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302 Marsha Morton ed.37 As requested, he provided a list of potential subjects for the painting  – all six fea- tured Egyptian traditions and ceremonies  – and proceeded in this and a subsequent let- ter to explain his reasons for rejecting Dalmatian and Viennese themes. These amounted to his first statements of artistic principles and they proved to be attuned to those of Eitelberger’s. He insisted that Eitelberger should not be so concerned about the location because what mattered was “how” it was painted. Although Müller actually believed that both were important, it is clear that he intended to persuade him by using Eitelberger’s own earlier arguments regarding Waldmüller’s teaching methods against him : “Die Na- tur zeigt dem Künstler nur das, was er darzustellen habe ; das, wie er es darzustellen habe, ist Sache der Kunst.”38 Müller exemplified his point with Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and the Venus de Milo, maintaining that these were still venerated because of the timeless beauty of their technique even though the subject matter was now outmoded. Müller, however, also had something else in mind since he worries his remarks with a reference to Jules Breton, playing to Eitelberger’s concerns about French artistic dom- inance. Breton had been one of the most highly praised painters at the Vienna World’s Fair, valued for his seriousness, simplicity, and beauty of color and light, especially in comparison to his Germanic counterparts.39 Müller asserted that the French were better painters because their attention to subject matter was always considered in conjunction with the demands of art, by which he meant the formal techniques of painting. For this reason, he averred, Breton would always be superior to Franz Defregger : “Daß un- sere Genremaler Novellen malen, und unsere Historienmaler z. B. Kaulbach vornehm- lich geistreich sein wollen, ist die Ursache, daß man die Franzosen, die nur malen, was malerisch wirkt, den Deutschen mit Recht vorzieht. Weil Defregger den Bauer nur des Bauers wegen malt, steht er weit hinter dem Bauernmaler Jules Breton zurück, der aus dem Bauernleben nur das zu geben versucht, was sich im Bilde geben läßt.”40 This em- phasis on art making, with its implication of visible pigment, was associated with French naturalism as well as the Austrian and Hungarian landscapes of Emil Jacob Schindler, Tina Blau, and Pettenkofen, and the theories of the Munich artists Wilhelm Leibl and Wilhelm Trübner, which Eitelberger did not favor. But by suggesting that the Old Mas- ters (Titian) could serve as a lesson for modern artists, while at the same time pro- 37 Müller to Eitelberger, 9  April 1875, ibid., p.  202. 38 R. Eitelberger von Edelberg, Die Reform des Kunstunterrichtes und Professor Waldmüllers Lehrmethode, Vienna 1848, p.  1. This is quoted and discussed in E. Lachnit, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte und die Kunst ihrer Zeit, Vienna 2005, p.  23. 39 B. Meyer and A. Woltmann, Plastik und Malerei, in : Lützow (ed.), Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (cit. n. 1), pp.  316 f. This was the same publication on the Vienna World’s Fair in which Eitelberger’s essay appeared. 40 Müller to Eitelberger, 9  April 1875, in : Zemen (ed.), Leopold Carl Müller (cit. n.  2), pp.  202 f. Open Access © 2019 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN