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 architectonic 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.