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JERMAN art of the nineteenth century was largely eclectic, drawing its inspiration from many and diverse sources, and looking for instruction and models as often to foreign as to national ideals. Hofmann was born in Darmstadt, studied in Düsseldorf from 1842 to 1846, and then for a decade traveled and painted in many cities, including Paris and Rome. In Rome he met Cornelius, who had some influence on his career, especially in turning him to religious art.

Hofmann settled in Dresden after his wanderings and was for some time a professor at the Academy there. He has painted chiefly Bible scenes, and groups from mythology and dramatic literature. He has a lively feeling for beauty, an effective composition, and a harmonious and agreeable color, reminding in his effects of Venetian models.

The picture here shown is recognized as one of his most successful efforts. It was painted in 1882 and is in the Gallery at Dresden. It is particularly happy in its composition, for while the heads of the venerable doctors are strongly and distinctively characterized, so that we may study in their sympathetic features the varying impressions each is receiving, our attention is always called back to the central and chief figure.

While the types of the interesting heads on our right are clearly Hebrew, and might by the ingenious be construed to represent the different schools of Jewish philosophy, the noble figure on the other side of the Youth, a listener rather than a sharer in the debate, seems more like a Greek, just as the head in the background is Roman.

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JUKE the Evangelist in his gospel has gratified the world by giving more personal details, more of the human life and doings of Jesus, than his associates. It is he who relates the story of the Child, left unwittingly by his parents in Jerusalem, and later found there "in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions."

This illustration of the unusual character of the boy of twelve years, which in the case of another would be called precocity, has always been a favorite subject in religious art. Hofmann has followed most others in representing the Child as leading the discussion, astonishing the doctors by the novelty and power of his sayings. The Bible account, on the contrary, shows him clearly not as asserting or teaching, but as a willing pupil, marvelous in comprehension, listening and inquiring.

Comparing this clear, frank, boyish face with the varied types shown in the picture from which it is taken, it would seem to have been the artist's purpose to express the idea of the coming into the midst of the older philosophies, themselves worthy and precious, of a new, purer and loftier wisdom, not antagonistic or subversive, but rather continuing, unifying them and raising them to a vastly higher and broader plane.

Hofmann's biblical pictures have enjoyed a large share of public favor and their merit in their domain is allowed. This fine head, universal in its conception, not cast in the type of any race or period, will long appeal to the sensibilities of all, as an expression of divinely illumined youth in which is the hope and the promise of the ages.

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