BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE

Art for Art’s Sake. University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of Painting. With 24 Illustrations. 12mo.

The Meaning of Pictures. University Lectures at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. With 31 Illustrations. 12mo

Studies in Pictures. An Introduction to the Famous Galleries. With 40 Illustrations. 12mo

What is Art? Studies in the Technique and Criticism of Painting. 12mo

Text Book of the History of Painting. With 110 Illustrations. New Edition. 12mo

Old Dutch and Flemish Masters. With Timothy Cole’s Wood-Engravings. Superroyal 8vo

Old English Masters. With Timothy Cole’s Wood-Engravings. Superroyal 8vo

Modern French Masters. Written by American Artists and Edited by Prof. Van Dyke. With 66 Full-page Illustrations. Superroyal 8vo

New Guides to Old Masters. Critical Notes on the European Galleries, Arranged in Catalogue Order. Frontispieces. 12 volumes. Sold separately

Nature for Its Own Sake. First Studies in Natural Appearances. With Portrait. 12mo

The Desert. Further Studies in Natural Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo

The Opal Sea. Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo

The Mountain. Renewed Studies in Impressions and Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo

The Money God. Chapters of Heresy and Dissent concerning Business Methods and Mercenary Ideals in American Life. 12mo

The New New York. A Commentary on the Place and the People. With 125 Illustrations by Joseph Pennell.

AMERICAN PAINTING
AND ITS TRADITION

AMERICAN PAINTING

AND ITS TRADITION

AS REPRESENTED BY INNESS, WYANT, MARTIN, HOMER,
LA FARGE, WHISTLER, CHASE, ALEXANDER,
SARGENT

BY

JOHN C. VAN DYKE

Author of “Art for Art’s Sake,” “The Meaning of Pictures,”
“What is Art?” etc.

With Twenty-four Illustrations

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1919

Copyright, 1919, by Charles Scribner’s Sons
Published October, 1919

PREFACE

THE painters about whom these chapters are written helped to make up the period in American painting dating, generally, from about 1878 to, say, 1915. That period has practically closed in the sense that a newer generation with different aims and aspirations has come forward, and the men who broke ground years ago in the Society of American Artists have turned their furrow and had their day. Indeed, those I have chosen to write about herein, with the exception of Sargent, have passed on and passed out. Not only their period but their work has ended. We are now beginning to see them in something like historic perspective. Perhaps, then, the time is opportune for speaking of them as a group and of their influence upon American art.

Not all of the one-time “new movement” originated and died with these nine men. Dozens of painters became identified with American art just after the Centennial, and many of those who came back from Munich and Paris in the late seventies and the early eighties are still living and producing. But while the nine were by no means the whole count they were certainly representative of the movement, and their works speak for almost every phase of it. The value of the movement to American art can be rightly enough judged from them.

During their lives these nine did not lack for praise—some of it wise and some of it otherwise. They were much exploited in print. I myself joined in the chorus. I had more or less acquaintance with all of them, lived through the period with them, and from 1880 on wrote much about them. My opportunities for seeing and hearing were abundant, and perhaps such value as this book may possess comes from my having been a looker-on in Vienna during those years. To personal impressions I am now adding certain conclusions as to what the men on my list, taken as a body, have established. They wrought during a period of great material development—wrought in a common spirit, making an epoch in art history and leaving a tradition. The pathfinders in any period deserve well of their countrymen. And their trail is worth following, for eventually it may become a broad national highway.

J. C. V. D.

Rutgers College,

1919.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I

THE ART TRADITION IN AMERICA

During the Revolutionary Period, and immediately thereafter, art in America was something of sporadic growth, something not quite indigenous but rather transplanted from England. Painting was little more than portraiture, and the work was done after the English formula. America had no formula of its own. There was no native school of art, no tradition of the craft, no body of art knowledge handed down from one generation to another. West and Copley started out practically without predecessors. They were the beginners.

With Cole, Durand, and, later on, Kensett, that is about 1825, another kind of painting sprang up on American soil. It was the painting of landscape—landscape of the Hudson River variety—and, whatever its technical shortcomings, at least it had the merit of being original. Apparently nothing of artistic faith or of accumulated knowledge or art usage was handed down to the Hudson River men by the portrait-painters who had preceded them. The leaders worked from nature with little or no instruction. They were self-taught, and if any inkling of how work was carried on in the painting-rooms of Copley, Stuart, or Vanderlyn was given them, they turned a deaf ear to it or found it inapplicable to their landscape-work. If they knew of a tradition they ignored it.

This matter of tradition—the accumulated point of view and teaching of the craft—is of some importance in our inquiry. It has gone to the making of all the great art of the past. There were several hundred years of sculptors in Greece, with a continuous story, before Scopas and Praxiteles brought their art to final maturity; for centuries painters, with their craftsman-making guilds, had preceded Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian; countless “primitives” and “early men” went to the shades unsung before Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Holbein came to power. In America the Copley-Stuart contingent caught at, and in large measure grasped, the foreign teaching handed down by Reynolds and his school. Perhaps that accounts in some measure for their success. A generation later Cole and Durand started out to paint landscape without any teaching whatever. Does that account in any degree for their failure? They failed to produce any fine quality of art, but they had pupils and followers in whom the Hudson River school finally culminated. It became a school because Cole and Durand established with themselves a teaching, such as it was, and handed down to their pupils a point of view and a body of tradition. Perhaps again that explains, to some extent, the varied successes of such followers of the school as Inness, Wyant, Martin, Swain Gifford, Whittredge, McEntee.

But not entirely. Some of these last-named were influenced by European art, outgrew the teaching of their forerunners, and in middle life rather forsook their early love and faith. Yet it would be idle to contend that they had not received an inclination, even an inspiration, from contact with the older men. Short-lived though it was, and shallow as were its teachings, the Hudson River school, nevertheless, had weight with its followers. Even error is often helpful in establishing truth, and a feeble precedent is perhaps better than none at all. Some of the pupils—F. E. Church and Sandford Gifford, for examples—never outgrew their basic teaching. To the end they carried on the Cole-Durand tradition, improving and bettering it. They bettered it because they could add to their own view-point the observation and teaching of their masters. Three generations at least are supposed to be necessary to the making of the thorough gentleman. Is it possible to make the thorough artist in one?

But the Hudson River school was too frail inherently to carry great weight. Men like Inness, Wyant, and Martin soon began to see its weaknesses. Even before they went to Europe they had doubted and after their return to America they were openly heretical. They held allegiance only in the matter of the Catskill-Adirondack subject, and even that became modified to a virtual disappearance toward the end of their careers. Both aim and method changed with them. They saw deeper and painted freer, until finally they were wholly out of sympathy not only with the thin technique of the school but with its panoramic conception of nature.

So it was that in 1876 when the United States held its first national art exhibition—the Centennial, at Philadelphia—the painting of the country was in something of an anomalous condition. The Hudson River school was practically at the end of its rope. The older portrait-painters had been succeeded by Harding, Alexander, Neagle, Elliott, Inman, Page, Healy—each of them more or less going his own way. The German Leutze had been here and had blazed a brimstone trail of Düsseldorf method, along which some painters followed. Hicks and Hunt at Boston had introduced the French art of Couture and Millet, and they also had a following. Quite apart from all of them stood some independent personalities like La Farge and Winslow Homer, who seemed to say, “a plague on all your houses.” And they, too, went their own ways. There was no school unity.

No wonder then with these conflicting individualities, and with all traditions obsolete or unknown, there was no such thing as an American school of painting at the Centennial Exhibition. The visitor in Memorial Hall wandered hither and yon among the pictures and vainly strove to grasp a consensus of art opinion or even an art tendency. The exhibition was more or less of a hodgepodge. As a result both painter and public went away in a somewhat bemuddled condition. Perhaps the only thing about the exhibition that impressed one strongly was the general incompetence and inconsequence of it.

Just at this time there entered upon the scene another generation, a younger group of American painters. Many of them had seen the exhibition at the Centennial and had, perhaps, been unwarrantably influenced by it. They brought away from it a longing to paint; but they realized that such art as that at Philadelphia was not what they wished to produce, and if American teaching was responsible for it, so much the worse for the teaching. They would have none of it. Once more there was a sharp break with everything that might resemble a school view or a school method. The younger group left the country and sought instruction in European studios believing that nothing of good could come out of the Nazareth of America.

Some of this later generation had gone abroad for study just before 1876. Shirlaw, Chase, and Duveneck were at Munich; Maynard, Minor, and Millet at Antwerp; Blashfield, Bridgman, Beckwith, Thayer, Alden Weir, Low, Wyatt Eaton at Paris. After 1876 the exodus was greater and Paris was the goal. A few years later some of these students were homeward bound, having finished a more or less advanced course of instruction under competent masters. They immediately set up studios in New York, and, with the enthusiasm and assurance of youth, began to impart information to the effect that the only painting of importance was that of Europe. As for the native American art, it was not worth reckoning with. The Academy of Design was merely the abiding-place of the ossified, and, of course, it would be surrendered on the demand of the younger men. But the Academy, after a battle of words, declined to give up the fort, and a little later declined even to hang some of the pictures of the gifted. This was regarded as unspeakably outrageous, and swift action followed. In 1877 there was a call for the establishment of a new art body, and out of it came the Society of American Artists, with twenty-two initial members.

The younger men had not invited the academicians as a body to join them, but they had recognized the talent of certain men, who, though members of the Academy, were not in full sympathy with it. In other words, the aloof element of the Academy was elected to membership in the Society. These men—La Farge, Inness, Martin, Moran, Tiffany, Colman, Swain Gifford—joined the new without abandoning the old, and the Society quickly got under way, with its declaration of independence nailed to the masthead. In ten years the Society had grown in membership to over a hundred, had held yearly exhibitions from 1878 on, and had achieved a substantial success—a success of technique, if nothing more.

It is worth noting just here that this departure was a third violent break in the American art tradition. The young men in the Society practically proclaimed that they would start all over again and build a more worthy mansion than their predecessors. Had they not gone to Europe and received the best of technical training? Did they not know how to draw and paint? For the first time in its history America might congratulate itself upon possessing a body of painters that understood the technique of their craft. American art would now begin.

Lest progressive craftsmanship should die out new students continued to go abroad, and the Art Students League was started for those stopping at home. This new institution was not bound by any conventionalities; its existence was a protest against them. It had no century-old precedents to live up to; it was free to stickle for good workmanship alone. It was the training-school for no peculiar kind of art; it stood ready and eager to adopt any new method or medium or material that was offered. It was progressive to the last degree—progressive to the extent of burning every bridge behind it and starting out de novo to produce technicians (and consequent art) worthy of the name.

Well, the men, and the institutions, and the movement have been under way for forty years. Much paint has been spread on canvas in that time and hundreds of hands have been busy producing pictures. The “young men” have become old men and many of them have dropped out. The movement itself no longer moves, though some of its best men are still painting. But what is the net result of these forty years? Have the European-trained, after all, succeeded in producing in their one generation, sans tradition, an American art? No one will question for a moment that they have produced many exceptionally good works, even masterpieces; that they are a competent, even learned, body of artists; but has what they have said proclaimed American ideals and reflected American life, or has it repeated the conventions and atelier methods of Europe? Has not the manner of saying with them been more in evidence than the thing said? Is their foreign-based art entirely satisfactory or representative of America?

From a Whistlerian point of view this matter of tradition is, of course, great nonsense. Art just “happens” in Ten O’Clock, and the artist is that one in the multitude whom the gods see fit to strike with divine fire. He is called to service by inspiration as were the prophets of old. All of which no doubt explains the anointing of Whistler but does not account for the high-priesthood of Velasquez, of Rembrandt, of Raphael, or of Rubens. To say that three centuries of guild-teaching in the best way to grind color, or lay a gesso ground, or draw a figure, or fill a given space, is not better than the intuition of any one man of a period is equivalent to saying that the accumulated knowledge of the world is worthless, and each new generation should discard it and begin all over again. That is substantially what Mr. Whistler advocated. And, further, that the artist should stand aloof and create independently of time, place, or people.

But out of nothing nothing comes, and psychology assures us that there is no such thing as originality save by a combination of things already known. The old is added to and makes the new. The old is the tradition of the craft; the new is the revised point of view and method plus the old. It was so with Whistler notwithstanding his pretty argument around the clock. He was beholden to Gleyre, Ingres, Boucher, Velasquez, Courbet, Albert Moore, Hokusai, and helped himself to them when, where, and how he could. He would have been the last one to deny it. Had there been more continuity and stability in his training, had he followed the teaching of the craft more intently, he would not have been worried all his life as to whether his people stood well upon their feet, and he might have produced art with the calmness and poise of his great Velasquez. His misfortune was that he had no thorough schooling, inherited no body of taste, and practically stood alone in art. That he succeeded was owing to exceptional genius. That he was never in the class with Velasquez or Titian or Rembrandt was perhaps due to the fact that they had the training and the tradition and he had not.

The Whistler type is not infrequently met in American life—the type that seeks to scale Olympus without the preliminary of antecedent preparation. In art he usually has half a dozen strings to his bow, and paints, lectures, writes, speaks, carries on a business in Wall Street or elsewhere. He is glib in many things, has great facility, is astonishingly clever; but somehow he never gets beyond the superficial. He has not depth or poise or great seriousness. There is no hard training or long tradition or intellectual heritage behind him. He is not to the manner born.

Every writer in America knows that present-day American literature, with some precious exceptions, does not reach up to contemporary English literature; that poetry or romance or criticism with us has not the form, the substance, or the technical accomplishment of the same work in France. Every architect in America must realize that with all the get-learned-quick of his foreign study, with all his appropriations from the Gothic or the Renaissance or the Georgian, with all his cleverness in solving business needs and doing building stunts under peculiar circumstances, there is something lacking in his productions; that they are not so monumental as he could wish for; that they are not firm set in the ground and do not belong to the soil and remain a part of the land and the people in the sense of contemporary French or even English architecture. Every musician with us must have a similar feeling about our music. As with architecture and painting, there have been some remarkable compositions put forth by our composers. Europe compliments us by playing them and nods approval at the endeavor, but again they do not reach up to corresponding work in Paris or Berlin or Munich. Why not? Have we not as good brains and fiddles in New York as in Vienna? What is it we lack?

Surely we are not wanting in energy, in resource, in materials. Is it perhaps the restraint of these that we need? Time and patience are very necessary factors in all of the arts. Attitude of mind, a sense of proportion—a style, in short—cannot be attained in a few years of schooling. To the training of a lifetime must be added a something that has been more or less inherited. That something handed down from father to son, from master to pupil, from generation to generation, is what I have called tradition. It is not technique alone, but a mental outlook, added to the body of belief and experience of those who have gone before. The skilled hand of a Kreisler, a Sargent, a MacMonnies is perhaps possible of attainment in a decade, but the mental attitude—its poise and its restraint—is that something which is inherited as taste, and many decades may go to its formation. In this latter respect, perhaps, Kreisler has had the advantage of both Sargent and MacMonnies.

Coming back, therefore, to the men of the Society of American Artists, we cannot say that they failed in skill or were wanting in endeavor, or had no intelligence. They had all of these, but, unfortunately, they were not of artistic descent, and inherited no patrimony of style. Instead they tried to adopt in a few years the long story of French style, and attained only that part of it relating to technique. They were of the third generation in American art, but each one of these generations had denied and forsworn its predecessor, had flung its mess of pottage, such as it was, out of the window, and had left the ancestral roof never to return. The third generation then had nothing by descent, not even a pictorial or a plastic mind that could see the world in images. It went forth empty-handed into the highways and byways of Europe, became proficient in craftsmanship, and relied upon that for success.

