enuine
mountain coloring. Mountain peaks, rugged as possible, painted in thick
Venetian white, must detach themselves from a sky of almost pure Berlin
blue; with these again contrasts a centre-ground partly composed of
clumps of dark green fir-trees and partly of a poisonous yellow-green
meadow; finally the rocks of the foreground must be painted in glaring
ochre tones, just as they are squeezed out of the paint tube. Such
factory goods are, for the historian of culture, just as necessary a
supplement to Zimmermann and Schirmer and Calame as that "genuine Rhine
coloring" is to Koch and Rheinhard, to Schuetz and Reinermann.

Let us linger a moment longer in the region of the Rhine, which was in
Germany, for nearly two centuries, the subject of the most salable
landscape fancy articles. In the seventeenth century it was already a
sort of industry to turn out mechanically so-called "Rhine rivers." In
the same way that we now reproduce Rhine scenes on plates, cups,
tin-ware and pocket-handkerchiefs, in those days folding-screens,
fire-places, bay-windows, even door-cases, but more especially the space
over the doorway (though the latter were executed in the fresco style of
the cooper), were decorated with "Rhine rivers." But these "Rhine
rivers" are totally unlike those which the manufacturers of views of the
Rhine furnish us with today. The eye revealed by the one is very
different from that which we find in the other; at the most they have
the water in common.

[Illustration: AT THE SICK BED actually a painting by BENJAMIN VAUTIER]

In the old "Rhine rivers" there are, for the most part, rounded-off
mountainous formations, whereas we now make the angularity of the
real Rhine mountains still more angular if possible; the castles, as
indicative of a too barbaric taste, are often omitted or changed into a
sort of Roman ruin; the portrayal is so free that it ceases to be a
portrait, and yet they believed that they had adhered all the more
strictly to the peculiar motive of Rhine scenery. The most lively
activity of men and animals, ships and rafts, and all sorts of land
conveyances, formed the principal ornament; there had to be a sort of
antlike swarming to and fro on a river Rhine of this description if it
was to be considered really beautiful. In Saftleewen's views of the
Rhine this fondness is already discernible. Although in his pictures
there is still evidence of a very clear eye for mountainous formation
and the arc