The Project Gutenberg eBook of American painting and its tradition
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: American painting and its tradition
as represented by Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer, La Farge, Whistler, Chase, Alexander, Sargent
Author: John C. Van Dyke
Release date: June 11, 2024 [eBook #73811]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919
Credits: Alan, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN PAINTING AND ITS TRADITION ***
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_
[Illustration]
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
PAGE
I. THE ART TRADITION IN AMERICA 1
II. GEORGE INNESS 19
III. ALEXANDER H. WYANT 43
IV. HOMER MARTIN 65
V. WINSLOW HOMER 89
VI. JOHN LA FARGE 115
VII. JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER 147
VIII. WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE 185
IX. JOHN W. ALEXANDER 217
X. JOHN S. SARGENT 243
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
GEORGE INNESS, “Evening at Medfield” 32
GEORGE INNESS, “Sunset at Montclair” 34
Reproduced by the courtesy of F. F. Sherman, publisher of
“George Inness,” by Elliott Daingerfield
GEORGE INNESS, “Hackensack Meadows” 38
ALEXANDER H. WYANT, “Mohawk Valley” 52
ALEXANDER H. WYANT, “Broad, Silent Valley” 58
HOMER D. MARTIN, “View on the Seine” 78
HOMER D. MARTIN, “Westchester Hills” 84
Reproduced by the courtesy of F. F. Sherman, publisher of
“Homer Martin,”
by Frank Jewett Mather
WINSLOW HOMER, “Undertow” 102
WINSLOW HOMER, “Marine” 104
WINSLOW HOMER, “Fox and Crows” 108
JOHN LA FARGE, “Paradise Valley” 130
JOHN LA FARGE, “The Muse” 134
JOHN LA FARGE, “The Three Kings” 138
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “Nocturne. Gray and
Silver. Chelsea Embankment” 158
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “The Princesse du Pays de
la Porcelaine” 162
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “The Yellow Buskin” 168
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “The Woman with the White
Shawl” 202
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “Afternoon at Peconic” 204
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “Child Dancing” 212
JOHN W. ALEXANDER, “The Ring” 230
JOHN W. ALEXANDER, “Walt Whitman” 236
JOHN S. SARGENT, “Mrs. Pulitzer” 256
JOHN S. SARGENT, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose” 260
JOHN S. SARGENT, “Carmencita” 262
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
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.
[Illustration: “Evening at Medfield,” by George Inness.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
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.”
[Illustration: “Sunset at Montclair,” by George Inness.]
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.
[Illustration: “Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.]
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._)
[Illustration: “Mohawk Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
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!
[Illustration: “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.
[Illustration: “View on the Seine,” by Homer D. Martin.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
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.
[Illustration: “Westchester Hills,” by Homer D. Martin.
In the Daniel Guggenheim Collection.]
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.
[Illustration: “Undertow,” by Winslow Homer.
In the Edward D. Adams Collection.]
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.
[Illustration: “Marine,” by Winslow Homer.
In the Emerson McMillin Collection.]
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.
[Illustration: “Fox and Crows,” by Winslow Homer.
From a copyrighted photograph of the painting, reproduced by courtesy
of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.]
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.
[Illustration: _Copyright by John La Farge._
“Paradise Valley,” by John La Farge.
In the Collection of General Thornton K. Lothrop.]
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.
With a select public, however, La Farge had already won recognition.
His landscapes and flower pictures--especially the latter with their
lovely color, texture, and surface, and that indefinable feeling that
is La Farge--met with appreciation from artists and amateurs. The
Academy of Design elected him to its membership, and, a little later,
a firm of Boston publishers began publishing some of his illustrations
made for Browning’s poems. He had planned some three hundred drawings
for Browning, and for an edition of the Gospels many more. These were
La Farge’s romantic days, and the influences of French romanticism
intellectually and his Japanese prints technically were rather strong
with him. In fancy he was harking back to Greek and mediæval myths,
Bible legends, and Arabian Nights tales. But only a few drawings from
each field finally found their way into print. They appeared in the
old _Riverside Magazine_ and were accounted very effective, even after
the engraver had translated them. Every one who has written about La
Farge has devoted a page or so to an analysis of his “Wolf Charmer” and
“Piper of Hamelin.” Criticised they were for what has been declared
faulty construction and drawing but never for their lack of life.
