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.
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