This is not merely figure of speech, but statement of fact. None of the American painters spoken of in these pages, with the exception of La Farge, came from what might be called an artistic family, or had æsthetic antecedents. They were boys on a farm or grew up in the atmosphere of trade or profession, and came to art at twenty or thereabouts. They then learned the technique of painting quickly, and with much facility, but their mental attitude toward art was untrained and remained undetermined. Long after they knew how to paint they knew not what to paint or how to think. Their point of view was superficial or commonplace, or otherwise negligible. I have excepted La Farge, for, as we shall see hereafter, he did have an æsthetic legend behind him. Is that why he is now placed as the one Olympian of the period? I would also partly except Inness, Wyant, and Martin, who did know and follow at one time the rather feeble Hudson River school tradition. I ask again is that why they remain, even to this day, the best of our rather long line of landscape-painters?

Is tradition then synonymous with the academic? Not entirely; though the academies are usually the custodians and conservers of it. Unfortunately, their practice tends to perpetuate a manner that soon becomes a mannerism, and finally the mannerism usurps the place of style. The academic in France or Germany or Italy has of recent years become a term of reproach. All the rebels in art have been opposed to it. When they rebelled, their rebellion was called by them, or their biographers, “the break with tradition.” Rather was it a break with an indurated method or the tyranny of a hanging committee. For tradition has to do more with the spirit and style of art, while the academic is recognized in a method or a formula which, endlessly repeated, finally becomes trite and even banal.

The art of old Japan ran on for centuries and was excellent art notwithstanding it was academic and based in tradition. It did not run into formalism and never became trite until recent years. Its ruin lies straight ahead of it if it shall abandon its traditions and continue to coquette with Occidental art. But the bulk of painting by the young men of the Society of American Artists became commonplace within a dozen years after their return because they had learned abroad only a manner and reproduced it here in America with the persistence of a mannerism. They never knew the academic in its larger significance; they never felt the spirit and style of the traditional.

That is not to proclaim their work worthless or their movement inconsequent. On the contrary, almost everything that one generation in art could do was done. And well done. They established a foundation in sound technique. It remains to be seen if those who come after will build upon it or cast it down. Moreover, as an expression of the individual quite apart from the time, place, or people, as a representation of cosmopolitan belief about art, it must be accorded a very high place. Whistler and Sargent happen just now to be the most talked about exponents of the cosmopolitan, but dozens of painters here in America since 1876 belong in the same class and have the same belief. It is all along of a new departure in art, and how it shall work out no one can say, but that it does not entirely satisfy contemporary needs is already manifest. In spite of present practice, and quite apart from Ten O’Clock and other painter extravagances, art is still believed to be in some way an expression of a time, a place, and a people. The world has not yet grown so small that it does not continue to exhibit race characteristics in its art manifestations. That the all-the-world-as-one idea may be farther-reaching, more universal in its scope, and therefore loftier in its art expression than any national or race expression is very possible; nay, probable. Still, even then, with cosmopolitanism in the saddle, there will be the need and the use of tradition—the consensus of opinion and body of belief as to what constitutes style in art.

II

GEORGE INNESS

1825-1894

A plain man of the business world, knowing nothing of the peculiar manifestations of the artistic mind, would be very apt to wonder over the mental make-up of a George Inness. An artist’s way of looking at things is never quite sensible to the man in the street. It is too temperamental, too impulsive; and Inness was supertemperamental even for an artist. When he expressed himself in paint he was very sane; but when he argued, his auditors thought him erratic. And not without reason. He was easily stirred by controversy, and in the heat of discussion he often discoursed like a mad rhapsodist. His thin hands and cheeks, his black eyes, ragged beard, and long dark hair, the dramatic action of his slight figure as he walked and talked, seemed to complete the picture of the perfervid visionary.

He was always somewhat hectic. As a boy he was delicate, suffered from epilepsy, and was mentally overwrought. His physician had nothing to recommend but fresh air. As a man, one of his hearers over the dinner-table, after listening to his exposition of the feminine element in landscape, or some allied theme, said: “Mr. Inness, what you need is fresh air.” Inness used to tell this story about himself with a little smile, as though conscious of having appeared extravagant. As for fresh air in the sense of out-of-doors, he knew more about it than all his business acquaintances put together; but in the sense of its clearing the vision so that he could see things in a matter-of-fact light, it was wholly unavailing. He was born with the nervous organization of the enthusiast. That is not the best temperament imaginable for a practical business man.

And yet Inness certainly thought that his views about life, faith, government, and ethics were sound and applicable to all humanity. Art was only a part of the universal plan. In his theory of the unities everything in the scheme entire dropped into its appointed place. He could show this, to his own satisfaction at least, by the symbolism of numbers, just as he could prove immortality by the argument for continuity. All his life he was devoted to mystical speculations. He had his faith in divination, astrology, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism. And he was greatly stirred by social questions. During the Rebellion he volunteered to fight for the freedom of the slave but was rejected as physically unfit; and later he became interested in labor problems, believed in Henry George and the Single Tax, and had views about a socialistic republic. He never changed. In his seventieth year he was still discoursing on Swedenborg, on love, on truth, on the unities, with unabated enthusiasm. To expect such a man to be “practical” would be little less than an absurdity, and to expect a practical man to understand him would be almost as futile.

But the fever of intensity that burned in Inness and his visionary way of looking at things were the very features that made possible his greatness as an artist. There is something in the abnormal view—one hardly knows what—that makes for art. Certainly the “practical” work of the camera gives only a statement of fact where the less accurate drawing of a Millet gives something that we call “artistic.” The lens of the camera records mechanically and coldly, which may account for the prosaic quality of photography; but the retina of the artist’s eye records an impression enhanced by the imagination, which may account for the poetry of art. Whichever way we put it, it is the human element that makes the art. The painter does not record the facts like a machine; he gives his impression of the facts. Inness, with his exalted way of seeing, was full of impressions and was always insisting upon their vital importance.

“The true purpose of the painter,” Mr. Sheldon reports him as saying, “is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion. Its real greatness consists in the quality and force of this emotion.”

And he practised this preaching. Such nervous manifestations as enthusiasm, emotion, and imagination working together and producing an impression were the means wherewith he constructed pictures in his mind. They made up his point of view, and without them we should perhaps have heard little of George Inness as a painter.

It was no mean or stinted equipment. In fact, Inness had too many impressions, had too much imagination. His diversity of view opposed singleness of aim. While he was trying to record one impression upon the canvas, half a dozen others would rush in. Cleveland Cox, who knew him well, said that he changed his mood and point of view with the weather, and if he started a canvas with a storm piece in the morning, it was likely to end in the evening with a glorious sunset, if the weather corresponded. He was never satisfied with his work; he was always altering it and amending it, painting pictures one on top of another, until a single canvas sometimes held a dozen superimposed landscapes.

The late William H. Fuller used to tell the story of buying a landscape in Inness’s studio one afternoon and going to get the picture the next day, only to find an entirely different picture on the canvas. To his protests Inness replied:

“It is a good deal better picture than the other.”

“Yes, but I liked the other better.”

“Well, you needn’t take it—needn’t pay for it.”

“It isn’t a question of losing money. I have lost my picture. It is buried under that new one.”

Even when not bothered by many impressions, Inness had great difficulty in contenting himself with his work. It was never quite right. There was a certain fine feeling or sentiment that he had about nature and he wished to express it in his picture; but he found when the sentiment was strong, the picture looked weak in the drawing, had little solidity or substance; and when the solidity was put in with exact lines and precise textures, then the sentiment fared badly. He knew very well where the trouble lay.

“Details in the picture must be elaborated only enough fully to reproduce the impression. When more is done the impression is weakened and lost, and we see simply an array of external things which may be very cleverly painted and may look very real, but which do not make an artistic painting. The effort and the difficulty of an artist is to combine the two; namely, to make the thought clear and to preserve the unity of impression. Meissonier always makes his thought clear; he is most painstaking with details, but he sometimes loses in sentiment. Corot, on the contrary, is to some minds lacking in objective force. He tried for years to get more objective force, but he found that what he gained in that respect he lost in sentiment.”

This is Inness’s own statement of the case and it enables us to understand why many of his later canvases were vague, indefinite, often vapory. He was seeking to give a sentiment or feeling rather than topographical facts. When the facts looked too weak, he tried to strengthen them here and there by bringing out notes and tones a little sharper with the result of making them look hard or too protruding. After several passings back and forth from strength to weakness, from sentiment to fact, the canvas began to show a kneaded and thumbed appearance. Its freshness was gone and its surface looked tortured and “bready.” He was hardly ever free from this attempt to balance between two stools. It is a plague that bothers all painters, and no doubt many of them would agree with Inness in saying:

“If a painter could unite Meissonier’s careful reproduction of details with Corot’s inspirational power, he would be the very god of art.”

But Inness was much nearer to Corot than to Meissonier. He loved sentiment more than clever technique, and perhaps as a result left many “swampy” canvases behind him. His studio was filled with them. He used to take them from the floor and work upon them, sometimes half a dozen in a day. He never was “the perfect master of the brush” that we have heard him called, though he was an acceptable, and often a very powerful, technician. He usually began by basing a canvas in a warm gray or a raw umber tint, afterward sketching in with charcoal or pencil the general outline of forms and objects. His pigments at first were thin, and his canvas in its general distribution of masses was little more than stained. Upon that foundation he kept adding stronger notes, glazing his shadows to keep them transparent and push them back, and placing his opaque lights on top of the glaze. In this way he gradually developed the picture, keying up first one part and then another, until finally he drew the whole picture into unity and harmony.

It was most interesting to see Inness at work in this keying-up process. He always painted standing, and would walk backward and forward, putting on dabs here and rubs there with great expertness. He was a painter in oils, seldom employing any other medium, and yet he would use on his canvas almost anything that the impulse of the moment told him might prove effective. One day I watched him for fifteen minutes trying to deepen the shadows in a tree with a lead-pencil. The canvas was dry at the time and he did not want to put any more wet paint upon it. As he painted he talked, argued, declaimed, glared at you over the top of his glasses with apparently little embarrassment to himself or detriment to his canvas.

Painting he believed he had reduced to a scientific formula, but he kept changing the formula. Rules of procedure, too, he had in abundance, but they also kept shifting. At one time he insisted that a picture should have three planes—the middle plane to contain the centre of interest, the foreground to be a prologue, and the background an epilogue to this central plane. At another time he would spread a half-tone throughout the whole picture, keeping his sky low in key, and upon this neutral ground he would place lights and darks, making them brilliant and sparkling by contrast. Others before him—notably the Fontainebleau-Barbizon men—had worked with similar rules in mind, but Inness was quite original in his application. And he was always moving on to something new and better. Ripley Hitchcock quotes from one of his letters:

“I have changed from the time I commenced because I had never completed my art; and as I do not care about being a cake, I shall remain dough, subject to any impression which I am satisfied comes from the region of truth.”

What Inness was at the time he commenced may be gathered from another quotation from the same authority:

“My early and much of my later life was borne under the distress of a fearful nervous disease which very much impaired my ability to bear the painstaking in my studies which I could have wished. I began, of course, as most boys do, but without any art surroundings whatever. A boy now would be able to commence almost anywhere under better auspices than I could have had then, even in a city. I was in the barefoot stage, and, although my father was a well-to-do farmer, the boys dressed very much in Joseph’s coat style as to color, the different garments being equally variegated, while schooling consisted of the three R’s, and a ruler, with a rattan by way of change.”

At fourteen Inness received some instruction in drawing from a man named Barker, and at nineteen he was working as a map-engraver with Sherman and Smith in New York. It is said that he engraved several plates, but Inness himself evidently counted this apprenticeship of little value, for he later said:

“When almost twenty I had a month with Regis Gignoux, my health not permitting me to take advantage of study at the Academy in the evening, and this is all the instruction I ever had from any artist.”

He was virtually self-taught as a youth, but his later work was developed and somewhat influenced by the study of other painters at home and abroad. At first he studied Cole and Durand, and his pictures were rather panoramic in theme and hard in drawing. He worked much over detail, and at this early time must have been acquired a knowledge of form and a store of visual memories which were to serve him thereafter. The brittle landscapes of Inness’s youth are seldom seen to-day. What became of them no one knows. He sold them for any sum that would temporarily keep the wolf from the door, and, passing into the hands of unappreciative people, they have perhaps perished. I never heard him so much as mention his very early work, though in his letter to Ripley Hitchcock he speaks of some of his studies under Gignoux as being “very elaborate.”

In 1850 he was married, and through the assistance of one of his patrons, Mr. Ogden Haggerty, he went to Italy and spent fifteen months there, returning through Paris, seeing the Salon, and the work of Rousseau for the first time.

“Rousseau was just beginning to make a noise. A great many people were grouped about a little picture of his which seemed to me metallic. Our traditions were English; and French art, particularly in landscape, had made but little impression upon us.”

Just when he made this statement is not apparent, but certainly it was not his final estimate of Rousseau and French landscape. He was later on much influenced by Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny; but with his first long stay in Europe, chiefly near Rome, it was to be expected that the romance and glamour of the place with such classical painters as Salvator, Claude, and Poussin would sway him.

The second period of his development, dating from about 1853 to 1875, is full of diverse influences. Succeeding trips to Europe and repeated studies of European art rather disturbed his preconceived opinions, and made him doubtful. At one time he would work in one vein; at another time he would reverse himself and go back to his early affinities. It was a period of struggle not only with his art but with the more purely material affair of gaining a livelihood. He lived during this time for four years at Medfield, Massachusetts, then at Eagleswood, New Jersey; and in both places painted some notable canvases, though they were not popular with the buying public.

The “Peace and Plenty,” now at the Metropolitan Museum, painted in 1865, is a huge affair, and the wonder is that it was not a huge failure. It is a little too diversified in the lights, and a bit spotty, perhaps, but it is rather broadly handled with a flat brush, and, all told, a remarkable canvas for the time. It represents him under Italian inspiration. The “Evening at Medfield,” also in the Metropolitan, painted in 1875, suggests French influence, perhaps Daubigny. It is broader, freer, thinner in handling, simpler in masses, and has more unity. None of the pictures at this period are counted his best output, but they are not the less works of decided merit.

It was after four continuous years in Europe (1871-1875) that Inness came into a third style of work (the “Evening at Medfield” indicates it), quite his own, quite American, and quite splendid. It was during this stay abroad that he seemed finally to find himself. His brush broadened, his light grew more subtle, his color became richer and fuller. Corot had taught him how to sacrifice detail to the mass, Rousseau had improved his use of the tree, Daubigny gave him many hints about atmosphere; from Decamps he learned how to drive a light with darks, and Delacroix opened to him a gamut of deep, rich color. He was now in position to graft the French tradition of landscape upon the American stock. And this he did, but in his own manner and with many lapses, even failures, by the way.

All through this third period, and for that matter up to his death, Inness was experimenting with landscape. Every canvas was a new adventure in color, light, and air. In his last period he seemed to see landscape in related masses of color rather than in linear extensions; and so he painted it holding the color patches together with air and illuminating the whole mass by a half-mysterious light. It was not attenuated color—mauves, pinks, and sad grays—but strong reds, blues, greens, and yellows keyed up oftentimes to a high pitch and fire-hued by sunlight. Nor were they put on the canvas in little dots and dabs, but rather shown in large masses brought together for massed effect and made resonant by contrast.