They were excellent examples of naturalistic drawing wherein accuracy
is often sacrificed to vitality. But the telling quality of the
illustrations was not so much their technique as their imagination. La
Farge had inner as well as outer vision, and the conception of the wolf
charmer, for example, as half-wolf himself, gnawing rather than playing
his pipe, was perhaps the better part of its excellence.
But illustration was to engage his attention for only a short period.
He was interested in things of larger decorative significance.
Describing one day some work of art that I cannot now recall he used
the word “decorative” and I remember his pausing and saying rather
emphatically in parenthesis: “And when I say decorative, I am saying
about the best thing I can about a picture.” Imagination he had in
abundance, but perhaps it was manifested stronger in the light and
color of his decorations than in such literary readings as the “Wolf
Charmer.” His glass was the finest flight in color of modern times.
It remains so to this day. The same creative sense of hue on a large
scale was shown in his mural work. His panels and lunettes have their
individual meaning and their imaginative presentation of the type, but
these are only parts of a whole which carries again by its decorative
color sweep.
His first wall decorations were those for Trinity Church, Boston, in
1876. They were done under time pressure in less than six months--done
in winter with open windows and everybody clad in overcoats and gloves.
Ten or a dozen painters worked under him and with him, among them Frank
Millet, Francis Lothrop, and George Maynard. It was the first attempt
in America to do church decoration on a large scale with a group of
painters directed by one head. The unusual conditions and requirements
limited its success, and yet it was quickly recognized as being an
initial step of much importance and La Farge was acclaimed as the
leader of the new order. Thereafter commissions for churches, public
buildings, and private houses came to him and did not cease to come up
to his death. He at first did panels for the Church of the Incarnation,
decorations for St. Thomas’s Church, afterward destroyed by fire, and
for the Reid house in New York; in his late years he painted great
lunettes for the capitol at St. Paul. Perhaps the climax of these
wall-paintings is the picture of the “Ascension” set up on the chancel
wall of the Church of the Ascension, in New York. It is his chief work,
and is picture-making, wall-painting, and church decoration all in one.
The “Ascension” had its origin in one of La Farge’s drawings for a
western chapel. It was enlarged to meet the new need by putting in at
the back a high and wide mountain landscape. The architectural place
for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a
heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top which
acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was
practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-circle
top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the
other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the
holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled
the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels
hovering about the risen Christ, and, again, the rounded lines of the
angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch.
[Illustration: “The Muse,” by John La Farge.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly
adopted from Italian Renaissance painting and had been used for high
altar-pieces by all the later painters--Andrea del Sarto, Raphael,
Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that
upright-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because
he recognized its sufficiency. But when all that is said it should be
added that his “Ascension” is no close following of Italian example.
The grouping is different and the setting is quite the opposite of
the Italian. This is an open-air Ascension, not a studio-lighted
gathering of academic figures posed merely to repeat each other’s
linear contours. The apostles stand in a great valley plain with
mountains at the sides and back. They stand _in_, not _out_, of the
landscape. The angels are in a huge floating oval about the risen
Christ. What beautiful moving circling figures they are! With what
superb recognition of light, air, and space they are given! And how
they hold their exact place in relation to the background and to the
figures below them! All of La Farge’s knowledge and skill came into
play in painting these two groups that contrast with and yet complete
each other. They are his highest achievement in figure-painting. It
may be merely provincial pride that makes one think they do not suffer
by comparison with the groups of the great Italians, yet there are
intelligent people who believe that.
