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 light-effects. One might think that
sun, air, and clouds, water and mountains and trees and rocks, had
altered in the course of the centuries, that nature itself had been
transformed, if we did not know only too well that it is the eye of man
alone which has altered in the mean time, that every generation _sees_
in a different style.
Pages:
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597