nts he rather suddenly developed a
style of great maturity and firmness. From Paris he went back to Berlin,
but in 1889 he started for Rome, where he spent four profitable years.
The fruit of this Roman period has continued to ripen up to the present
time, although since 1893 Klinger has made his home in Leipzig, his
_wanderjahre_ apparently over and done with. He not only painted in
Rome a _Pieta_, a _Crucifixion_, and a number of pictures in which
problems of open-air painting are attacked, but he conceived there the
powerful series of etchings on the subject of death, and there he made
his first attempts in colored sculpture. From his earliest years, the
image of death had often solicited him, and some of his interpretations
are filled with dignity and pathos. In the slender, rigid figure on a
white draped bed, from the etching cycle entitled _Eine Liebe_, there is
the suggestion of a classic tomb, severe and impressive in outline,
while nothing could be more poignant than the emotional appeal of the
_Mutter und Kind_ in the second death series. To turn from these to the
two religious paintings executed in Rome, is to realize that eccentric
as Klinger often is, both in choice of subject and treatment, his
attitude toward the mysteries and problems of man's existence is that of
a serious thinker with a strong artistic talent, but a still stronger
intelligence. It is not, however, until we reach the period which he
devotes to sculpture, that we find in his art the quality of nobility, a
certain breadth, which in spite of innovations in execution and almost
trivial symbolic detail, impresses upon his conceptions the classic
mark.

He began his studies for his great polychromatic statue of Beethoven as
early as 1886, fifteen years before its completion. In 1892 it was
reported in Rome that he had turned to sculpture as a new field in
which to prove himself a master, and his first exhibited figure placed
him above the rank of the amateur. He threw himself into his new work
with his usual energy, making himself familiar with the technicalities
of marble cutting in order to follow the execution with intelligence at
every stage. He sought for his material with unwearying zest, taking
long journeys into Italy, Greece and the Pyrenees to procure marble with
the soft, worn, rich quality produced by exposure to the weather; with
this he combined onyx and brilliant stones, bronze, ivory and gold,
always with the intention of crea