But after one has studied and wondered over these figures, he begins
to look further, and finally comes to question if the enveloping
landscape is not the more beautiful part of the picture. No such
landscape was ever painted by any old master, not even by Titian in
his “Presentation” picture in the Venice Academy. And thereby hangs a
tale. La Farge could not at first get the right landscape for it, and
in the middle of the work, that is in 1886, he and his friend Henry
Adams went on a long trip to Japan. It was in the mountains of Japan
(or was it, perhaps, later in the South Sea islands?) that he saw and
sketched the superb landscape that now does service in the background
of the “Ascension.” It fitted the figures exactly and is their natural
and proper environment. Figures and groups from Italy that are not
Italian and landscapes from Japan that are not Japanese blend together
perfectly because translated, transmuted, by the genius of La Farge
into something that is peculiarly his own type of the Ascension. In
such fashion, and of such materials, is great art brought into being.
La Farge’s glass-work carried over the greater part of his artistic
life. Mr. Cortissoz tells us that he did several thousand windows of
various patterns and designs. For many years, and up to his death,
he had a shop in South Washington Square where, with assistants and
workmen, the more mechanical part of window construction was carried
on. But he looked after every part of it from start to finish. He
never let go of his workman, never allowed himself as a designer to
be eliminated by turning his design over wholly to the shop. He
followed up everything and exacted results while inspiring enthusiasm
and intelligence in his men. The result was that the work, in spite of
the touch of others, remained peculiarly that of La Farge and bore his
individual stamp.
In window-making he tried dozens of different experiments to get depth,
variation, and complement of tone by repeated platings of pot-metal
glass. As a result he produced brilliant jewel-like glass theretofore
never dreamed of. With iridescent and opalescent sheets at hand in
countless tones and shades he began the construction of his window, not
in patches of color, but with a crayon cartoon, just as he had designed
pictures. He made a pattern, filled the spaces rightly, and thought of
the colors afterward. The lead lines helped out the design and did not
break or block it by haphazard crossings at stated intervals. In other
words, his radiant color schemes were every one of them based in design
and had a foundation of drawing under them.
“This, then, is a study of line and is different from the notion of
some intellectual friends that the line is to be put on afterward.”[9]
[9] La Farge in a letter to Mr. Cortissoz.
And yet there was no attempt to do in glass what could be better done
on canvas. The brilliant transparent tones were peculiarly fitted for
glass because they could not be squeezed out of a tube or laid down
with a brush. I recall seeing in his shop years ago a tall narrow
window, done, if I remember rightly, for the Whitney house, showing a
robed female figure scattering autumn leaves upon a pool. The brilliant
autumn tints, the light from the reflecting water, would have been
impossible to render fully with pigments, and the blending of light and
air seemed attainable only with La Farge’s delicate opaline glass. It
seemed to me at the time a quite wonderful window, and yet he did many
of them pitched in the same key of splendor.
In the midst of wall and window decorations La Farge found little
time for easel-painting--something he regretted but could not help.
Twice, however, he broke away from the shop and went upon long trips.
The first was to Japan with Henry Adams in 1886. Out of that came
many water-color sketches and drawings, besides a charming book, _An
Artist’s Letters from Japan_. To some the book is of more interest
than the drawings. The temple-doors and interiors and Buddhas of
his sketches are, no doubt, truthfully illustrative, and that is
perhaps their failing as pictures. The model was too apparent and
the artist not so much in evidence as could be wished for. His own
negative definition of art applies just here: “It is never the _mere
representation_ of what we see.” Some of the mountain landscapes,
however, are very fine, and his garden bits recall the early La
Farge of the pond-lilies and the “Paradise Valley.”
[Illustration: “The Three Kings,” by John La Farge.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.]
His second long trip was again with Henry Adams and this time to the
South Seas. He was gone for a year or more, from 1890 and on, and out
of this trip came another engaging book, _Reminiscences of the South
Seas_, besides many water-color drawings. The water-colors were again
illustrative, but perhaps they were more animated than the Japanese
series, had to do more intimately with the island life, and were often
strikingly picturesque in theme and movement. With them came also a
number of small sea-pieces showing bays, harbors, and islands done with
the greatest simplicity and yet having a satin-and-silk quality about
them quite indescribable in its beauty. These silvery sea-pieces are
in the same class with La Farge’s early violets and roses--things that
are exquisite in their surface texture and their color beauty. His
mountain landscapes of the South Seas are again superb in their greens
and blues. A love and a gift for landscape always remained with him,
and one often wonders, had he devoted himself to this alone, what new
revelations of the world about us he might have handed down in art.
