hitectonic adornment of the region, yet the monotonous,
unnaturally tender and misty coloring indicates the effort to soften and
equalize the contrast of forms, while life is introduced into the
landscape only by means of the immeasurably rich accessories which make
every rock, every valley, and especially the entire river, swarm with
people. These are, in truth, cultural landscapes, in which we perceive
the greatest charm of the region to lie in the pathway of human work,
just as the whole age in which they were painted longed to get away from
the devastation of the Thirty Years' War into the crowded activity of
work and festive pleasures, which, however, were far less apt to be
found on the real Rhine than on the painted "Rhine rivers" of the
seventeenth century. Johannes Griffier affords us an even clearer idea
than Saftleewen of the model pictures of the mechanical old "Rhine
rivers." Griffier paints from imagination an idyllic river valley,
adorned with Roman ruins such as never stood on the Rhine, animated by
all kinds of jolly people, such as it would have been hard, in that day,
to find gathered in our devastated provinces. That was then dubbed a
river Rhine. Griffier, however, certainly believed that he had beheld
the genuine scenery of the Rhine; he did not laboriously evolve his
pictures shut up in a room, but painted his imaginative pieces in a
skiff, direct from nature. And it really was the actual Rhine that he
saw, only he looked at it with the idealistic eye of the seventeenth
century.

If one confronts productions of this kind with the later works of a
Schuetz or Reinermann which treat of the same subject, and then again
compares both with our modern views of the Rhine, one can often scarcely
comprehend how even the same character of scenery is supposed to be
reproduced in these widely differing conceptions, much less the
identically same landscape. While in Saftleewen, for example, we always
see the Rhine country veiled in a soft mist, seventy years ago it was
accounted as a merit of the elder Schuetz that he always gave his
pictures of the Rhine and the Main the clearest possible air, and that
there was never a trace of mist in the atmosphere! Let us now compare
both of these conceptions with the Rhine views executed in the modern
style of a steel engraving, with their heavy, tropically stormy sky,
dark masses of clouds, between which thick dazzling streams of light
break forth, and similar violent li