“Evening at Medfield,” by George Inness.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(click image to enlarge)

Almost all of his later pictures will be found to hinge upon color, light, and atmosphere. He was very fond of moisture-laden air, rain effects, clouds, rainbows, mists, vapors, fogs, smokes, hazes—all phases of the atmosphere. In the same way he fancied dawns, dusks, twilights, moonlights, sunbursts, flying shadows, clouded lights—all phases of illumination. And again, he loved sunset colors, cloud colors, sky colors, autumn tints, winter blues, spring grays, summer greens—all phases of color. And these not for themselves alone, but rather for the impression or effect that they produced. If he painted a moonlight, it was with a great spread of silvery radiance, a hushed effect in the trees, a still air, and the mystery of things half seen; when he painted an early spring morning, he gave the vapor rising from the ground, with dampness in the air, voyaging clouds, and a warming blue in the sky; with an Indian summer afternoon there was the drowsy hum of nature lost in dreamland and the indefinable regret of things passing away. His “Rainy Day—Montclair” has the bend and droop of foliage heavy with rain, the sense of saturation in earth and air, the suggestion of the very smell of rain. The “Delaware Water Gap” shows the drive of a storm down the valley, with the sweep of the wind felt in the clouds, the trees, and the water. The “Summer Silence” is well named, for again it gives that feeling of the hushed woods in July, the deep shadows, the dense foliage that seems to sleep and softly breathe.

Always the impression—the feeling which he himself felt in the presence of nature and tried to give back in form and color upon canvas. I remember very well standing beside him before his “Niagara” and hearing him say what interested him in that scene. It was not so much the thundering mass of the waters, the volume and power, the sublimity of the cataract, as the impression of clouds of mist and vapor boiling up from the great caldron and being struck into color-splendor by the sunlight. Only an Inness in the presence of Niagara could have thrown emphasis upon so ethereal a phase as its mists and color. They made the impression and he responded to it.

Every feature of landscape had its peculiar sentiment to him. He said so many times and with no uncertain voice:

“Rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky, clouds—all things that we see—can convey sentiment if we are in the love of God and the desire of truth. Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of conveying human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant.”

“Sunset at Montclair,” by George Inness.
(click image to enlarge)

That last statement of his about the civilized landscape is well worth noting, because that was the landscape he painted. His subjects are related to human life, and some of our interest in his pictures is due to the fact that he gives us thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are comprehensible by all. He tells things that every one may have thought but no one before him so well expressed. In other words, he brings our own familiar landscape home to us with new truth and beauty. This, it may be presumed, is the function of the poet and the painter in any land. It was the quality that made Burns and Wordsworth great and may account in measure for the fame of Rembrandt, Hobbema, Constable—yes, and Inness.

When he was young there were traditions of the Hudson River school in the air. The “mappy” landscape with its crude color and theatrical composition held the place of honor. Inness was probably captivated by it at first sight, but he soon discovered its emptiness. It had no basis in nature; it was not the landscape we see and know. The “Course of Empire” and the “Voyage of Youth” were only names for studio fabrications. The truly poetic landscape lay nearer home. This was what Inness called the “civilized landscape,” the familiar landscape, the paysage intime, the one we all see and know because it has always been before us—its very nearness perhaps blinding us to its beauty.

How hard it is to believe that the true poetry of the world lies close about us! We keep fancying that romance is not in our native village, but in Rome or Constantinople or Cairo; and that the poetic landscape is not that of the wood-lot behind the house, but that of Arden Forest or some Hesperidian garden far removed from us. Emerson has noted that at sea every ship looks romantic but the one we sail in. Yet there is plenty of romance in our ship if we have the eyes to see it; and there is abundance of beauty in the wood-lot if we have the intentness of purpose to study it out and understand it. Any one can admire the “view” from a mountain-top, but it takes some imagination to see beauty in the quiet meadow. And after you have seen it it requires a great deal of labor and skill to tell what you have seen. Wordsworth and Constable made more failures with it than successes. Just so with Inness. He shot wide of the mark innumerable times, but when he hit, it was with very decided effect.

A love of the familiar landscape would seem to have always been with Inness. After a period of following the Hudson River panorama of nature undefiled by man, he gave it up. While in Rome he produced some semiclassic landscapes, but he gave them up, too. Not so with the Fontainebleau-Barbizon landscape. Rousseau and his band had broken with the classic and were producing the paysage intime to which Hobbema (not Constable, of whom they knew nothing) had called their attention through his pictures in the Louvre. They had done in France just what Inness had sought to do in America: they had abandoned the grandiloquent and put in its place the familiar. Inness was in sympathy with them almost from the moment he first saw their work. Had he been born in France, no doubt he would have been a member of the Rousseau-Dupré group.

Again it is worth noticing in passing that all of the so-called “men of 1830” were really provincial in what they produced. Corot painted Ville d’Avray, Rousseau, Dupré, and Diaz the Fontainebleau forest, Daubigny the Seine and the Marne. None of their work represents the south or the east of France, and none of it carries beyond France. It is localized about Paris. Just so with the work of Inness. It is emphatically American, but limited to the North Atlantic States. The appearances which he portrayed are peculiar to the region lying east of the Alleghanies. In his pictures the light and coloring, the forms and drift of clouds, the mists and hazes, the trees and hills, the swamps and meadows may be recognized as belonging to New Jersey or New York or New England, but none of them belongs to Minnesota or Louisiana or California. He pictured the American landscape perhaps more completely than any other painter before or since his time; but his “civilized landscape” was nevertheless limited as regards its geographical range.

Nor would we have it otherwise. All the masters of art have been provincial so far as subject goes. Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt never cared to go beyond their own bailiwicks for material. And Inness—though he may not rank with those just mentioned—found all the material he needed within fifty miles of New York. It was the discovery of this material, his point of view regarding it, what he did with it, and what he made us see in it, that perhaps gives him his high rank in American art.

The man and his impulsive nature never changed, though he kept shifting his methods and his point of view from year to year. He went his own pace and was always something of a recluse. The art movements about him interested him in only a slight way. The Academy of Design honored him with membership, but he cared little about it. The Society of American Artists elected him a member also, but he cared even less for the brilliant painting of the young men than for the weak performances of the academicians. He kept very much to himself and painted on in his own absorbed, impulsive fashion. His studio was only a bare barn of a room with a few crazy chairs in it. Wall-hangings, stuffs, screens, brass pots, shields, spears—the artistic plunder which one usually finds in a painter’s apartment—he regarded as so much trumpery. In his later days he came and went to his studio from Montclair, seeing landscapes out of the car-window, and in his mind’s eye seeing them upon his canvases. His art swayed him completely.

“Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.
(click image to enlarge)

He had no pupils, though he corrected, advised, and instructed many young painters after his own method. It was a decidedly arbitrary teaching. Elliott Daingerfield tells a story of one of his own landscapes in which a rail fence was running down into the foreground. When Inness was asked in to criticise the canvas, he objected to the fence and said it should be taken out.

“Why can’t I have the fence there if I want it?” Daingerfield protested. To which Inness replied:

“You can if you want to be an idiot.”

His criticism of older painters and pictures was just as unqualified. And in matters outside of art, where he spoke with no peculiar authority, his vehemence was no less. Crossing on the Arizona in 1887, he talked every one out of the smoking-room on the Single Tax question, so a friend informs me. In 1894, when I happened to be crossing with him, he was as positive as ever about his religious, socialistic, and political convictions. His interest and enthusiasm were in no degree abated. In the mornings he sat on deck wrapped up in rugs under the lee of a life-boat, and amused himself doing examples in vulgar fractions out of an ordinary school arithmetic; but in the afternoon he liked to talk, and I was a willing listener, though I had heard him discourse many times.

Every one remembers his caustic criticism of Turner’s “Slave Ship.” He always had a kick for Turner, though at heart he admired him, and in many respects his own methods were very like that master. They both worked from visual memory, Turner putting in what pleased him in architecture, people, and boats; and Inness putting in cows or bridges or wagons, as pleased him. Neither painter resorted to the model or to a sketch for these accessories. They painted them out of their heads, and sometimes they were vague in drawing or false in lighting. The only difference was that Turner took more liberties with his text than Inness, and often lost truth of tone. This gave Inness his chance to say that Turner was a painter of claptrap—his detail was spotty, he could paint figures in a boat, but he couldn’t paint a boat with figures.

For Gainsborough he had some admiration, and in his early days rather followed him, but he outgrew the brown-fiddle tone of Gainsborough’s foliage and came to think his work lacking in color. Constable, too, he admired, perhaps because he painted the greens of foliage very frankly; but his light and color were cold. Turner’s heat and Constable’s cold he did not believe could both come out of England, except through subjective distortion. The pictures of Watts, he insisted, looked as though dipped in a sewer, so unhealthy and morbid were they in color. This referred to the later pictures of Watts which Inness had seen in a loan collection exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. He was fond of brilliant color himself, and evidently he had never studied the earlier and middle-period pictures of Watts. Wilson he liked, though recognizing that he was merely a reviser of the old classic formula of landscape. But Wilson knew how to handle his sky and could tie things together with atmosphere.

Corot was a very pretty painter—and by “pretty,” Inness meant clever. He wagged his head in saying it and smiled as though the statement were incontestable. The sentiment of light and air with Corot was something that Inness thoroughly understood. And he greatly fancied Corot’s composition. At one time he painted pictures that have a Corotesque arrangement—notably the “Wood Gatherers,” formerly in the Clarke Collection. What he did not understand was Corot’s monotony of color, or, as other painters expressed it, Corot’s refinement of color. Millet was wonderful, especially in his landscape-work, which had attracted so little attention. Delacroix was one of the great gods for his wonderful gamut of color, if nothing else. And so on.

The steamer trip in 1894 was the last one that Inness made. He died that summer at the Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His funeral was held in the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Swedenborgian minister who officiated, in the course of his eulogy, said: “Those of you who knew George Inness knew how intense a man he was.” “Intense” is exactly descriptive of the man. He was keyed up all his life and worked with feverish intensity. But the word does not describe his art, for that has no feeling of stress or strain about it. Sometimes one is conscious of its vagueness, as though the painter were groping a way out toward the light—a vagueness that holds the mystery of things half seen, a beautiful glimpse of half-revealed impressions. But usually his pictures are serene, hushed, and yet radiant with the glow of eternal sun-fires from sky or cloud.

They were lofty and poetic impressions, and the loftier they were the more intense the painter’s effort to reveal them. The heights of Parnassus are very calm, but they are not reached without a struggle. The great ones—those who scale the upper peaks—are perhaps the most intensive strugglers of all. Inness was one of them.

III

ALEXANDER H. WYANT

It was Corot who declared that in art Rousseau was an eagle and he himself was merely a lark singing a song from the meadow-grasses. The contrast and the comparison are not inapplicable to two of our own painters. Wyant never possessed the wide range or the far-seeing eye of Inness, but he had something about him of Corot’s mood and charm. He, too, was a lark, or should we say a wood-thrush singing along the edge of an American forest? He had only a few mellow notes, yet we would not be without them. They still charm us. And it is not certain that in the long account of time the direct and simple utterances of Corot and Wyant may not outlive the wide truth of Rousseau and the vision splendid of Inness. More than once in æsthetic story the songs of a Burns have been held more precious than the tumults of a Milton.

The wonder of Wyant’s success is greater than that of Inness, for his boyhood surroundings, if anything, were less stimulating and his pictorial education far more restricted. Besides, Inness lived on to seventy years, but Wyant died at fifty-six, having endured ill-health, and for the last ten years of his life—his best working years—been paralyzed in his right arm and hand. Living much to himself, something of a hermit in his mountain home, weighed down by misfortunes and disappointments, the wonder grows that he not only kept up and improved his technique to the end, but that he preserved his serenity of mood and purity of outlook through it all. He must have been a man with fortitude of soul beyond the average. It is not every painter that can turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.

Wyant was the typical barefoot boy of the near West in the days before the Civil War. He was born in 1836 at Evans Creek, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and his boyhood and early youth were far removed from anything like the madding crowd. His parents were Americans of the soil, his father being a farmer and carpenter of Pennsylvania extraction, and his mother of Dutch-Irish descent. They were nomadic, after the manner of border people, and soon left Evans Creek to live in or near Defiance, where Wyant learned his three R’s in the village school. There were less than one thousand people in the town at that time, and what Wyant got out of it by way of enlightenment or encouragement must have been meagre. As a boy he, no doubt, roamed the woods, fished the streams, and trailed along the Ohio hilltops; and at this time, unconsciously perhaps, he was storing up visual memories of appearances that were to be of service to him later on.

That he had an eye and was an observer from the start comes to us in the tales told of his boyish sketches on the floor made with charcoal from the wood-fire. At least they showed an inclination that was afterward to develop into a passion. But the inclination found no immediate outlet. After leaving school the youth served as an apprentice in a harness-shop, but he did not care for harness-making. He preferred to paint photographs, cards, signs—almost anything that could be done with a brush. At twenty-one he went to Cincinnati and for the first time saw some paintings in oil. Before that his ideas of art had been bounded by book illustration and the omnipresent chromo. It is said that among the pictures he saw at Cincinnati was something by Inness. The young man was impressed by it, or by the reports about Inness, for he took the train to New York to consult that master about art as a vocation.

He found Inness at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy. How long he stopped there and what was said we do not know, but the master was encouraging, and the young man went back to Cincinnati determined to be a painter. He had a right instinct about art at that early time or he never would have chosen Inness for a counsellor. The famous landscape-painters then were Kensett and Church. Inness was the most progressive, the most ultra-modern of the time, and had not yet won universal applause. He did not paint enough in detail for the man in the street, and evidently he must have given Wyant his argument for breadth of view over detail, for, as we shall presently see, Wyant had it almost from the start. But perhaps the most and the best that he got from Inness was inspiration.

Back in Cincinnati and painting pictures after his own formula, Wyant found a purchaser and a patron in Nicholas Longworth. It became possible for him shortly thereafter to move to New York. There, in 1863, he saw a large exhibition of Düsseldorf pictures that probably stirred his imagination. Pictures in America at that time were rather scarce, and any exhibition of foreign work would be more impressive then than now. The next year he exhibited at the National Academy of Design for the first time, and in 1865 he went to Europe on a Düsseldorf pilgrimage, impelled thereto by a mountain-and-waterfall landscape of Gude which he had seen in New York.

He went straight to Gude at Carlsruhe and put himself under his tutelage. Gude was a Norwegian painter, influenced by Dahl, and imbued with the Düsseldorf method and point of view. The grand landscape—panoramic in extent and mountainous in height, with a hot sun in the heavens—was then in vogue, and Achenbach was its prophet. From Wyant’s short stay with Gude it seems that his enthusiasm was soon chilled down to zero. In after-life he often referred to the great kindness of Gude and his wife, but he seemed to think that his instruction in art had been fundamentally wrong. His pupil, Bruce Crane, says that he spoke of his art environment there as being “a miserable one,” and Wyant believed that “environment played the greater part in the making of a painter for good or bad.”

He left Gude and started back to America, but stopped on the way in England and Ireland, where he studied pictures and painted some of his own. The old masters in the National Gallery apparently did not make a strong appeal to him. His work shows no sign of Claude, Salvator, Poussin, Ruysdael, Hobbema, or Cuyp. Even Gainsborough and the ascendant Turner seem to have left him cold. But Constable he liked very much. Here at last was a man seeing things in a large way and doing them with breadth of brush. Moreover, he was doing simple transcripts of nature, not the panorama of blazing perspective. In America Wyant had inherited something of the spectacular from his Hudson River predecessors; Düsseldorf had aided the conception, and Turner had abetted it; but Constable seemed to be against it. Wyant was inclined to renounce it. Constable produced the broad realistic look, and at that time Wyant had probably not arrived at any other conception of art than as a large transcript of nature. Ruskin’s doctrine of fidelity to fact was in the air, and the landscape as emotional expression, or as a symphony, or even as a decorative pattern, was little known either in the studios or the critic’s den. There was, however, plenty of controversy going on. And yet fresh from varying theories and impressions, Wyant went over to Ireland and painted pictures that bore no earmark of any painter or any school.

