MODERN PAINTING IN AUSTRIA BY LUDWIG HEVESI HE Sun of Modern Taste rose in the West. It needed some years to enable its beams to reach the art of Austria, but slowly did light and warmth arrive, amid difficulties which had their natural causes. In matters of art Vienna always inclined to conservatism, for the reason that Flanders and a large part of Italy were for a long time Austrian. The glorious Venetian and Flemish painters of the great days still give their stamp to the Viennese galleries, which are among the richest in the world. Vienna is, inter alla, a Rubens city of the first rank, and it is no wonder that the powerful Austrian painter, Flans Canon (1829— 1885), should have lived and died a student of Rubens in partibus—a sort of posthumous Jordaens. Hans Makart himself (r84o-1884), who inaugurated a period of splendid colour, and intoxicated the whole of central Europe with the hues of his palette, was a new Paolo Veronese, and had a most dazzling effect on the unstrung nerves of a 6n de siècle. It was indeed the last brilliant blaze of an old  » Gallery art, » which was destined to be followed by a new art based on nature. Add to that the baroque traditions of the great Theresian century. Vienna had corne down to us as a beautiful baroque city, and in every street there still stand the rnagnificent palaces and cathedrals, dating from the time of Bernini and Juvara, for this spirit is not to be lightly thrown off. On the other side, the Academy of Fine Arts was a solid fortress of the historical point of view in art and of conventional taste. Its chief teachers of painting were pupils of Rahl, the monumental painter of the city extension (Eisenmenger and Griepenkerl), and its architects were those of the historical style, the  » Gothic  » Schmidt, the  » Greek  » Hansen, and the  » Cinque-centist  » Ferstl ; and from this Academy—history-taught and history-teaching—there arose the Society of the  » Künstlergenossen-schaft, ‘ whose members had the lead in the  » Künstlerhaus. » Simultaneously there existed a leaning towards Parisian colour. August von Pettenkofen (1822-1889) had corne into contact with Meissonier and the French painters of the East—Fromentin, Gérôme, Diaz, and others ; but he found in Hungary, in the valley of the Tisza, whose praises had already been sung by Lenau, a European Egypt of 1200 geographical square miles, with a lovely little Nile A