The groups of natives in dances or games or ceremonies naturally
attract the most attention in the South Seas water-colors. Technically
they are interesting because of their hark back to Delacroix. Not
only the reds, blues, greens, and flesh notes are like Delacroix, but
the drawing of the hands and feet, the movement of arms and legs are
much like that master. All his life La Farge had carried that impress
about with him. A few years before he died one of his pictures, at an
exhibition or sale, was so like a Delacroix that at first, from across
the room, I thought it by the great romanticist. Some time later in
mentioning the fact to La Farge he nodded his head and said that he had
been very much influenced by Delacroix and no doubt unconsciously did
things in his style or manner.
To say that one prefers La Farge’s travel books to his travel sketches
is not to disparage the sketches, for the books were extraordinarily
good. He had a great admiration for Fromentin’s _Une Année dans le
Sahel_, and perhaps that volume had not a little to do in suggesting
the form of the volumes on Japan and the South Seas. They are
impressionistic in that they record moods, thoughts, and talks that
make up a quite perfect text for his sketches. They are both grave and
gay, profound and volatile, forceful and yet charming. La Farge had the
literary sense quite as much as the pictorial, and had he chosen to
make a profession of letters he would perhaps have risen to as great a
height as he did in painting.
While a student under Hunt at Newport he became well acquainted with
Henry James, whom he later on advised to take up literature. In the
light of subsequent achievement that must be regarded as good advice,
and yet James had the pictorial cast of mind and might have made a
fine painter. At any rate, some of his best work in writing was his
criticism of painting. La Farge, too, with a mind pictorially inclined,
put out some of his best thoughts in a book of art criticism entitled
_Considerations on Painting_. It was delivered originally as lectures
to art students, but it must have shot far over their little heads.
It is too profound to be grasped at once and often requires a second
reading to apprehend the meaning, but it is the best piece of art
criticism put forth in America. In kind and excellence it ranks with
Fromentin’s _Les Maîtres d’autrefois_--the classic of the craft.
Fromentin was about the only writer on art that La Farge cared for. He
was kind enough to send me a copy of his _Considerations on Painting_
when it was published, and later, in talking over the book with him,
he took occasion to remark (as afterward in print) that he had read
thousands of pages of art criticism “without finding anything that a
person seriously devoted to his profession of art could find of the
slightest use.” At the time I ventured to suggest to him that aid
to artists was not the object of art criticism, that an attempt to
instruct professionals would argue greater knowledge in the critic
than in the artist and be presumptuous, that the critic wrote for
the public and thought to be of service by calling attention to
and explaining certain things that might otherwise be overlooked
or misjudged. Moreover, it was suggested that the writer, too, had
his design and pattern in words which he was trying to work out
artistically and decoratively, and that the subject, whether criticism,
history, poetry, or fiction, was of as little importance with him
as with the painter. Ruskin in art criticism, Newman in sermons and
lectures, and Carlyle in history and essay were possibly greater
artists than Dickens and Thackeray in fiction.
There was nothing new about that to La Farge, but he acquiesced in it
by bowing and smiling a little, especially over Ruskin, for whom he
came as near having contempt as for any one. Not only Ruskin’s ideas
but his vehemence of style were not to La Farge’s fancy. He wrote in
no such hectic vein in his _Considerations on Painting_. The whole
treatise is an inquiry, not an argument, and through it all you feel
the evenly poised, well-balanced mind that is weighing the question and
is not to be stampeded by rhetoric or eloquence of any kind. He was
too intelligent for enthusiasm or emotion. He thought out everything
very calmly, and in the midst of conviction often doubted or questioned
his own conclusions. It was his normal attitude of mind--a mind that
indulged in subtleties, that saw as many meanings in a problem as a
rug-weaver’s eye sees colors in a pattern of tapestry. It was the
attempt to put these subtleties in parenthesis that sometimes makes his
_Considerations on Painting_ hard reading, and yet no one would wish
them deleted. They are side-lights that illumine the quest. The book is
an epitome of La Farge’s method of thinking and is a type of its kind
in literature as truly as his “Paradise Valley” is a type in painting.