In the Metropolitan Museum there is an Irish landscape by him done in 1866—“View in County Kerry, Ireland.” There are gray mountains at the back, a green foreground with a pool of water, a gray-blue and whitish sky, a gray atmosphere. At the right middle distance is a white cottage. The rest is treeless upland running into mountain heights that are lost in haze and cloud. The picture is not only remarkable for its simplicity of composition but its absence of small objects or distracting details. Though a mountain landscape, it is broadly seen, largely and simply massed, and painted with a broad flat brush. It may have been repainted in later years, but I am willing to believe from the breadth of its composition that it was painted broadly to correspond, and is to-day substantially as when originally done.

This picture is in somewhat violent contrast with another Wyant landscape hanging in the same gallery and dated in the same year—1866. I refer to the large “Mohawk Valley” landscape—an excellent picture, though evidencing limitations perhaps peculiar to America. It is a huge valley view with a gorge and stream in the foreground running down to a fall from which mist is rising. The stream as a pool is seen again emerging in the middle distance. A half-lighted sky with falling rain at the left and warm grays of clouds and blues of distance make up the background, while in the foreground a tall tree at the left is balanced by a group of lesser trees at the right. The whole color-tone is warm (probably from underbasing), especially in the foreground, which shows in grays and browns. It is a symmetrical composition with a central point of sight, and in its detailed elaboration gives no hint of selection or sacrifice. The trees, the ledges of rock in the foreground, the water, the clouds are all exactly drawn and realized to the last item, each one having quite as much importance as its fellow. As for the painting, it is thin, kept thin to allow the underbasing to show through; but it is flatly painted, not stippled. In the latter respect it is an advance on, say, Church’s panorama, “Heart of the Andes,” in the same gallery, where the stippling with white paint produces a glittering, bedizened surface, and the minute drawing of leaves in the foreground runs into petty niggling.

Now, the “Mohawk Valley” was probably completed just before Wyant went to Europe; at least in method it antedates the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape of the same year.[1] It is a very important picture and represents the culmination of Wyant’s early style—a beautiful picture for any place or period or painter to have produced. It shows Wyant’s original point of view, with some of the influences that must have come to him from the Hudson River school, from Inness, from various unknown American sources. But the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape shows a departure, a widening, and a broadening of both brush and vision which were to increase and expand thereafter into a second style—the style of Wyant’s later and nobler canvases. To this style Wyant was undoubtedly helped at first by what he saw abroad, especially by the pictures of Constable.

[1] “In regard to the two pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, ‘View in County Kerry, Ireland,’ and the ‘Mohawk Valley,’ I never could reconcile myself to the idea that they were both painted in 1866. There is no doubt about the ‘Mohawk Valley’ because its manner is so much like the many canvases of that period which Wyant often showed me and which Mrs. Wyant destroyed after his death. The ‘View in County Kerry, Ireland,’ marks a new period in his art and the widely different handling as well as view-point are too much to have been acquired in one year. There is certainly some mistake in the date—I should say a difference of ten years. At some time that picture has been cleaned and the restorer accidentally destroying the date restored it incorrectly.”—(Bruce Crane in a letter to the writer, December 13, 1917.)

“Mohawk Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(click image to enlarge)

This was a time of rapid production with Wyant and he was always afire with his theme. The recognition of artists was coming to him if not the large patronage of the public. His picture of a “View on the Susquehanna” resulted in his being elected an associate of the National Academy in 1868, and he was named a full academician in 1869. But ill-health was with him, and in the hope of improving his physical condition and at the same time gathering material for his art, he joined in 1873 a government expedition to New Mexico and Arizona. There were many hardships on the trip, and Wyant’s never very robust constitution broke down under the strain. He was put on the train and sent back East. It is said that on the way East he passed his home town of Defiance, but would not get off. Ill as he was, with few friends and less money, he determined to go on to New York and fight it out. The fine courage of all that becomes more marked when we understand that the illness was so severe that it had resulted at Fort Wingate in paralysis of his right hand and arm. He was never to paint with his right hand again. It was a crippled painter coming back to New York—crippled in a vital spot—but he had determined that his left hand should be trained to service. And it was.

The West not only maimed him physically but apparently taught him nothing artistically. The deserts that he crossed with their red porphyry mountains, dull-yellow sands, and gas-blue air—the most wonderful landscapes in the world in their definition of form and their quality of color—seem to have made no impression whatever upon him. This is understandable only by considering the inheritance of tradition and environment. In Wyant’s time a handsome landscape meant a mountain-valley with forests, rocks, waterfalls, and the variegated foliage of summer or autumn. The desert was unknown and remained for a later generation of painters to discover; the plains were unpainted and thought unpaintable; even the marsh and the meadow, which Corot loved, were considered too slight for art. The grand-view conception in landscape-painting died hard. In Wyant’s time it was very much alive. Naturally enough, he was impressed by it, and though in later life he did many small intimate bits of nature, he never got away entirely from the wide mountain-valley theme.

He was, in fact, always a mountain lover. After his return to New York he spent much of his summer-time in the Adirondacks. He was then deeply interested in the pictures of the Barbizon-Fontainebleau painters which were coming into the United States. So outspoken was his admiration for Rousseau that he sent a picture to the Academy with the title “In the Spirit of Rousseau.” His own style was growing broader and simpler each year, and, strange enough, the public was buying his pictures. He became measurably prosperous, had a studio in the Y.M.C.A. Building in Twenty-third Street, and received a number of pupils. One of his pupils, a Miss Locke, he married in 1880.

After his marriage much time was spent in the Keene Valley, and in 1889 he moved to Arkville in the Catskills, where with a fine sweeping outlook from his porch upon woods, valleys, and hills he found enough material to last him the rest of his life. He saw little of the town thereafter. He had never mingled freely with his fellow man. The Society of American Artists had honored him with membership in 1878, he was a founder of the American Water-Color Society, and a member of the Century Association, but he always held somewhat aloof from them. Friendly enough with painters and people who sought him, he was, nevertheless, a little shy, which perhaps gave him the reputation of being gruff. He seemed less fitted to the city street than the aisle of the forest. It was in his mountain home on the forest edge that he died in 1892, having suffered much physical pain before his going.[2]

[2] “I met Wyant in 1876; his right arm was then practically useless. Later on his right side was affected, and the last six years he was compelled to walk sideways. Yet through all these years of suffering he worked day and night, and during the last six years, when his suffering was the worst, he recorded on canvas some of the beautiful things that survive him.”—(Bruce Crane, ibid.)

Like many another painter, Wyant doubtless knew infinite regrets that he could not live to complete his art. For he never believed in his having reached a final goal, and was always changing, experimenting, trying to better his work. My first meeting with him must have been in 1882. I seem to remember him seated before a picture with his palette fastened to the easel, his right arm hanging rather limp, and his left hand holding a brush. There was nothing noteworthy about the meeting except that his first words were a request that I should tell him what was wrong with the picture on the easel. He was so anxious to get a new view-point that he was quite willing to listen to a stranger, whether he spoke with authority or not. Of course I did not venture to say anything other than in praise of the canvas, though as I now remember it the picture was bothering him and looked a little tortured in its surface.

He worried a good deal over many of his pictures. When Inness came in to see him he relieved the strain in his impetuous way by taking up Wyant’s palette and brushes to add a touch here and there. The result usually was that the canvas grew into an Inness before the acquiescent Wyant’s eyes. There was so much of this that Mrs. Wyant finally forbade Inness her husband’s studio—at least that is the story told by the Inness family. But Wyant would do anything, submit to anything, for the love of painting. Bruce Crane writes me:

“How that man did love to paint! I often thought he worked too hard, sometimes failing to get his breath between canvases. He wished always to be alone so that he could paint, paint, not for praise nor emolument; never with the thought of reward. I recall Z. visiting the studio one day and remarking that he, Z, would like to be considered the best landscape-painter in America. After he left, Wyant said: “What a h—— of an ambition!”

Loving the mountains and the forests as he did, it was to be expected that he would use them in art. It was his earliest inheritance and his latest love. Any one at all familiar with the Adirondacks or the Catskills will recognize in Wyant’s landscapes not their topography, perhaps, but their characteristics. The valleys, the side-hills with outcropping rock, the pines, beeches, and birches, the little streams and pools, the clearings with their brush-edgings, are all there. Wyant arranged them in his pictures with the skill of a Japanese placing flowers in a pot. He made not so much of a bouquet as an arabesque of trees and foliage, illuminated by sunlight filtered through thin clouds at the back and warmed with golden-gray colors. Atmosphere—the silvery-blue air of the mountains—held the pattern together, lent it sentiment, sometimes (with shadow masses) gave it mystery.

Perhaps the best illustration of this in any public gallery is the “Broad Silent Valley” in the Metropolitan Museum. It is doubtful if Wyant ever expressed himself better or more completely than in this picture. It is a large upright canvas, the very shape of which adds to the dignity and loftiness of the composition placed upon it. At the left are half a dozen large trees, at the right a rocky hillside, in the central plane a reflecting pool of water, at the back a high, clouded sky, radiant with the light beyond it. Simple in materials, not brilliant in color but rather sombre in tones of golden gray, devoid of any classic or romantic interest, it is nevertheless profoundly impressive in its fine sentiment of light, air, and color. It is as strong almost as a Rousseau in its foreground and trees, and as charming as a Corot in its light and air. But you cannot detect either Corot or Rousseau in it. When it was painted, Wyant was greatly taken with those painters, but he did not imitate or follow them. His pictures were always his own—the “Broad Silent Valley” not excepted.

The beauty and charm of its sentiment with the wonder of its strong mental grasp are paralleled by the workmanship displayed. Looking closely at the canvas, one finds it not heavily loaded, but dragged broadly and laid flatly with pigment. The ground has been underbased in warm browns, the shadows kept transparent and distant by glazes, the lights put in with opaque pigments. The handling is very broad if thin, and there has been little or no kneading or emendation or fumbling. It is straightforward flat painting of a masterful kind. And this was done with that late-trained left hand!

“Broad, Silent Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As for the drawing, it does not bother with the edges of objects, but concentrates force on the body and bulk—the color mass. Wyant had learned linear drawing with the exactness of a Durand and used it in his early pictures, but he soon outgrew the fancy for photographic detail. It was not effective. And he could give the solidity of a ledge of rock or the lightness of a floating cloud much better with a broader brush. As he grew in art his brush continued to broaden. His work became more sketchy, his brush freer and fuller, and possibly before he died he may have heard his work referred to as “impressionistic”—heaven save the word!

The general public usually regards any breadth of brush-work whatever as a sign of impressionism. The term in its present meaning, or lack of meaning, covers a multitude of stupidities. Every one who paints gives an impression because he cannot give anything else. Realism is a misnomer. The real is nature itself, and art is the report about the real made by the painter. If it is a minute report of surface detail that can be seen through a magnifying-glass the public immediately dubs it realistic; if it is a broad report that ignores the surface detail for bulk, mass, and body, it is called impressionistic. But the difference is merely between the smallness and the largeness of the view-point. The great landscapists have usually regarded a tree as more important in its shadow masses and volume than in its leaves, a rock as more impressive in its weight than its veins or stains, a bar of sunlight more striking in its luminosity than in its sharp-cut edges. Seeing and painting that way it is easy to comprehend how they should be set down as impressionists when in a large sense they are making more faithful record than the men who see only the surface glitter. Such men were Corot, Constable, Inness, Wyant, not to mention Manet or Monet.

Wyant probably came to that point of view at first through Inness and then, later on, through Constable, Corot, and Rousseau. It was the right point of view, though he never gave it with quite the breadth of Corot or with the solid painting of Rousseau. His canvases were always sufficiently covered with pigment, but no more. Some of his late pictures show a freer use of pigment, but he seldom if ever did any fat or unctuous painting, and never painted for mere display of dexterity. He had certain formulas of composition, methods of getting certain effects that he employed continuously. For instance, he liked a dark foreground, a lighted middle distance, and a veiled sunlight effect at the back. To avoid the obviousness of this composition he often introduced light spots from a pool in the dark foreground and dark stumps or tree trunks in the light middle distance, or otherwise varied the contrast of light with dark. But these with glazed shadows and opaque high lights were not exactly painter’s tricks but rather the conventional practices of the studio at that time.

Wyant up to the last ten years of his life painted much out of doors and directly from the model. From that he got exact knowledge of forms, lights, and colors, so that in after-years he was able to draw and paint largely from visual memory. Working directly from the model led him into much detail, and some of his earlier pictures are burdened with a multitude of facts, but when he worked from memory in the studio all that was changed. He simplified his composition to a few large masses, threw out detail, and depended for effect largely upon light, air, and diffused color. A little valley view with half a dozen beeches at the left, a clump of bushes with a ledge of rock at the right, a veiled distance—that was enough for him.

Occasionally in his pictures one sees a white cottage in the background, a road or a bridge; but these do not occur frequently, and I cannot remember any picture by him that shows man, woman, or child. The human interest was not his. He believed that nature was sufficient unto itself and needed no association with mankind to make it beautiful or interesting. So long had he looked at nature and studied her appearances, so long had he marvelled and brooded over her grandeur and beauty, so long had he loved the veiled mountain light, the blue air, and the forest shadow, that finally he came to have a way of seeing things, a point of view about nature that by its intensity and depth was perhaps abnormal. He saw not as we see but as an absorbed nature-lover sees. The disturbing prose of facts was no longer there. The poetry of light, air, and color alone remained.

In his first endeavors when he painted from the model he recited the beauty of the facts and perhaps thought they would be sufficient to carry the picture. Nature was beautiful in itself; if faithfully transcribed on canvas why would not the beauty carry on into the transcription? He found later on that it would not and could not, that the counterfeit presentment remained only a counterfeit presentment. Then he began to simplify his matter and broaden his method, seeking not to reproduce the original but to give merely the feeling or impression that the original had made upon him. The result was that peculiarly poetic quality of light, air, and color that we associate with such pictures as the “Broad Silent Valley.”

Of its kind no finer quality of pictorial poetry was ever produced than is shown in Wyant’s later landscapes. It is not exactly epic, though it has wonderful descriptive passages, sustained effect, and often very positive strength of utterance. Lyric is the term that describes it better. For it is a song rather than a recitation—a wood theme worthy of a Pan’s piping, though it gives no hint of the Old World, and belongs emphatically in this new Western land with its unbroken soil and virgin forests. In aim and effect it is not unlike the pæan in praise of light by Corot. They were both painter-poets—the one painting on the outskirts of Paris, the other gathering his material on the outskirts of civilization here in America.

Inness, Wyant, Homer Martin, Winslow Homer—no one ever questioned the Americanism of their art. They are our very own—the product of this new soil. Even their limitations recite our history. As for their aspirations, with their passionate love for the beauty of our own American landscape, may it not be fairly claimed that in these they are representative of the American people? In a large sense have they not been our pictorial spokesmen, saying in art what many of us have always felt but could not well express?

And Wyant—Wyant with the wood-thrush note—well, we shall not look upon his like again! For he and Martin were perhaps rarer spirits, finer souls, than either Inness or Homer. Their charm of mood, the serenity of their outlook, the loveliness of their vision will hardly be repeated in our art. They marked an epoch and belonged to a past that unfortunately is leaving no decided teaching or sequence in its wake. The trend in art to-day is not toward serenity but turbulence.

IV

HOMER MARTIN

The little aloofness of manner that prevented Wyant from being a pronounced social light was not a characteristic of Homer Martin. From his youth upward Martin was companionable, had in fact something of a genius for making friends. All through his life he maintained social relations with the wise and the witty of his time, moved in intellectual club circles, and both at home and abroad was accounted a man of mind, a rare raconteur and conversationalist, a most attractive personality. His droll comments and quick retorts are still told at his club, and form perhaps something of a contrast to his pictures hanging upon the walls near by.

