of interest as evidence of Overbeck's unshaken
allegiance to the great master; if called by others a pre-Raphaelite, he
remained at heart faithful to the painter from whom indeed he borrowed
largely. Unlike certain of our English artists and critics, he never
decried Raphael. He writes: "Know, then, I was present at the opening of
Raphael's grave, and have looked upon the true and incomparable master.
What a shudder came over me when the remains of the honoured painter
were laid open, thou canst better conceive than I can describe. May this
deep experience not be without good results for us: may the remembrance
of the honoured one make us more worthy inheritors of his spirit!"[7]

Overbeck about this time, in letters to Emilie Linder, begins to express
ultra views, to the prejudice of his art. He pleads that certain
Biblical drawings may have for her more worth because the religious
meaning dominates over the art skill. In like manner he writes
apologetically concerning _The Death of St. Joseph_. The picture, he
urges, embodies not so much a historic fact as an idea, the intent being
not to lead the spectator to the real, but to something beyond. The
purist painter then proceeds to express his invincible reluctance to
study the subject from the side of life; models he had carefully
avoided, because he feared that a single glance at nature would destroy
the whole conception. It is with sincere regret that I have to record so
pernicious a doctrine. Surely the artist's special function must always
be to find out the divine element in nature, and fatal is the day when
first he calls into question the essential oneness between Nature and
God. But Overbeck's peculiar phase of Catholicism marred as well as made
his art. Through the Church he entered a holy, heavenly sphere, and his
pictures verily stand forth as the revelation of his soul. But the
sublimest of doctrines sometimes prove to be utterly unpaintable, and
certainly the tenets to which Overbeck gave a super-sensuous turn, in
the end perplexed and clouded his art. Outraged nature took her revenge,
and the sequel shows that Overbeck so diverted his vision and narrowed
his pictorial range that his art fell short of the largeness of nature
and humanity.

Northern Germany claimed the illustrious painter as her son, and so
fitly came commissions from Cologne, Lubeck, and Hamburg. For the great
Hospital in this last commercial town was painted the large oil-picture,
_Chris