Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/853

Krause, a painter of sea-pieces. Like other artists who have earned a name for subtle and rapid execution, he worked at first in a formal, smooth, and timid fashion. Several early pieces exhibited after his death,—a breakwater, dated 1838, ships in a breeze off Swinemiinde (1840), and other canvases of this and the following year,—show Hilde- brandt to have been a careful student of nature, with inborn talents kept down by the conventionalisms of the formal school to which Krause belonged. It is difficult to say what the outcome of his art would have been if Hilde- brandt had not felt other influences than those of his native schools. Accident made him acquainted with masterpieces of French art displayed at the periodical exhibitions of the Berlin Academy, and these awakened his curiosity and envy. He made up his bundle and wandered to Paris, where, about 1842, he entered the atelier of Isabey and became the companion of Lepoittevin. In a short time he sent home pictures which might have been taken for copies from these artists. Gradually he mastered the tricks of touch and the mysterious secrets of effect in which the French at this period were already so perfect. He also acquired the necessary skill in painting figures, and having done this he returned to Germany, unsurpassable in techni- cal execution, and well skilled in the rendering of many kinds of landscape forms. His pictures of French street life, done about 1843, are impressed with the stamp of the Paris school, but they reveal at the same time a spirit eager for novelty, quick at grasping, equally quick at rendering, momentary changes of tone and atmosphere in varying space and medium. After 1843 Hildebrandt, under the influence of Humboldt, extended his travels, and in 1864-65 he actually went round the world, But whilst his experience became enlarged his powers of concentration broke down. He lost the taste for detail in seeking for scenic breadth, and a fatal facility of hand diminished the value of his works for all those who look for composition and harmony of hue as necessary concomitauts of toneand touch. In oil he gradually produced less, in water colours more, than at first, and his fame will probably rest on the sketches which he made in the latter form, many of which are known to the general public by means of chromo-lithography. His course may best be compared to that of a meteor, being breath- lessly rapid, brilliant, and charged with colour. No other had the same art of combining elements singly unpicturesque into a picturesque and striking whole, and this chiefly by contrasts of tint and observation of natural phenomena. Fantasies in red, yellow, and opal, sunset, sunrise, and moonshine, distances of hundreds of miles like those of the Andes and the Himalaya, narrow streets in the bazaars of Cairo or Suez, panoramas as seen from mastheads, wide cities like Bombay or Pekin, narrow strips of desert with measureless expanses of sky,—all alike display the bravura of a master who had innumerable admirers in his day on account of this facility, and deserved all the admiration he received, subject to the merited reproach that all these fire- works would have been more satisfactory if combined with deeper meditation on the art of composition and more patient study of detail. Hildebrandt died young at Berlin, on the 25th of October 1868. His pictures are scattered in vast numbers throughout Germany. But good selections are accessible in the royal palaces and in the collections of Borsig, Raabe, and Ravené at Berlin.

HILDEBRANDT, Theodor (born at Stettin 1804, died at Diisseldorf 1874), was a disciple of the painter Schadow, and, on Schadow’s appointment to the presidency of a new academy in the Rhenish provinces in 1828, followed that master to Diisseldorf. Bred in the academy of Berlin, and finished under Schadow (1820-24), Hildebrandt began by painting pictures illustrative of Goethe and Shakespeare; but in this form he followed the traditions of the stage rather than the laws of nature. His artificial modes of thought were not, however, without admirers, and he pro- duced rapidly Faust and Mephistopheles (1824), Faust and Margaret (1825), and Lear and Cordelia (1828). He visited the Netherlands with Schadow in 1829, and wandered alone in 1830 to Italy ; but travel did not alter his style, though it led him to cultivate alternately eclecticism and realism. At Diisseldorf, about the year 1830, he produced Romeo and Juliet, Tancred and Clorinda, and other works of the same kind which deserved to be classed with earlier ones ; but during the same period he exhibited (1829) the Robber and (1832) the Captain and his Infant Son, examples of an affected but kindly realism which captivated the public of the time, and marked to a certain extent an epoch in Prussian art. The picture which made Hilde- brandt’s fame is the Murder of the Children of King Edward, of which the original, afterwards frequently copied, still belongs to the Spiegel collection at Halberstadt. It challenges comparison with a similar composition by Paul Delaroche, though rather to Hildebrandt’s disadvantage. Hildebrandt chose the moment when the children are asleep, and the murderers pause ere they smother their victims with a pillow. Delaroche with subtler sense of artistic propriety represented the princes seated on their bed, unconscious of the near approach of their assassins, whose vicinity is betrayed by a streak of light at the bottom of the door and the watching of a dog. The execution of Delaroche is spirited and delicate, that of Hildebrandt finished and smooth. But the German master, who was below Sohn and Schadow in power, is also naturally far below his French competitor. Comparatively late in life Hildebrandt tried his powers as an historical painter in pictures representing Wolsey and Henry VIII., but he lapsed again into the romantic in Othello and Desdemona, a fair replica of which, in Schulte’s collection at Diisseldorf, gives a good idea of his shiny, ineffective, technical execution. After 1847 Hildebrandt gave himself up to portrait painting, and in that branch succeeded in obtaining a large practice.

HILDEGARD (1098–1179), commonly referred to as St Hildegard, abbess, “‘ prophetess,” and a figure of some con- sequence in the history of medixval mysticism, was born of noble parents at Bickheleim in the countship of Sponheim, diocese of Mainz, in 1098 (or 1099), and from her eighth year was educated at the Benedictine cloister of Disibodenberg (Mons Disibodi) in the principality of Zweibriicken, now in Rhenish Bavaria, where Jutta, sister of the count of Sponheim, was at that time abbess. From earliest childhood, we learn from Hildegard herself, she was accustomed to see visions which increased in frequency and vividness as she approached the age of womanhood ; these, however, she for many years, though with great pain, kept almost wholly secret, nor was it until she had reached her forty-third year (1141) that she felt constrained at last to divulge them. Committed to writing by her intimate friend the monk Godefridus, they now form the first and most important of her printed works, entitled Sciwias (probably an abbreviation for “sciens vias” or * nosce vias Domini”) s. Visionum et Revelationum Librt III., and completed in 1151. In 1147 St Bernard of Clairvaux, having come to Bingen while engaged in preaching the new crusade throughout Germany, chanced to hear of Hildegard’s revelations, and on inquiry became so convinced of their reality that he not only wrote to her a letter cordially acknowledging her as a prophetess of God, but also successfully advocated her recognition as such by his friend and former pupil Pope Eugenius III. in the synod of Tréves (1148). In the same year Hildegard, who meanwhile had succeeded Jutta as abbess at Disibodenberg, and had attracted overflowing numbers to that