lacking in any individual note and are hopelessly stiff and academic in
colour. Not even the very apparent influence of the great English
portrait masters of their time could save them from mediocrity. The only
pictures worth excepting from this classification, outside of the
Stuarts, are Charles Elliott's "Colonel McKenney" and S. B. Waugh's
portrait of Thorwaldsen, the Danish sculptor.

Gallery 59.

In an adjoining gallery toward the north, our chronological
investigations bring us into an atmosphere of story-telling pictures of
the most pronounced Düsseldorf and Munich styles. This period has always
been the source of delight to the populace, which has no concern in the
technical qualities of a picture, a contention which led, more than
anything else, to the healthy reaction we now enjoy as the modern
school. The sentimental tone of most of these pictures and their
self-explanatory illustrative motives no doubt make them easily the lazy
man's delight, but I cannot help feeling that most of their themes could
much more successfully be approached through literature than through the
painter's art. Most of them explain themselves immediately, and those
which do not are helped along by descriptive titles fastened to the
frames, as the taste of that school demands. The great men of this
school in Germany were primarily great painters. Men like Defregger,
Knaus, Vautier, Grützner, Kaulbach, and others will always command high
respect by their technical achievements, no matter how we may disagree
with their choice of subjects. The really worthy ones we have produced
in this field of genre painting are to be found in other galleries and
are represented by men like Hovenden, Currier, and Johnson. The only
real painting among the many figure pictures in this gallery is Peter
Frederick Rothermel's "Martyrdom of St. Agnes." Very rich in colour and