For there was never anything amusing about Martin’s art. He indulged in no drollery of the brush, and no intelligent person ever got a smile out of his canvases. They are serious, almost solemn, affairs. Mrs. Martin, in her delightful reminiscences of her husband, quotes John R. Dennett as saying that “Martin’s landscapes look as if no one but God and himself had ever seen the places.” There is, indeed, nothing of human interest about them. A distant figure or a house is occasionally introduced as a light spot in a dark plane, or otherwise to help out the composition; but the figure always suggests a wraith or a spook, and the house is deserted or haunted. Says Mrs. Martin:

“There is an austerity, a remoteness, a certain savagery in even the sunniest and most peaceful of his landscapes, which were also in him, and an instinctive perception of which had made me say to him in the very earliest days of our acquaintance that he reminded me of Ishmael.”

There is no contradiction of character in these two phases of Martin’s mentality. They argue merely versatility. He was exceedingly fond of the silent, even melancholy, beauty of nature, as he was of the solemn seriousness of fine poetry; but these were not themes for talk at the club. Mrs. Martin says she never heard him “talk shop” and that, with several notable exceptions such as La Farge and Winslow Homer, most of his close friends were people in other professions than painting. He never tabooed art as a topic of conversation, but he could talk on other themes quite as well. The mental facet that reflected him as a man of the world gave out a different light from that which proclaimed him a poet in landscape. His was not a one-facet mind.

What part heredity played in his equipment may only be guessed at. His father was a mild-mannered carpenter of New England descent, his mother a strong-willed, quick-witted woman belonging to an old Albany family. It is usually assumed that Martin derived from his mother and got his artistic instincts from her. These latter, it seems, developed early—the mother testifying that before he was two years old she was accustomed to quiet him by giving him pencil and paper. At five he did what has been called a “spirited” drawing of a horse. Doubtless every one can remember something of the same sort told about his own infancy. The drawing habit is common to almost all children and usually means little.

But Martin was to demonstrate shortly that he could do nothing else but draw and make pictures. At school in Albany (where he had been born in 1836) he was not a shining success. He said himself that his school-days had been spent in looking through the windows at the Greenbush Hills and longing for the time when he could get over there and draw them. At thirteen his schooling ended, much to his after regret. He then went into his father’s carpenter-shop, but that proved as little attractive as the schoolroom. A clerkship in a store ended disastrously owing to his non-recognition of the amenities of business life. Then he entered an architect’s office and failed there because of defective eyesight. He could not see or draw a vertical line properly. Later on he was eliminated from the Civil War draft because of this same defective vision. His special fitness for the painter’s craft was not very obvious at this time, and yet he was headed strongly that way.

It was E. D. Palmer, the sculptor, who persuaded the father to allow Martin to go on with art. Palmer was then the art oracle of Albany, with a little coterie of painters about him consisting of such men as James and William Hart, George H. Boughton, Edward Gay, Launt Thompson. Martin knew them as a boy; and, after sixteen, doing pretty much as he pleased, he frequented their studios, and for two weeks was a pupil of James Hart. That is the only direct instruction he ever received. Before he was twenty he had opened a studio of his own in Albany, was quite well known as a youthful prodigy, and was generally thought to have in him the making of an artist.

It was in Albany that he met and married in 1861 Elizabeth Gilbert Davis, a clever woman who afterward developed much literary ability and became well known not only as a reviewer in The Nation and other periodicals but as a novelist and magazine writer. The marriage was altogether fortunate and happy, though at times pecuniary difficulties incident to the artistic and literary life weighed heavily upon them. She was a rod and a staff to comfort him, and there is no record that she ever flinched or failed or regretted her choice. In their early married life there were few trials, she recording that they were fairly prosperous, that he received numerous commissions for pictures, and that they had made many friends. They had stayed on in Albany until the winter of 1862-1863, and then had moved to New York. In 1864 he had a studio in the Tenth Street Building, and his near neighbors were Sandford Gifford, Hubbard, Griswold, J. G. Brown, McEntee, Eastman Johnson, and, later, John La Farge.

This was a time of comparatively rapid production with Martin and also a time when many influences might be supposed at work upon him; but in reality none of the influences seems to have made much of an impression. His early work is now infrequently seen, but what there is of it, though small, bright, and a little crude, is nevertheless quite distinctly Martinesque. He had, of course, inherited from the Hudson River school (a name that Professor Mather declares Martin originated) the “view” in landscape. With the panorama had come down the studio method of small detailed treatment, and Martin at first paid it allegiance but he very soon saw its defects. As a boy he could speak of a picture by his master, James Hart, as “a scene of niggled magnitude,” and Mr. Brownell tells me that he had always talked much of “generalization” in landscape.

His early pictures show this generalization not so much perhaps in breadth of handling as in breadth of view. He was even then seeing the large elements of earth, air, water, and sky. Naturally enough, his brush was a little fussy with foliage, dead-tree trunks, rock strata, and foreground properties in general; but he could see the unity of mountain ranges, the continuity of air, the omnipresent radiance of light, the great heave of the sky. He already had the vision but not, as yet, the full means of revealing it. It was practically the same nature that Cole and Church had seen, but they saw it in its surface aspect, where Martin saw it in its depth. The difference between them was the wide difference that divides the superficial from the profound.

With his early pictures Martin had made considerable success. As far back as 1857 he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design; in 1868 he was elected an associate of the Academy, and in 1874 he was made a full academician. His landscape material at first had been gathered in the Berkshires, then he seems to have tramped and sketched with Edward Gay in the Catskills. In the early sixties he went to the White Mountains, and from 1864 to 1869 he was every summer in the Adirondacks. In 1871 he went to Duluth, Minnesota, at the invitation of Jay Cooke, but the next year found him in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He was a mountain lover, almost exclusively so, at this time, and apparently not quite happy away from them.

Professor Mather, who has closely traced Martin’s career in a notable monograph,[3] says that his sketches in this early period were made with a hard pencil on sheets of gray paper. They were minutely done, drawn in outline, without color, and with no dash or smudge or mere suggestion about them. The pictures painted from them in his studio were perhaps less detailed than the sketches, and as for their color, he no doubt relied upon his visual memory or his instinct for tone and harmony. After 1876 he began to use charcoal in sketching, and later on he took up water-colors and made drawings with them along the Saguenay and elsewhere. Doubtless these later sketch mediums had come to him on his first trip abroad in 1876.

[3] Homer Martin: Poet in Landscape, by Frank Jewett Mather, New York, 1912.

The climax of his early work—that is, before 1876—seems to have been reached in such pictures as the “Lake Sandford.” It was shown at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, but painted probably as far back as 1870. The scene is in the Adirondacks, and Martin has pictured the lake looking down from a distant height. There is a dark foreground of outcropping rock, then the light-reflecting surface of the long lake, then a ridge of dark mountains, and back of that the light sky—four planes in alternations of dark and light. It is woods, rock, water, and sky—no more. The largeness of Martin’s view, with its grasp of such essential elements as light, air, and space, is quite apparent notwithstanding a handling that seems too small for it. There is no petty puttering over leaves and stones, but the small catches of light-and-dark in the foliage, the tree trunks, the rocks, the sharp, clean-drawn outlines conceal rather than reveal the conception. Moreover, the smooth, enamel-like surface seems to act as a binder and a restraint. An excellent picture, as many another that he painted during this period; but Martin had not yet entirely emerged from his early manner, was not yet expressing himself fully and freely.

At this time, no doubt, he had seen in America some works by Corot and the Barbizon men and had been impressed by them, but a new period was to begin for him with his first trip to Europe. This was in 1876. He went to England, where he met and became intimate with Whistler and Albert Moore, then to France, where he visited Barbizon, though Millet and Rousseau were dead. He also went to St. Cloud to see Corot’s sketching-ground, and sketched there a bit himself. He did not do much painting. All of his sojourns abroad were times of study and observation. Mrs. Martin says that his working periods were very irregular, that he absorbed things by a slow means rather than painted by wilful effort; and he himself insisted that he could not paint without the impulse. Of course all this was set down to him as indolence by the hypercritical, but at the present time it is well understood that mental preparedness is necessary for the production of any great work, and that periods of long reflection are not periods of idleness.

He returned to New York in December of the same year and took up his painting, but he was now making some decided changes in both his matter and his manner. The generous expanse of the panoramic view was cut down to more modest landscape proportions. No doubt that had come to him from seeing the paysage intime of Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny. Possibly, too, he had been persuaded by the broad, simple landscapes of Georges Michel, whose pictures were then well known not only in Paris but in New York. At any rate it is quite apparent in Martin’s work after 1876 that he was gradually discarding the “view” for something smaller and more intimate. It was still a mountain landscape known only to God and himself and had no human appeal, but it expressed Martin’s thought and feeling much better than the earlier affair.

His brush, too, was broadening. It was beginning to sweep over details, spots, and sparkles, and to emphasize masses of light or dark or color. Exactness of statement, sharpness of line, emphasis of drawing were hindrances rather than helps to expression. Later on, no doubt, he would have agreed in toto with a remark attributed by Charles Ricketts to Puvis de Chavannes: “La perfection bête qui n’a rien à faire avec le vrai dessin, le dessin expressif!” It was not until near the end of his career, when his eyesight had nearly gone, that Martin felt himself free from the restraint of method and materials. He then said to his wife in reply to some praise of a picture on the easel: “I have learned to paint at last. If I were quite blind now and knew just where the colors were on my palette I could express my self.”

But long before he thought himself able to paint he had arrived with painters and paint-lovers. In 1877 he was asked in at the birth of the Society of American Artists, and was an initial member of that organization. The next year he went to Concord for Scribners Monthly[4] to do some illustrations for an article on that place, and in 1881 he was sent to England by the Century Magazine[5] to prepare some illustrations of George Eliot’s country. Martin did not altogether like making the illustrations and considered it as only hack-work. And it seems that the Century people did not particularly care for his work, though just why would be hard to discover. To the casual critic of to-day looking at these drawings in the magazine they seem excellent, and, moreover, they are decidedly Martinesque though worked over by an engraver.

[4] Scribners Monthly, February, 1879.

[5] Century Magazine, vol. 30, 1885.

In London once more, the Martins saw much of Whistler and something of such literary people as Henley and the Gosses. After the illustrations were made they crossed over to France. It was planned to return soon to New York, but some unexpected money arrived and they stayed on at Villerville in Normandy. There and at Honfleur they remained until late in 1886. It was perhaps the most enjoyable period of their lives, for though they were poor in purse they were well-off in friends, and W. J. Henessey, Duez, Reinhart, the Forbes-Robertsons, the Brownells, and others came to see them. Life in Normandy was very attractive—perhaps too attractive for Martin’s work, for he seems to have completed few pictures while there. It was another period of absorption during which he sketched and laid in many pictures which were afterward finished in America—such pictures as “Low Tide, Villerville,” “Honfleur Light,” “Criquebœuf Church,” “Normandy Trees,” “Normandy Farm,” “Sun-Worshippers,” and the “View on the Seine.” He was not a painter to do a picture at one sitting. He required time and much musing before production.

Back once more in New York, Martin took a studio in Fifty-fifth Street, where he completed many of his Normandy canvases. After 1890 he had a painting-room in Fifty-ninth Street, where he did the “Haunted House” and the “Normandy Trees.” In 1892 he made a last trip to England, and spent some time at Bournemouth with George Chalmers. Returned again to America, he went to St. Paul to join Mrs. Martin, stopping on the way at the Chicago Fair, where a number of his pictures were shown. At St. Paul his eyesight began failing to an alarming degree. A famous oculist declared the optic nerve of one eye dead and the other eye clouded with cataract. But Martin now painted on with redoubled energy, as though conscious that his time was short. He finished a number of pictures and sent them on to New York, where he had a selling arrangement with a dealer. But alas! the pictures did not sell, and shortly afterward the painter laid aside his brushes. He was fatally ill with a malignant growth in the throat, and death came to him as something of a relief in 1897.

“View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(click image to enlarge)

It was in these latter years only that Martin said that at last he had learned how to paint. Mrs. Martin had been lauding a picture called “The Adirondacks,” saying that if he never did another stroke he would go out in a blaze of glory, and it was his answer to her. He probably meant by the remark that he had arrived at a method of handling that fully expressed his thought. In reality it was the same old method, only it had been broadened and simplified. Except in his very early works, Martin had never been given to excessive surface detail. He painted with a comparatively broad brush almost from the start—painted with a flat stroke rather than with a stippling point. The “White Mountain” picture in the Metropolitan Museum, painted in 1868, shows substantially the same brush-work as the “Lake Ontario Sand Dunes” of nearly twenty years later. The sand-dunes picture seems to have been done largely with a palette-knife. Apparently it is trowelled across the canvas, with one tone or color laid over another, flattened down, compressed, blended. This applies especially to the sky; only the dead trees in the foreground are painted with a brush. In the “View on the Seine,” also in the Metropolitan Museum, the foliage and rocks are painted with the brush, but, again, the sky and water seem laid down in layers of paint, put on in long bands, and flattened to a lacquered surface. These bands of color in the sky, superimposed one upon another like platings of glass in a La Farge window, appear again in the “Honfleur Light.” All the hues seem blended by superimposition to produce a golden opalescent glow in the sky. Mrs. Martin said he used colors as a poet does words, and here, no doubt, he was getting orchestration in his sky by fusing many colors together.

But back of the method was the point of view which perhaps unconsciously begat the method. Martin always had a fancy for the great, the essential, elements of nature. And he saw things in their large relations, but at first was bothered by their protrusive and petty facts. When finally he came to paint only what he loved and let the rest go, he arrived at full expression. To paint space, air, pervasive light, color—to paint these alone—was to emphasize them, to characterize them by isolation, as though the painter should say: “I mean you to look only at the things I love and you shall see that they are lovable. Never mind the bright autumn leaf, the woodchuck on the rock, or the open cottage door. Look at the glory of light coming through thin clouds, the great lift of the sky, the splendid reflection of the water, the abiding beauty of color in the forests and hills.”

It is doubtful that Martin had any positive theory of art which he was trying to work out in practice. He probably painted instinctively or unconsciously toward a given goal, as most painters do. That he knew emphasis could be given certain features of landscape by suppressing other features is to say that he knew the old law of dramatic effect. But there is a shade of difference perhaps between negative suppression and positive assertion. To emphasize a certain quality or element by putting forward its most commanding feature was to characterize it and make it dominant. And that, I think, was Martin’s aim. He knew mountain fight, air, and color as few painters have known them; he knew the glamour of their poetry quite as well as the prose of their facts. From much knowledge and long contemplation he had come to know the abiding character of mountain landscape. And when at last he had simplified his composition and his handling, it seemed an easy matter for him to put the characterization upon canvas. His remark to Mrs. Martin, “If I were quite blind now and knew just where the colors were on my palette I could express myself,” was not an empty boast.

This is perhaps reducing theories of painting to a very elementary basis. The formula prescribes merely an omission of what you do not care for and a strong characterization of the things you do care for. But as a matter of fact is that not the process common to most painters? The Meissoniers and Gérômes who paint the shoe-button and the eyelash do so because they love shoe-buttons and eyelashes just as Durand and Church loved birch bark and trailing ivy. Almost all of our early landscapists made no discrimination whatever in what they liked or disliked. A red sun in the background was of no more artistic importance than a red September maple in the foreground. They took nature in its entirety, omitting nothing, adding nothing. In result they produced something only a grade above the colored photograph. But Corot, Inness, Wyant, Martin had a more intelligent view-point. To them there were certain features of nature that were characteristic in their universality and permanence, and other features that were merely casual or accidental. The introduction of the merely casual they found did not lend to the characterization of the permanent, so they discarded it and threw their strength into that which signified the most.

