I prepared for this exhibition in Düsseldorf by taking the short train journey down the Rhine to Cologne, which would hate to be thought of as a twin city. Its gigantic cathedral is as I first saw it some 40 years ago, still black with soot (but where would you start to clean it?), and the streets still remind me of Swansea, but without the sense of space. The same low-rise blocks of anonymous postwar buildings are on every side, with the same seemingly temporary shops and takeaways, only with Würstel as well as burgers.
Where Swansea has the fine Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Cologne has the Wallraf-Richartz, now in a handsome new building adorned in the old-fashioned manner with the carved names of artists whose works are held within. Here is Van Dyck, Murillo, Courbet; here is Renoir, and here is ...Stokes. Yes, Marianne Stokes, technically flawless purveyor of goblins and fey adventurers, making a useful point for anyone about to look at lots of academic paintings. So much 19th-century art remains condemned by the proleptic history that considers artists irrelevant if their work failed to fit with the onward march to ‘modernism’.
I recommend fortification with a few Würstel, though, before entering the recently reopened Art Deco Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. There are some 420 paintings on view, spread over three floors. The first thing you see, in a huge space showing history and religious scenes, is none other than ‘The Two Princes in the Tower’ (correctly, ‘The Children of Edward’), exhibited by Paul Delaroche at the Paris Salon of 1831. He is much misunderstood. We are not meant to think of what is before us as ‘reality’ but as a tableau vivant, a scene performed upon a stage, reality at one remove. We are to experience the drama of the painting as we would the action in a theatre, and David’s ‘Death of Marat’, for example, was exhibited on a carefully lit stage within a darkened playhouse. It is a way of reacting to paintings that we have rather lost sight of, but Delaroche’s composition pointed the way forward for many artists for whom ‘history painting’ was still the ultimate goal. And the irrelevant little princes became a popular subject: we see alongside examples by Theodor Hildebrandt of the Düsseldorf academy and Karl von Piloty of Munich.
The Düsseldorf academy first got into its stride with the native-born Peter von Cornelius. He was a Nazarene, one of those Teutonic hippies avant la lettre who lived in Rome in the first years of the 19th century, dedicated to long hair, communal living and ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ medieval art. His exquisite study for ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins’ is packed with quotations from Raphael, which it ought not to be. Cornelius became director in 1819 and Nazarenes were to control many of the German academies of which they had so disapproved. Cornelius moved to Munich five years later, whence he advised upon the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament in London.
But the real hero of this story is another Nazarene, Wilhelm Schadow, who came to Düsseldorf from Berlin in 1826, bringing with him a gaggle of disciples. In their passionate advocacy of serious history painting, Schadow and his followers resurrected some seriously remote incidents, such as the ‘Battle of Iconium’ of 1190, seen here in brilliant oil studies by Carl von Lessing. They spent even more passion upon subjects from the Old and New Testaments, and it is fitting that the main room is dominated by Schadow’s titanic ‘Purgatory, Heaven and Hell’ triptych, now on long loan to the Kunstpalast from the Court of Justice, where it must have made many a defendant quail.
And so we come to Schadow’s paradoxical legacy. He disapproved of landscape painting, but the Düsseldorf academy had always encouraged debate at the same time as practising extreme technical discipline. Schadow, still a hippie at heart, allowed everyone to do their own thing. The landscape rooms are the revelation of this exhibition, to which anyone interested in art ought to go, as soon as possible: from London it is an hour, more or less, by plane.
By the middle years of the 19th century, artists not only from Europe (especially Scandinavia) but also from America were hanging out in Düsseldorf. Worthington Whitteredge, William Haseltine, Sanford Gifford and Albert Bierstadt returned equipped to interpret the great wildernesses of the Wild West. The light they deployed was that of Rome, where almost all their tutors had studied (some of them had too), while their compositions reflect an advanced understanding of the ‘Sublime’, seen in the vertiginous landscapes of the Alps by such masters as Johann Wilhelm Schirmer.
Many here are not names to conjure with. But they should be, and the extraordinary works on view make some of our vaunted British landscapes of the 19th century look pretty silly. Early death cut short the lives of several, among them Hugo Becker, dead at 35 in 1868, whose paintings of the French seashore anticipate Sargent at his most ravishing. And then, all too briefly, there was the yet more astonishing Augustus Cappelen, who died in 1852 at the age of just 25 leaving a handful of indisputable masterpieces. Cappelen’s ‘Black Pond and Dying Forest’ might inspire anything from a Disney fantasy to a movie set in the hell of the Western Front. How proleptic is that?