaposition—setting Lairesse against Tieck, or the English draughtsmen against the French military painters—rather than through extended analysis of individual pictures. The excerpts suggest a historian more interested in tracing the evolution of taste than in providing close readings of canvases. This makes the book a useful guide to the shifting criteria by which nineteenth-century painting was judged, even if the paintings themselves remain largely in the background.

That rainy afternoon, Muther’s book kept me company while water streaked the window, his Romantic painters chasing sublime ruin over Lairesse’s tidy smiles. I found myself thinking of stone rather than canvas, of weathered arches standing like patient ghosts. Before I knew it, I was leafing through The ecclesiastical architecture of Scotland from the earliest Christian times to the seventeenth century; vol. 1/3 — Context and Discussion, tracing the same longing for aged, solemn beauty.