What are the significant and permanent features in landscape? Well, above all is light—the first of created things, and to this latest day the most beautiful of nature’s manifestations. Corot spent his life painting it and even on his deathbed was raving about it in delirium. No wonder Martin was a great admirer of Corot, for he, too, was devoted to the splendor of light. In all of his later pictures it is a leading feature, and the eye is inevitably drawn at once to this beauty of the sky. He greatly disliked anything like a story in his landscapes or any literary climax dependent upon figures or houses or animals. They would detract from the tale of light and were discarded. Nature was beautiful enough by itself considered. No wonder he chose the uninhabited mountains for his subjects. They were not only devoid of humanity, but up there beyond the peaks was the most splendid manifestation of the light he loved—the pure mountain light.

What are the other abiding features of landscape? Well, shadow or half-light—light partially obscured by opaque bodies. It could be used as a contrast and by cunning application could be made to enhance the luminosity of full light. Moreover, interior depth and penetration could be obtained with it. Best of all, its uncertainty lent itself to suggestiveness and the mystery of things half seen. Inness was greatly in love with it. Many of his late canvases are called “vague” or sometimes “swampy,” because they are saturated with shadow masses out of which loom or glow mysteriously half-seen forms and colors. Martin made no such use of it as Inness, though many of his foregrounds are in shadow through which one looks to a lightened middle distance or sky. He was very fond of a light broken by being filtered through thin clouds, and he carried this out by employing a diffused thin shadow such as obtains under broken light. It is not often that one meets with dark shadows in his later pictures. He seemed to shy at anything like blackness, and in one of his pictures now in the Metropolitan Museum—the “View on the Seine”—the luminosity is so marked that the picture has the look of a water-color drawing. It was not the black and the “woolly” in Corot that he loved but the luminous and the radiant.

Another omnipresent and universal feature of landscape is color. It is an emanation of light, is, in fact, no more than its dispersed beams. If the light is direct and unclouded, the color will leap to very high pitches, such as we see in the landscapes of Inness or the Algerian scenes of Delacroix or Regnault or Fromentin; if the light comes from below the horizon and is reflected down to earth from the upper sky, the color will be subdued in mellow tones of saffron, rose, and grays such as we see in the dawns of Corot; if the light comes from above the horizon at sunset and is filtered through filmy forms of cumulo-stratus clouds, the color will be delicate broken tones of gold, azure, sad grays such as we see in the “Honfleur Light” or the “Criquebœuf Church” of Martin. He revelled in these subdued tones of broken light. They were not only the eternal coloring of nature but they were the means wherewith he expressed his own sentiment or feeling about nature.

Still other and not less universal features of landscape to Martin were enveloping atmosphere which bound all things together and made harmony; space which lifted above the reach of the earth and was limitless; heave and bulge in the mountain ranges with continuity in their interblended lines and massive strength in their rock strata; a limitless expanse to the mountain forests; a splendid broken reflection from the surface of river, pond, and pool. These features appear in such different pictures as the “Lake Champlain,” the “Lake Sandford,” the “Adirondacks,” the “Normandy Farm,” the “Mussel Gatherers,” the “Haunted House,” the “Westchester Hills”—this last, perhaps, the simplest and the best of all.

“Westchester Hills,” by Homer D. Martin.

In the Daniel Guggenheim Collection.
(click image to enlarge)

A final characteristic of nature may be noted because Martin seems to have known it well. It appears in almost all of his pictures, and is perhaps more pronounced with him than with any other landscape-painter. I mean nature’s great serenity. The word has been so carelessly used in criticism that one has difficulty in enforcing more than a careless meaning for it, and yet whatever of serenity there may be in fretful civilization or its art is merely a poor imitation of the eternal repose of nature itself. By that I imply nothing very profound. The mad plunges of Niagara, the explosions of Colima and Krakatoa, the inundation of tidal waves, or the shakings of earthquakes are mere accidents from which nature straightway recovers. The winds, the storms, the great sea-waves again are only momentary incidents. After they have passed, nature once more returns to herself. She is ruffled merely for a moment and then only in a small localized area. Her normal condition is repose—that immobility which we associate with the realms of space.

In the arts some attempt has been made to give this quality of supreme restfulness. The early Egyptians in their colossal Pharaonic statues attained a formal repose by the bulk and weight and hardness of the granite and the calm attitude of the figure seated in its great stone chair. The Parthenon as a building and the Phidian sculptures of the pediment, now in the British Museum, again have a poise and style not inaptly called restful. Once more in painting serenity has often been attributed to the landscapes of Claude and Corot and not without good reason. Martin liked that feature in both these landscape-painters. Standing before the paralleled and contrasted Claude and Turner in the National Gallery, he called George Chalmers’s attention to the serene dignity of the Claude and the fussiness and labored work of the Turner. But before ever he saw Turner or Claude or Corot, he was picturing this attribute of nature with marked effect. His critics and admirers called attention to the absence of anything dramatic in his art; they noticed that his landscapes were deserted of man, that they were silent, forsaken places with a solemn stillness about them. Nothing stirred in them; God and Martin only had seen them. But was not all this merely another way of describing nature’s eternal repose which Martin had grasped and pictured?

There is no stillness like that of a deserted church or a haunted house, and are not all Martin’s churches deserted and all his houses haunted? There is no hush like that of a mountain forest, and are not all his forests motionless? There is no rest like that of a mountain lake caught in a cup in the hills, and are not all Martin’s lakes still waters that throw back the reflection of serene skies? We speak of his poetry, of his sentiment and his feeling about nature, and these he had in abundance, but do we always credit him with a knowledge of nature’s profundities? Had he not an intellectual grasp of the great elemental truths of nature, and was his art not largely a calm, supreme, and splendid exposition of those truths to mankind? A seer and a poet he was; but also a thinker. His long fallow periods when he did not, could not, paint were periods of intellectual reflection that brought forth after their kind an art which was at least unique.

Martin’s pictures never were very popular. During his life the great public passed them by and the picture-collector bought them only with caution and at very modest prices. It was to be supposed that after bravely living and dying in poverty his pictures would finally come into the market and sell at factitious prices. Such indeed has been the case. Some of them shortly after his death fetched over five thousand dollars apiece, and to meet an increased demand for them the genial forger came to the rescue. Spurious Martins were made and sold to picture-collectors until finally the scandal of it had an airing in open court.

What a commentary on an age and a people that would appreciate and patronize art! The real jewel lying unnoticed in the dust for years and then a quarrel in court over its paste imitation! Verily the annals of art furnish forth strange reading, and not the least remarkable page is the story of Homer Martin and his pictures.

V

WINSLOW HOMER

I never had more than a nodding acquaintance with Winslow Homer. Several times at opening nights of the National Academy of Design or elsewhere, there was a word of greeting or comment but no more. He sent me, in 1893 or thereabouts, a signed copy of a reproduction of his “Undertow,” and letters were exchanged about it; but nothing noteworthy was in the letters. My impression about him, if I had one, was perhaps not different from that of his contemporaries. He was always thought a diffident, a taciturn, even at times a brusque, person—one who preferred his own silence to any one else’s loquacity. Chase once remarked that he would thank no one for entertainment because he liked his own art better than any one’s society, but that was mere scorn he was just then flinging out at a Philistine millionaire. The remark would fit Homer much better. For Homer lived it and Chase did not.

Much of Homer’s brusqueness of manner found its way into his art. There is no grace or charm or polish about it. The manner of it repels rather than wins one. The cunning, the adroit, the insinuating are hardly ever apparent, but in their place we have again and again the direct, the abrupt, the vehement. He states things without prelude or apology in a harsh, almost savage, manner, and the chief reason why we listen to him is that he has something to say. He has seen things in nature at first hand and his statement about them brings home fundamental truths to us with startling force. There is no sentiment or feeling in or about the report. The man never falls into a revery as Martin, or a mood as Wyant, or a passion as Inness. He is merely a reporter and is concerned only with the truth. But it is a very compelling truth that he shows us.

He came out of Boston, where in 1836 he was born of New England parents. His father was a hardware merchant and his mother a Maine woman who is said to have had a talent for painting flowers. The inference has been that the son got his first fancy for painting from his mother, though one can hardly imagine anything farther removed from Homer’s liking than the anæmic flower-painting of New England ladies in the 1840’s. On the other hand, his grandfathers had been seafaring men and it is quite possible that he inherited from them that love for the sea that developed in his later life. But then it is difficult to make out that Homer derived anything from any one. He seems to have just grown rather than developed from a stalk or stock.

When he was six his family moved to Cambridge; and thereabouts, in the woods and streams, he hunted, fished, and developed a love for out-of-door life that never left him. There, too, he went to school and put forth his first drawings. There is a drawing extant, done when he was eleven years old, called the “Beetle and the Wedge”[6]—a drawing of boys at play—that Kenyon Cox praises highly, saying that “the essential Winslow Homer, the master of weight and movement, is already here by implication.” It is certainly a remarkable drawing, for it shows not only observation but skill of hand beyond a boy of eleven. Moreover, one is rather surprised at the economy of means employed. It is done easily, with a few strokes, as though the boy-artist had unusual knowledge of form.

[6] Published in Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, Boston, 1911.

The father was evidently pleased with the son’s after-efforts, for at nineteen the youth was apprenticed to a Boston lithographer by the name of Bufford. He started at work without any lessons in drawing and was soon making designs for title-pages of sheet-music and working somewhat upon figures. A wood-engraver named Damereau gave him some hints about drawing on the block, and in the two years that he remained with Bufford he must have picked up much information about drawing for illustration, for at twenty-one he had set up a shop of his own and was making illustrations for Ballou’s Pictorial, Harper’s Weekly, and other periodicals.

The experience as an illustrator no doubt taught him exact observation, precision in outline drawing, conciseness in statement, and the value of the essential feature. So impressive was this early education that it remained with him and influenced him to the end. He was always an observer and an illustrator. One of his canvases left unfinished at his death, “Shooting the Rapids,” now in the Metropolitan Museum, is primarily an illustration of Adirondack life. It is something more, to be sure, but the point to be noted just here is that the early inclination was never wholly changed. He never became subjective, never intentionally put himself into any of his works. He merely reported what he saw from the point of view of an illustrator.

He came to New York to live in 1859 and attended the night classes at the Academy of Design. There he no doubt improved his drawing. It is said that he also received instruction from Rondel, a Frenchman, and in the Paris Exposition of 1890 he was catalogued as a “pupil of Rondel”; but there must have been some jest behind it, for Homer received only four lessons from Rondel. He was not the man to take lessons from any one. From the beginning he was too self-reliant, too self-centred, to be led very far afield by another’s method or opinion.

In 1860, while still a very young man, he exhibited at the Academy of Design his picture called “Skating in Central Park.” The next year he went to Washington to prepare drawings for Lincoln’s inauguration; and the year following he was the special war-artist of Harper’s Weekly with McClellan in the Peninsular Campaign. His first war-picture done in oils is said to be a “Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty.” It was soon followed by “Rations,” “Home, Sweet Home,” and “The Lost Goose”—two of them shown at the Academy of Design in 1863. The next year he sent “The Briarwood Pipe” and “In Front of the Guard House.” In 1865 he was made an academician for his picture called “The Bright Side,” and shortly afterward his very popular painting “Prisoners from the Front” was shown.

There is nothing remarkable about any of these works. “The Bright Side,” which won Homer the title of N.A., shows some negro soldiers sprawling on the sunny side of an army tent. Like “Rations” and “Prisoners from the Front,” it is just a passable illustration that if made to-day would run small risk of applause. We wonder over the achievement of Homer’s later years, but one is not sure that the lack of achievement in his earlier years is not the more surprising. How could he do such commonplace little pictures! Occasionally something like “Snap the Whip,” which has large drawing comes in to break the monotony; but the dull trend is soon resumed. His audiences and editors must have been decidedly uncritical or else extremely good-natured.

And at this time Homer had practically finished with his apprenticeship to art. He was thirty years old and had already developed aloofness, not to say taciturnity. He kept much by himself, would not look at other people’s pictures or discuss them, would not take advice from any one. This was not because his head had been turned by his popularity; but possibly because he thought he could work out better results alone than with the aid of others. In spite of a little noisy success, he must have known that his paintings up to this time were of small importance. They were hard in drawing, brick-like in color, cramped in handling. Their illustrative quality and the fact that Homer did them are the only interesting things about them to-day.

In 1867 he went to France and spent ten months in Paris, but what he did there can only be guessed at. He evidently attended no schools, haunted no galleries, made no friends among painters. He did some drawings of people copying in the Louvre and dancing in the Students Quarter—that is about all. The inclination of the illustrator was with him rather than the prying instincts of an art student. What cared he about Titian’s nobles or Watteau’s gallants or Chardin’s cooks! They were not themes for him to conjure with. What to him was the Ecole des Beaux Arts or the atelier of Couture! He was well past the student age. He might have thought highly of the works of Millet or Courbet had he studied them, but there is no hint in his work that he had even seen them, though John La Farge said that Homer was largely made by studying the lithographs of the men of 1830.

He came back to America and continued painting American subjects in his own hard, dry, and hot manner. He did some shore themes at Gloucester showing a first interest in the sea, some pictures of girls picking berries or grouped in a country store, some sketches of boys swimming, and men in the hay-fields—all of them showing an interest in country life. But none of them was in any way remarkable. His “Sand Swallow Colony,” with boys robbing the nests under the bank’s edge, is the best type of his illustrations done at this time. It appeared in Harper’s Weekly, served its purpose, and went its way without making any perceptible impression upon American art.

In 1874 Homer made a first trip to the Adirondacks, as though searching new magazine material. He found it in the Adirondack guides and in hunting-scenes. In 1876 he went to Virginia, once more looking for painter’s “copy,” and finding it in the American negro. Such pictures as “The Carnival” and a “Visit from the Old Mistress” were the result. It was a genre interesting only in theme, for Homer’s workmanship was still without any great merit or impressiveness. He flung back to the American farmer for a subject, and then once more went to Gloucester to do schooners and ships. In 1873, while staying on Ten Point Island, in Gloucester Harbor, he had drawn some water-colors notable for their high light and their absence of shadow. They seemed to have some purely pictorial quality about them, but the illustrative motive was still behind them. He did not give up work for Harper’s Weekly until 1875, and it was 1880 before he finally abandoned all work for reproduction.

Up to this time Homer had not painted a single epoch-making picture. As Kenyon Cox quite truly says, had he died at forty he would have been unknown to fame. One might draw out the number of years and make them fifty without extravagance of statement. Indeed, it was not until he was sixty that he began to paint his pictures of barren coast and sea upon which his enduring fame must rest, though before that he had given indication in many pictures of fisherfolk, whither he was trending. The blood of his sailor ancestors was coming to the fore at last, and the sea was to be his main theme thereafter. If we believe in genius that is born rather than made, then that, too, began to crop out in his later life.

He went to Tynemouth, England, in 1881, and stayed there for two years in close contact with the fisher people of the coast. This produced a decided change in his art. The large, robust type of English fisher lass, the strongly built sailor in oilskins, appealed to him and remained with him. They were rugged, forceful people that well met his hard drawing and severe brush. There, too, he began picturing the gray sky and mist and sea of England. The heavy atmosphere that hangs like a pall upon the North Sea in stormy weather caught his fancy, and the gray-blue, gray-green waters gave him a new idea of color. The old airless, brick-colored picture of his early days was never taken up again. He dropped readily into cool grays, which in themselves were perhaps no nearer a fine color-harmony than his earlier hot colors, but at the least they were neutral and they were emphatically true of the sea in its stormy phases.