As for the philosophic mind, he practically describes himself in one
passage in an article in _Scribner’s Magazine_[10] on the “Teaching of
Art.” It is worth quoting:
“The noblest of all the gifts of the great institutions of learning is
a certain fostering of elevation of mind. It is not so much by what he
knows that the man brought under the trainings of the great academies
is marked; it is by his acquaintance with the size of knowledge; with,
if I may say so, the impossibility of completing its full circle; with
the acquaintance of the manners of enlarging his boundaries; with
the respect of other knowledge than his own; with a certain relative
humility as compared with the narrower pride of him who knows not the
size of the spaces of the world of knowledge. And such an attitude of
mind, such an elevation above petty prides, such a belief in something
larger than one’s self, such an openness to the world, is the privilege
of a full artistic development.”
[10] _Scribner’s Magazine_, vol. 64, page 181.
La Farge as a painter, as an inventor of precious glass, as an
illustrator of Oriental life, as a writer of books, was a great
success; as a student, a man of learning, a philosopher and a talker
he was not less so. He had been born of cultivated parents and all his
life had been saturated with the intellectual. He knew how to think,
weigh, and judge matters, and he knew how to express himself in paint,
in letters, and in words. His mental poise was remarkable for its
stability, though he was not stubborn and was always open to new light.
His conversation was serious, and his manner grave, courteous, calm as
that of a French academician. Certain eccentricities--mental habits
that indicated the questioner--were peculiar to him, and Henry Adams,
his travelling companion, was led to speak of him as a wonderful mind
and a wonderful contradiction. By that, perhaps he meant that La Farge
always stopped short of the positive conclusion. He guarded himself
with qualifying clauses, as though conscious of another side to the
question.
His talk was quite as delightful as his books. He had read almost
everything, knew almost every one in the modern art world, and his
fund of information seemed as exhaustless as his charm of manner. And
yet withal he was rather a shy man and had to be sought out. For many
years he dined regularly at the Century Club, and more often alone than
with company. If any one sat opposite to him at his little table, the
chances were two to one that the visitor was self-invited. He held as
intimates for many years Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams. They
must have proved a rare quartet of wits around a dinner-table, for all
of them were exceptionally brilliant talkers. But I never heard of a
fifth at the table.
Honors had come to La Farge from the beginning. He had received medals
and prizes and degrees, he wore the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,
was president of the Society of American Artists, and an initial member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He took them all very
calmly. They were recognitions that he did not despise; neither did he
count them as crowns of glory. His well-poised mind, with its Oriental
sympathies, could rise above praise, and yet he was human enough to
like it. When the gold medal of the Architectural League was presented
to him he startled the honor-bearers by suggesting that it was late in
coming. That was not so much egotism as the bald truth, and he could
not refrain from pointing it out.
La Farge had never been physically robust, and during his latter years
he had known much illness. There were periods when he was totally
incapacitated and could do no more than lie still. He took that
calmly, too. He was a philosopher always and made the best of things.
Perhaps that is the reason why with his frail body he lived on to
seventy-four, not dying until November, 1910. He lived his character to
the last, and when he died the painter-world, if no other, knew that a
master mind as well as a master craftsman had passed out.
In the arts he was our first great scholar and spoke as one having
authority. With his learning, his imagination, and his skill he gave
rank to American art more than any other of the craft. For that reason
he is to-day hailed as master and written down in our annals as
belonging with the Olympians. He deserves the title and the separate
niche.
