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Updated: June 3, 2025
Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "No, I can't place Mr. Tischbein." It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "You must pardon me, Sir Claude," she said with an austerity of which the note was real, "if I thank God to your face that he has in his mercy I mean his mercy to our charge allowed me to achieve this act." She gave out a long puff of pain. "It was time!"
Therefore it was droll in the good Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations and good deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, to Tischbein; a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two professors recommended to foreign universities; &c., &c.
What was it that had made Tischbein not once, but thrice abandon Goethe? We have no right to suppose he had plotted to avenge himself for the poet's refusal to collaborate with him on the theme of primaeval man. A likelier explanation is merely that Goethe, as I have suggested, irked him.
He seems to have regarded Goethe's bravery as rashness. Here, you see, is a rift, ever so slight, but of evil omen; what seismologists call 'a fault. Goethe was unconscious of its warning. Throughout his sojourn in Naples he seems to have thought that Tischbein in Naples was the same as Tischbein in Rome. Of some persons it is true that change of sky works no change of soul.
Goethe had leave from the Duke of Weimar to prolong his Italian holiday till the spring of next year. It is possible that Tischbein really did mean to come back and finish the picture. Goethe had, at any rate, no reason for not hoping. 'When you think of me, think of me as happy, he directs. And had he not indeed reasons for happiness?
Nor was this hope unfulfilled. Tischbein was assiduous, enthusiastic, indefatigable. In the early letters to Frau von Stein, to Herder and others, his name is always cropping up for commendation. One guesses him blond and rosy, very voluble, very guttural, with a wealth of forceful but not graceful gesture. One is on safer ground in guessing him vastly proud of trotting Goethe round.
Mengs, the Raphael of Germany, Oeser, Tischbein, the landscape-painters Seekatz, Hackert, Reinhardt, Koch, etc., formed the transition to the modern style. Frey, Chodowiecki, etc., gained great celebrity as engravers. Architecture flourished during the Middle Ages, painting at the time of the Reformation, and music in modern times.
'During our walks together' and can you not see those two together, pacing up and down the groves of the Villa Pamphili, or around the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter? little Tischbein gesticulating and peering up into Goethe's face, and Goethe with his hands clasped behind him, ever nodding in a non-committal manner 'he has talked with me in the hope of gaining me over to his views, and getting me to enter upon the plan. Goethe admits in another letter that 'the idea is beautiful; only, he adds, 'the artist and the poet must be many years together, in order to carry out and execute such a work'; and one conceives that he felt a certain lack of beauty in the idea of being with Tischbein for many years.
This noble relic stands about 85 centimetres in height and measures some 215 centimetres in circumference; it was never completed, as can be seen by the rim, which is still partially in the rough. A similar vessel is figured, I believe, in Tischbein. The small villa-settlement on this promontory is deserted owing to lack of water, every drop of which has to be brought hither by sea from Cotrone.
'Indeed, the frontispiece for such a joint work, writes Goethe in one of his letters, 'is already designed. Pushful Tischbein! But Goethe, though he was the most courteous of men, was not of the stuff of which collaborators are made.
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