Even Homer’s rigid method of painting began to break a little at Tynemouth. He was working then in water-colors, and perhaps the lighter medium lent itself more readily to a freer handling. His brush loosened, his drawing seemed less angular, less emphasized in outline, and his composition became more a matter of selection and adjustment than of mere accidental appearance.

Mr. Cox, whose excellent monograph on Homer I am glad to quote,[7] thinks that Homer quite found himself at Tynemouth, and points out in the “Voice from the Cliff” his “rhythm of line” whereby he holds the three figures together; but I am not sure that Homer did not get a suggestion of that rhythm of line up in London town on his perhaps occasional visits there. A hint of the types of the fisher girls, the repeated lines of the arms and dresses, with the strength gotten from the repetition, I seem to remember in Leighton’s picture called the “Summer Moon.” Albert Moore, too, was turning out rhythmical repetitions at that time and using models that remind us somewhat of those used by Homer, though, of course, slighter and more fanciful. The fisher girls in the “Voice from the Cliff” and the “Three Girls” are a little too pretty to be wholly original with Homer, and yet it must be acknowledged that such water-colors as “Mending the Nets” and “Watching the Tempest” give warning of the coming man. The two women seated on a bench in the “Mending the Nets” are young-faced, large-boned, big-bodied types that have a sculpturesque quality about them; and the “Watching the Tempest” throws out a suggestion of the Homeric sea that is to be.

[7] Winslow Homer: An Appreciation, by Kenyon Cox, New York, 1914.

It was in 1884 that Homer finally went to Prout’s Neck, near Scarborough, where he built a cottage on the shore and lived for the rest of his life, quite alone, practically shut out from art and artists, a recluse and a hermit yet within gunshot of a crowd. He lived there much as Thoreau at Walden Pond, cooking his own meals, doing his own gardening, raising his own tobacco, and rolling his own cigars. The city had never been attractive to him, and from first to last he preferred picturing the open spaces rather than streets and houses.

It was from the isolation of Prout’s Neck that he began sending forth the pictures that made him famous. One of the earliest was the “Life Line” of 1884. It is a most dramatic illustration of a rescue at sea—a girl being brought ashore by a life-saving-station man. The two are swung in a buoy from the taut life-line and are being windlassed through the great waves. The girl is unconscious, and, lying helpless, catches the eye and the sympathy at once. That our interest in her might be all-absorbing, the painter has hidden the man’s face by a woollen muffler blown out by the wind.

Now the “Life Line” is very forceful story-telling with the brush, but let it not be overlooked that it is story-telling—illustration. The illustrator, with an eye for the critical moment and the appealing interest, is just as apparent here as in “Snap the Whip” or “Prisoners from the Front.” Winslow Homer, the pictorial reporter, is still present. All along he has been answering the question: “What does it mean?” He is still interested in that, but he is now beginning to think about the artist’s question: “How does it look?” He is just a little concerned about his form and his color, his composition, and his general pictorial effect. They are not what they should be. The wet, clinging garments of the girl reveal a large and very hard figure. It is rigid in its outlines and stony in its texture, as though reinforced for purposes of mechanical reproduction. The man is little more than so much tackle and line, so ropelike is his treatment, and the enormous hollow of the sea is merely a perilous background. As for color, the picture is gray and would lose none of its fetching quality if done in black-and-white. There is no love for color as color nor for painting as painting here. The handling was evidently as little pleasure to the painter as it is to us. It is as flat, as monotonous, and as negative as the plaster on a kitchen wall. There is no suspicion of subtlety, facility, or suavity in it. But when all that is said, there is a large something left behind unaccounted for—a grip and knowledge and point of view—that we respect and admire.

“Undertow,” by Winslow Homer.

In the Edward D. Adams Collection.
(click image to enlarge)

A second dramatic and harrowing picture finished at Prout’s Neck was “Undertow.” It is a rescue of two girl bathers by life-savers, something that the painter had seen in the surf at Atlantic City. It appealed to him. Why? Because it was beautiful in itself? Hardly that; but because it had great illustrative possibilities. There once more was the critical moment and the appealing interest. He could not resist such “copy” as that. But now in putting the picture together he is something more than a reporter of the fact. He embellishes the fact to make it not only more effective but more attractive. He places the figures on the canvas in a diagonal line that echoes the diagonal of the incoming wave at the back. The lines give a swing and surge forward not only to the sea but to the figures. The four figures are locked in a long chain—almost a death-grip—with clutching hands and arms and much use of angle lines. The angle lines repeat one another, interlock, and run on until the whole group is of a piece—moves as a piece. All this, of course, helps on the literary but it also indicates a growing sense of the pictorial. The four figures begin to have the monumental quality of a Greek pedimental group. The very sharpness of their drawing and the hardness of their texture seem to help out the plastic feeling. Homer seems rising to the difference between the merely illustrative and the picturesque in design; but his color sense stirs only sluggishly. The “Undertow” is pitched in neutral grays and greens, and one cannot rave over it.

At this time the painter was spending his winter months not on the Maine coast but down in the Bahamas or Cuba or Bermuda. While in those places he did a great many water-colors—glimpses of palm and sand and sea with white houses glaring in the sun. They were done with much freedom, with a sense of blinding light, and some realization of color. The quality of mere “copy” drops out of them, or perhaps was never in them. They seem scraps of pictures, delightful glimpses of such pictorial features as sun and shade and bright hues. It looks from them as though Homer would finally emerge as a great painter and forget his early point of view. And at times he does. But he has lapses, and the bias of his early days returns to him.

From his Southern trips came the material for “The Gulf Stream” done about 1886. Once more the painter has grasped the psychological moment. A shipwrecked, starving negro is lying on the deck of a dismasted schooner drifting in the Gulf Stream. In the shadowed water of the foreground sharks are playing, beyond the boat are whitecaps and running seas, in the distance is the suggestion of a waterspout under a blue-gray sky. There is quite a display of color. It is in the sea and sky, but its breadth is somewhat disturbed by being flecked with white in patches. The picture is spotty in the foam and the clouds, and does not sum up as a complete harmony. It seems as though color were not an integral part of it but something brought in as an afterthought—color added to design rather than design in color.

“Marine,” by Winslow Homer.

In the Emerson McMillin Collection.
(click image to enlarge)

This is not the case, however, with the very beautiful “Herring Net,” done at about the same time. It is another open-sea piece with fishermen drawing into a boat a net full of wriggling fish caught in the meshes. Herring, as they come out of the water, are brilliant in iridescent hues, and no doubt that in itself appealed to Homer and was the reason for the picture’s existence. The color at once became the illustrative motive—became the picture. There is no feeling now of color as an afterthought or as playing second part to the men or the sea. The eye goes to the glittering herring at once. You comprehend at a glance that this is a color scheme per se, and that the gray men and the gray sea are only a ground upon which the iridescent hues appear. Whether Homer realized how beautiful the color was, whether he had any emotional feeling about it, or saw any fine pictorial poetry in it, who shall say? In life he was disposed to deny such things. He said to John W. Beatty: “When I have selected a thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears.” Was that his procedure with the “Herring Net”? Was it merely a color report of what he had seen? If so, he never saw anything so beautiful again. It is his high-water mark as a colorist.

Homer was now producing his best-known pictures of fishermen, sailors, and sea, such as the “Fog Warning” and “Eight Bells.” A literary half-illustrative quality marks them, but perhaps we should not feel this did we not know the painter had served time at that side of art. They can stand as great pictures all by themselves, simply because they are powerful characterizations of the sea. They have a driving truth about them that sweeps away any demurrer on account of their method. And in them all there is indication and suggestion of an expanding pictorial sense. It came late, for Homer was fifty. It was never to become a complete expansion, it was always more of a suggestion than a realization; but it was a welcome addition and showed the painter’s active and receptive mind.

While in Cuba Homer got the material for his “Searchlight, Santiago Harbor,” which he put in picture form about 1899. There is a great dark gun in the foreground—the dramatic catch-point, again—with a suggestion of a mason-work fort around it. A search-light flares up the sky; the sky itself is a gray-blue night effect. The arrangement is large, big in simplicity of masses. The color is the usual gray-blue, but there is a fine note about it, with a light and an air that would count for little in reproduction but are very effective in the picture itself. The canvas comes precious near being a great affair of form, light, and air. It is as sharp in drawing and as flat and dull in its surface painting as his other works. The naïve simplicity of the brush-work is astonishing. Homer knows no tricks of handling, and will resort to no glazes, scumbles, or stipples. He makes his statement so unadorned that it seems almost crude or immature. And yet with these shortcomings we still have an unusual quality of light, a rare night sky, and a suggestion, at least, of fine color.

If the artistic sense seemed to be growing with Homer in his late years, the early illustrative sense was not exactly dead or dying. From first to last he knew how to characterize things—to catch and give the salient features with force. Nothing he ever did shows this better than his “Fox and Crows,” now in the Pennsylvania Academy. A red fox is trailing through soft, deep snow and some crows are hawking and dipping at him, as is their wont. Off in the distance is a glimpse of the sea under a gray sky. It is composition, characterization, and illustration all in one. Nothing could be more original or more truthful. From this picture alone one might think Homer an experienced animal painter, but it happens to be his one and only animal picture. It is practically an arrangement in black-and-white, well massed and effectively placed on the canvas. The blacks of the near crows are repeated in the far crows and in the ears and forepaws of the fox; the white of the snow is repeated in the sea and sky; the gray half-tones are echoed in the fox and rocks and clouds. It is not only an excellent design fully wrought but the effect of the skill is apparent in the convincing truth of fox and snow and winter shore.

Finally came a series of pictures in which bird and beast and man are left out and only the great sea and its fearsome fret on the shore remain. “Cannon Rock,” done about 1895, shows a section of rocky coast with blue-green waves pushing in and curling in white crests. In the “Northeaster” a green-and-white wave is breaking over a rock and the spray and foam are flung high in air. The “Maine Coast” is a wild day along shore with rain and mist and spindrift and flying scud in the air; there is blue-gray sky and sea, and far out the huge waves are lifting and rolling shoreward with irresistible force. On the rocky coast the foaming crests are falling amid split and shattered rock strata. “High Cliff” and the “Great Gale” are variations of the same theme.

“Fox and Crows,” by Winslow Homer.

From a copyrighted photograph of the painting, reproduced
by courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
(click image to enlarge)

Of course these pictures are illustrative in a way of the Maine coast, but one does not think of them as such but rather as descriptive or creative. They are reports of the power of the sea, wonderful view-points of a great element. In that sense they are epic, tremendous characterizations, all-powerful statements that startle and command. You cannot get away from them. They fascinate, and yet are not attractive in the sense that you would like to have one of them in your drawing-room. They are elemental rather than ornamental. As Kenyon Cox well puts it, you might as well let the sea itself into your house as one of Homer’s sea-pictures. The picture would sweep everything before it, put everything else out of key, make a black spot on the wall, and continually irritate you with its harshness of method. From his youth upward Homer seems to have had a scorn for the decorative. Charm either in his personality or his art seems to have been a gift withheld by the fairy godmother. He had the giant’s strength and with it he had to accept the limitations of that endowment. The gentler side of the sea—the flat summer plains of glorious color and light—he did not care for, and even such features of the stormy sea as the flashing, foaming crests he could not do except in hard, immovable form. The crests in the “Woods Island Light” look like inlays of white marble on lapis lazuli. The bubbling surge full of color and evanescent as champagne was too charming, too lovely for him.

There were returns to the illustrative during his later years in such pictures as “The Wreck,” “Kissing the Moon,” and in Adirondack scenes, but by 1900 he had reached his apogee and thereafter changed little. He was not to break out any new sails. Nor was there need of it. His great ability and originality had been abundantly displayed and universally recognized by both painter and public. Honors, enough and to spare, were his. In 1893, at Chicago, he had been awarded the gold medal, and everything that art societies could do or artists and critics could say had been done and said. Up at Prout’s Neck, where he had shut the door after him and kept it closed for so many years, these echoes of the world’s recognition were received with indifference. Miss Mechlin quotes from a letter of his in 1907:

“Perhaps you think I am still painting and interested in art. That is a mistake. I care nothing for art. I no longer paint. I do not wish to see my name in print again.”

He wrote that perhaps on one of his bad days, for he did take up the brush again, but with no great spirit or effectiveness. In 1908 he was seriously ill and quite helpless, but he insisted upon living on in his lonely house with entrance forbidden to all but his brother’s family. And there quite by himself he died in September, 1910. He had lived a strange life, produced a strong art, and then died, like a wolf, in silence.

One often wonders regarding such a character as Winslow Homer what would have been the result if the strange in both his life and his art had been eliminated. Would it have helped matters or would his strength have been dissipated thereby? And wherein lay the strangeness of Homer if not that he never inherited a single social or artistic tradition nor would adopt one in later life? He made his own manners and his own methods, in life as in art, with the result that in both he was always a rough diamond. He never received anything of importance by teaching or training. Culture of mind and hand, emotional feeling or romance, were practically unknown to him. He was as far removed from romanticism as classicism, and cared nothing about any of the isms of art. We keep flinging back to an early conclusion that he was a wonderful reporter rather than an interpreter, a reporter who saw unusual things in the first place and reported them with unusual characterization in the second place. The result was about the largest nature truths of our day. Truth was his avowed aim—the plain unvarnished truth. He never intentionally departed from it.

Homer is an excellent illustration of what a man cannot do entirely by himself. With his initial force and his keen vision he could make a very powerful report. Had he been educated, taught restraint and method, given a sense of style, schooled in decorative value, he might have risen to the great gods of art. But perhaps not. Even pedagogues, in their late years, begin to doubt the worth of training. It might have ruined Winslow Homer. Yet, nevertheless, it is the thing that his admirers always feel the lack of in his pictures. He has no comeliness of style, no charm of statement, no grace of presentation. To the last he is a barbarian for all that we may feel beneath his brush

“the surge and thunder of the ‘Odyssey.’”

Unfortunately, much of Homer’s barbarism of the brush lives after him while his splendid vision and stubborn character are in danger of being interred with his bones. He himself has become a tradition, a master to be imitated, for though he founded no school and had no pupils, a great many young painters in America have been influenced by his pictures. The majority of these young men have concluded that Homer’s strength lay in the rawness and savagery of his method; they have not gripped the fact that his compelling force was a matter of mind rather than of hand. An imitator can always be counted upon to clutch at a mannerism and neglect a mentality. So it is that many a young art student of to-day, with just enough imagination to conjure up an apple-blossom landscape is painting with the crude color and gritty brush of Homer, thinking thereby to get something “strong.”

What a dreadful mistake! A surly surface of heaped-up paint minus the drawing that is Homer! And the juvenile error of supposing that the knowledge of a lifetime can be picked up and handed out by a glib imitator in the few hours of a summer afternoon! The attempt presupposes art to be merely a conjurer’s trick—a supposition that history does not sustain.

Homer cannot be counted fortunate in his followers. Accepting a surface appearance of strength as the all-in-all of art, they have abandoned grace of form with charm of color—flung the decorative to the winds. We are now asked to admire this or that because it is “real” or “just as I saw it,” or “absolutely true”—as though such apologies in themselves were sufficient reasons for fine art. But Homer long before he died withdrew to Prout’s Neck and abandoned his fellows of the brush. He no doubt thought them quite hopeless. Perhaps there was reason behind his thinking.

Of course he cannot be held responsible for their paint pretenses. His rank as a painter will be made up from his own works. By them he will be judged and they will surely stand critical estimate. For nothing more virile, more positive, more wholesome has ever been turned out in American art. He had something to say worth listening to. And he said it about our things and in our way. No one will question for an instant the Americanism of his art. The very rudeness of it proclaims its place of origin. Reflecting a civilization as yet quite new to art, a people as yet very close to the soil, what truer tale has been told! The fortitude of the pioneer, with the tang of the unbroken forest and the unbeaten sea are in it.

