pictures.

When Bocklin was nineteen years old he took himself to Dusseldorf,
with his merchant father's permission, and settled down to learn his
art, but in that city he found mostly "sentimental and anecdotal"
pictures being painted, which did not suit him at all. Then he took
himself off to Brussels, where again he was not satisfied, and so went
to Paris. But while in Brussels he had copied many old masters, and
had advanced himself very much, so that he did not present himself in
Paris raw and untried in art.

At first he studied in the Louvre, then went to Rome, seeking ever the
best, and being hard to satisfy. He found rest and tranquillity in
Zurich, a city in his native country, but it was Italy that had most
influenced his work.

He loved the Campagna of Rome with its ruins and the sad grandeur of
the crumbling tombs lining its way, and therefore a certain
mysterious, grand, and solemn character made his pictures unlike those
of any other artist. He loved to paint in vertical (up-and-down)
fines, rather than with the conventional horizontal outlines that we
find in most paintings. This method gives his pictures a different
quality from any others in the world.

He loved best of all to paint landscape, and it is said of him that
"as the Greeks peopled their streams and woods and waves with
creatures of their imagination, so Bocklin makes the waterfall take
shape as a nymph, or the mists which rise above the water source
wreathe into forms of merry children; or in some wild spot hurls
centaurs together in fierce combat, or makes the slippery, moving wave