The Russian School of Painting
the sixties, and the rare concessions he made to the æsthetic programme of the "Wanderers," He came too late to join the "school," which trained Bryullov, and it is as a half-schooled genius that he appears throughout his motley, multiform art.
In the fifties and sixties, when all of "Jeune-France" and "Jung Deutschland" had turned into venerable professors, the romantic currents degenerated into something decrepit and senile. The narrow, cold rationalism of Wilhelm von Kaulbach and Jean Flandrin replaced the ardent ecstasies of the Nazarenes; costume painting of the type produced by Piloty and Gérome flooded historical painting; frivolous and mawkish fancy took the place of Hoffmannesque fantastic flights, so characteristic of the twenties and the thirties; loose drollery supplanted the caustic satire on which was brought up the great school of political caricaturists with Daumier at its head. The spirit of true Romanticism continued to live, just as it lives in our own times, but the forms of its manifestation had changed. In a certain sense, Millet, all the Barbizon painters, Böcklin, the English Pre-Raphaelites, our own Ivanov—were romanticists, but in their own times they were apparently antagonists of Romanticism, for at that time it is such genuine decadents as Kaulbach, Delaroche with his numerous followers, the Düsseldorf mas-
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