Homer was not the Leonardo but the Mantegna of American art. He came too early for perfect expression, but, like many of the rude forefathers, he had the fine virtue of sincerity. You cannot help but admire his frankness, his honesty, even his brutality. There is no pretense about him; he makes no apology, offers no preface or explanation. He presents a point of view, and in the very brusqueness of his presentation seems to say: “Take it or let it alone.” He must have known his expression was incomplete. Did he realize that art was too long and life too short to round the whole circle? The majority of painters move over only a small segment of the span. At sixty, Homer had no more than found his theme. It would have taken another lifetime to have given him style and method. And even then, grace of accomplishment might have weakened force of conception. He had his errors, but perhaps they emphasized his fundamental truths. So perhaps we should be thankful that he was just what he was—a great American painter who was sufficient unto himself in both thought and expression.

VI

JOHN LA FARGE

La Farge is an exceptional man in American painting—the exception that will perhaps prove the value of tradition and education in the craft. More than any other in our history he was born to art. He did not live through a barefoot stage on a farm and then by chance come to a speaking acquaintance with painting at twenty or thereabouts; he could not boast of a struggle against adverse circumstances in an uncongenial environment. On the contrary, he was rather luxuriously raised in a city, and as a child found art in the family circle and a part of the family life. He had begun to see, hear, and think about it at six years of age. At thirty, when he definitely decided to accept painting as a vocation, he knew the tale quite well, was highly endowed intellectually, and had the insight and the imagination to see things in significant aspects. What wonder that he made an impression and left a body of work that voiced authority! He himself became a master, caught up the torch and carried on the light, spreading it and diffusing it in this new world. He was an inheritor and transmitter of art as well as a creator of it.

By that I do not mean that La Farge was raised in a studio and trained in hand and eye like a Florentine apprentice, but rather that his family, with its collateral branches, was made up of highly educated dilettanti, and art as a theme was ever up with them for discussion and appreciation. He grasped it historically and æsthetically long before he took it up professionally. The practical processes were taught him, to some extent, even as a child; but the philosophy came first and remained with him to the last. It was the French philosophy of taste—the best of the time—and La Farge himself was French save for the accident of his birth here in New York. It was the tradition of Delacroix that he finally accepted and transplanted here in American soil, adding to it, of course, his own profound thought and fine feeling. “He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention,” according to his long-time friend Henry Adams.

The story of his birth and education reads somewhat romantically to-day, though it was only yesterday that he was here. His father as a young man was an officer in the French navy and had been sent to Santo Domingo, during an uprising there, to seize Toussaint the revolutionist. The enterprise went against him, but he escaped the general massacre that followed and eventually found himself a refugee in the United States. He did not return to France, but instead went into sugar-growing in Louisiana, acquired property in New York, and married there a daughter of M. Binsse de St. Victor, a Santo Domingo sugar-planter, who, like himself, had been driven from the island by the uprising under Toussaint. These French refugees were La Farge’s parents and he, himself, was born in Beach Street, near St. John’s Church, in 1835. The house was in what has latterly been called old New York and La Farge never entirely got out of that quarter. During his life he did not live above Tenth Street.

His parents were very cultivated people and as a boy La Farge’s education was precisely guided. His father was a rather severe type and instilled rugged principles. He was a good teacher, and the pupil was brought up to do exact thinking. In his reading he was not permitted to roam at large. He tells us in his letters and communications to Mr. Cortissoz, whose admirable account I am paraphrasing,[8] that as a child he read French and English, read St. Pierre, Rousseau, Bossuet, Homer, De Foe, Voltaire—certainly an odd lot of authors for childish consumption. The house was full of books—Molière, Racine, Corneille, Cervantes, Byron—some of them illustrated with handsome Turneresque engravings, which no doubt had quite as much influence on the boy as the printed texts. The outlook of his parents was large and La Farge grew up in an atmosphere of liberal ideas.

[8] John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study, by Royal Cortissoz, Boston, 1911.

As for the house, he speaks of it as being “really very elegant” and regarding the pictures on the walls, he says:

“The influences which I felt as a little boy were those of the paintings and the works of art that surrounded me at home.” There were examples in the house of Vernet, Le Moyne, Salvator Rosa, Sebastiano del Piombo, many Dutch pictures, particularly “a beautiful Salomon Rysdael.” “It so happened that my very first teachings were those of the eighteenth century and my training has covered almost a century and a half.”

At six he had wished to draw and paint, and was handed over to his maternal grandfather to be taught. The grandfather had been ruined by his Santo Domingo losses, and in his age had no other resource than to fall back upon the polite learning he had acquired in his youth. He took up miniature painting and gave drawing lessons because, as La Farge explained it, “it was in the family.”

“On a small scale he was an exquisite painter. He was also a good teacher and started me at six years old in the traditions of the eighteenth century.... The teaching was as mechanical as it could be and was rightly based upon the notion that a boy ought to be taught so as to know his trade. There was not the slightest alleviation and no suggestion of this being ‘art.’”

He was taught to sharpen crayons, to fasten paper, to draw parallel lines, and produce a tint. Gradually he came to copy such things as engravings. The work became more interesting, and at eight he could do something that had resemblance to an original. Later he copied everything that came to hand and was free to do as he pleased.

In the meantime his general education was not neglected. His grandmother Binsse de St. Victor had opened a school for young ladies which was very successful. La Farge as a boy took lessons under her, and in his reminiscences recalls the severity of his drilling in eighteenth-century French. He got English from an English governess, and some German from an Alsatian nurse. Then came books and school and the dreariness of lessons on dry themes. He was sent to Columbia Grammar School, passed into Columbia College, changed over to Fordham, and finally, in 1853, graduated at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland.

He recalls that during his school-days there was much reading of history, literature, and archæology. In English his professor led him to read Newman and Ruskin—the two great masters of style, though the one was classic and the other romantic. In French there was De Musset, Balzac, Heine. He was familiar with Greek and Latin—he could not have graduated from a Catholic college without knowing Latin—and had early gone over the classical writers in the original languages. As for art, he studied engravings of Dürer and lithographs of the old masters. “An English water-color painter had been found who gave me thoroughly English lessons.” After college days he got lessons from a French artist. In later life, looking at his drawings made in the early fifties, he thought them “respectable.” “They were largely based on line and construction, which of course gives a basis of seriousness.”

After graduation he entered a lawyer’s office and began studying law, though he still held his interest in art. Some pictures of the men of 1830 were beginning to come into the country and he recalls buying for a few dollars a Diaz, a Troyon, and a Bargue, and his delight in them. He met artists like Inness, talked art and thought much about it, but he was not yet prepared to embrace it for better or worse. In 1856, when he was twenty-one, he went to Europe, not minded even then to study art professionally, but merely wishing travel for travel’s sake and to be for a time a looker-on.

He went directly to Paris and joined his cousin, Paul Binsse (or Bins), Comte de St. Victor, who was just then holding prominent place in literary and journalistic Paris. The cousin was writing in a brilliant style dramatic, literary, and art criticism for Le Pays, La Presse, and La Liberté, and publishing books such as Hommes et Dieux, Barbares et Bandits, Les Dieux et les Demi-Dieux de la peinture. He was in association with the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Flaubert—all the great gods of little Paris. The father, Jacques Benjamin Maximilien Binsse, Comte de St. Victor, had had a literary and artistic vogue before the son. He had been the editor of La France and the Journal des Débats, had written for the stage and the opera, and was the author of numerous books of poetry, archæology, and history. He was still alive and flourishing when La Farge reached Paris, and his house was open to the young man from America. It was the house of a collector of paintings; the most famous artists and literary men met there; there was much comment and criticism in the air—much roaring of the lions. La Farge was in the midst of it. As he expressed it: “Art and literature were there at my hand, in rather an ancient form, but with the charm of the past, the eighteenth century, and the wonderful beginning of the nineteenth.”

The great uncle was in sympathy with the classic and the academic, stood up for David and Guérin, and looked askance at everything new; but the cousin, Paul de St. Victor, was the champion of the younger men. La Farge was between two fires in the home and listened to both sides when he went abroad. He met Gérôme, then a young man, frequented the house of Chasseriau, heard much of the controversy between Ingres and Delacroix. He never met Delacroix, but was profoundly impressed by his works. He was also much impressed at this early time by the glass in the Paris churches, and during a trip to Brussels met Henry Le Strange, who had decorated Ely Cathedral, and through him became interested in methods of mural painting.

The father in America thought that his son was wasting his time and wrote him urging that he take up art seriously. The result was that La Farge went to Couture’s studio and had a talk with the master. He did not even then think of art as a profession, and wanted from Couture not so much technical education as general education in art. He spent only two weeks in the studio and then set about copying the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. Presently he went to Munich and afterward to Dresden, copying in each place more of the drawings of the old masters. He thought this a logical and very serious way of learning art. And so it was. In copying the drawings he got at the understructure whereas in the paintings he got only the surface. La Farge from first to last was always seeking the logical, philosophical, and scientific bases of things. And meanwhile thereby

“I kept in touch with that greatest of all characters of art, style—not the style of the academy or any one man, but the style of all the schools, the manner of looking at art which is common to all important personalities, however fluctuating its form may be.”

In Copenhagen he made a copy of a Rembrandt.

“I was enabled to learn a great deal of the methods of Rembrandt and to connect them with my studies.... Rubens I followed in Belgium, trying to see every painting of his throughout the whole kingdom and as many of his pupils’ as I could gather in.”

He had an admiration for the severe training of Rubens and for his later prodigal expenditure of energy and paint on canvas. In the autumn of 1857-1858 he was studying Titian, Velasquez, and many others of the famous masters at the Manchester Exhibition in England. There also he saw and studied the Preraphaelite painters and became acquainted with several of them.

“They made a very great and important impression upon me, which later influenced me in my first work when I began to paint.”

When La Farge returned to New York (his father’s illness had hastened his return) nothing as to art had been decided upon and no method of painting had been definitely learned. He had had a unique and very wonderful experience for a young man, had gathered up much information, and perhaps unconsciously had developed an inquiring attitude of mind. This latter became his habitual attitude; he was always contemplative, meditative, disposed to question. Perhaps that is the reason why he still hesitated about embracing art as a profession. At any rate, he went back to the study of law, though not forsaking his interest in painting and architecture. The following year he took a room in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he was accustomed to go to make little drawings and paint “in an amateurish way.” He recognized that he needed technical training and once more thought of returning to Europe to get it.

In 1859 he went to Newport to study painting under William M. Hunt, whose methods he did not altogether like, though he was fond of the man. Hunt was then devoted to Jean François Millet, and, through Hunt, La Farge came to know that painter’s work. He copied two or three of Millet’s pictures but could not accept him wholly any more than he could Hunt. The truth was that even then La Farge was an original and would follow no one. He could not abide recipes for doing or making things, though eventually he invented a recipe of his own and followed that.

At Newport he did some landscapes looking through a window to show the difference in light between the inside and the outside. It was for educative purposes, not for picture-making. In the same way he painted flowers in a vase at haphazard, or did the corner of a table, with no idea of composition but merely to get acquainted with all phases of light, texture, and surface. The next year he was back in New York, painting was temporarily abandoned, and presently he departed for Louisiana. He could not, however, keep away from painting wherever he went, and he soon returned to New York to start a picture of St. Paul Preaching for the Church of the Paulists. With John Bancroft he next took up the question of light and color, then being investigated by scientific men. That, he declares, had an important influence on his later work. But probably the event that definitely decided him for an art career was his marriage in 1860 to Miss Margaret Brown Perry, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

I have helped myself largely to Mr. Cortissoz’s book (for which I am sure he will not quarrel with me) regarding these educational happenings of La Farge’s early days, because they point to an unusual acquaintance with philosophic, literary, and artistic traditions. La Farge was saturated with them at twenty-two. His education was extraordinary when compared with his American contemporaries—Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer. He had found himself before he was thirty and knew what he wanted to say and do, whereas Homer at sixty was still uncertain and groping. Art had come to La Farge almost as a child learns to talk, that is, unconsciously, without great effort. The formulas had been largely thought out for him and he had merely to accept them. With Inness, Wyant, and Martin it was necessary to make their own formulas, work out their own philosophy, establish their own premises. And that, too, after they had come to man’s estate. La Farge had a great advantage over them. He was not only born to art but had it thrust upon him. With his fine natural endowments of mind and eye it is not, perhaps, remarkable that he afterward was able to achieve art in a large way and in more than one department.

But he did not rest content with his early experiences. He took up new problems and remained a student to his latest day. His mental curiosity was remarkable. He was always trying to get at the cause or sequence of things. I remember very well arguing at him one day, with undue vehemence perhaps, about some question of the hour, and hearing his quiet answer that it made no difference which of us was right, but that we should go along together and try to get at the truth. That was his Gallic cast of mind. He had no wish or care to put the other fellow in the wrong, and as for disputatious argument, it was not intellectually good form. In this respect Ruskin had amused and vexed him during his early years. The great critic was not only wrong in matter but in the method of presenting it. Fromentin, on the contrary, pleased him much. The French critic’s mind was of the same order as his own.

La Farge had evidently heard of Japanese art in Paris, for in 1863 he began collecting Japanese prints, sending directly to Japan for them. He records that he imported at that time many for himself and his friend Bancroft. He was interested not only in their linear patterns but in their color relations, particularly as shown in landscape. He was painting landscapes at this time and working out-of-doors.

“My programme was to paint from nature a portrait and yet to make distinctly a work of art which should remain as a type of the sort of subject I undertook.”

Almost the whole of his theory of art lies in that sentence. It will apply to his painting of water-lilies as well as to his figures or landscapes. He was after a type of the species—something typical and universal rather than something odd or singular. Perhaps the most notable result of his theory and practice at this time was the landscape called “Paradise Valley,” painted between 1866 and 1868.

The material for the “Paradise Valley” was found along the Rhode Island coast near Newport. It is a bare, almost treeless, scene, looking down toward the sea, and is cut up somewhat in the middle distance by the angle lines of stone fences. There is nothing about it of “the view,” nothing that a Hudson River painter would have looked at the second time; yet La Farge added beauty to its bare truth in such degree that it became a masterpiece. All of the painter’s studies in light and line were put into it and yet kept from attracting too much attention in the exposition. And all of the infinite variety of tone and color common to the Atlantic shore landscape were added and blended together as one. The type as a whole emerged—the universal came out of the commonplace. A more perfect piece of work, a more beautiful picture of landscape, had not then, and has not since, been produced in American art. Of its kind it is unequalled.

Copyright by John La Farge.

“Paradise Valley,” by John La Farge.

In the Collection of General Thornton K. Lothrop.
(click image to enlarge)

The last time I saw this landscape was many years ago at an exhibition in the gallery of the Century Club. It held the place of honor on the wall, and I was looking at it, praising it unstintedly to a friend standing beside me. After I had exhausted my adjectives, I became aware of some one in the room behind me. I turned and saw La Farge standing there. Whether or not he had overheard me I did not know, but there being nothing to conceal, I told him just what I had been saying to my companion. He smiled and bowed and seemed greatly pleased. He was always too polite to question the compliments of his admirers, and much too broadminded to scoff at praise, however unintelligent he might think it. But the point of my story is further along.

After his telling me how he came to paint the landscape and what he had sought to make out of it, I asked him why he had not continued with work of that kind—why he had not painted more Paradise Valleys. His answer was that he had done a number of landscapes similar in character but that no one seemed to care for them. There was no audience, no demand for them, and, worst of all, no one would buy them. He was forced to do something that would produce a revenue. That seemed to me at the time deplorable, but perhaps it was not all sheer loss to art, for his lack of pecuniary success with easel pictures probably had much to do with his taking up mural decoration and glass-work.