VII
JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER
After considering La Farge, it is difficult to think of Whistler other
than in terms of contrast. They were of the same time, their tastes
were not dissimilar, and many features of their theory and practice
were in agreement; but Whistler’s impetuosity and contentiousness
seem magnified when set over against the gravity and reticence of
La Farge. He had not the latter’s mental poise, nor philosophy, nor
tenacity, nor patience. The seriousness of his art always suffered
from the acrimony of his talk or the cleverness of his writing or the
flare of his conduct. He was a wit, to be sure, but not a wise one;
a brilliant writer but not a profound one; an æsthetic bravo but not
a discreet one. His social activities gave his art a wide notoriety,
but that rather harmed than helped its permanent fame. The mob enjoyed
his caustic utterances but continued to look askance at his symphonies
and nocturnes. What else could have been expected? Art explains itself
or it falls. Talk may make it talked about but does not establish its
final worth.
And so one, at times, wishes that Whistler had said nothing, written
nothing, explained nothing. His art standing alone would eventually
have vindicated itself as did that of Hals and Rembrandt and Velasquez.
There is not the least bit of flippancy or irritability or waspishness
about it. If we knew naught of his life and had never read _The Gentle
Art of Making Enemies_ and the _Ten O’Clock_, we could not have derived
the militant Whistler from his pictures. They are cast in a vein of
decorative beauty and done not only with the greatest seriousness but
with the greatest tranquillity. With their simplicity and largeness of
vision, their fastidiousness of arrangement, their charm of mood and
loveliness of color they would point to an Ariel-like creator who was
in love with color refinements, a devotee of nature’s minor chords,
her shadowy manifestations, her evanescent harmonies. And that would
have been the true Whistler--the Whistler that fame will not allow to
die. But his clarification is still some distance away. Appreciation is
clouded by the presence of the egotist, the dandy, the bitter-tongued
wit, the maker of paradoxes--passing phases of temperament quite aside
from his reckoning as an artist, mental poses forced upon him by
circumstances which he doubtless felt he had to meet and overcome.
That is not to say that the capacity for verbal fisticuffs was not
born in him, though he did not show it in his early days, nor while
a student in Paris. It was only after he took up life in London and
was reviled by British criticism that he stepped outside of his art
to defend himself. Perhaps he took to words as readily as Cellini
to throat-cutting or Goya to bull-fighting, but it was not the less
unfortunate. That Cellini was a bravo and Goya a roysterer and Whistler
a maker of enemies merely suggests that artists may have dual natures
like other people and not be the better for them. Their art is not
improved thereby.
But it is perhaps useless to argue against the admission of the
irrelevant. The world likes it and will have it. That Bacon, Titian,
Goethe were mean in spirit is inconsequent backstairs gossip, but it
is taken as a relish along with their vision and their wisdom. Just
so with Whistler. The present generation of painters thinks his _Ten
O’Clock_ the law and gospel of art, and a dozen biographies of him
record his epigrams and corrosive remarks along with his epoch-making
pictures. We shall have to take the chaff with the wheat.
Perhaps the chief infirmity of Whistler’s make-up was his lack of
patience. Nature had endowed him with a bright, alert mind that flashed
and scintillated but wavered perhaps in continuity of purpose. It
was a true-enough American mind in that at first it balked at effort
and sought to vault over obstacles by bursts of speed or sudden
inspiration. The average American believes more in inspiration than in
work, though as applied directly to Whistler we must not push that
point too far. There were periods when he labored hard but there was no
prolonged patience, no calm philosophy of enduring and biding his time.
As a boy he would never submit entirely to education, and as a young
man the rigor of studio-training fretted him. He took as much of each
as pleased him and let the rest go. He resented guidance and resisted
discipline as more or less of a restraint on individuality.
The story of his birth, family, and early education is told minutely
in the excellent biography by the Pennells.[11] From their account
it appears that Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834.
He was reported to have been born in Baltimore, and he did not deny
the report. “If any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why
should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me.” His parents were
refined, educated people, the best that the United States at that time
was capable of producing. His father was a West Point graduate, a
major in the United States army, and, at the time of Whistler’s birth,
an engineer, building locks and canals at Lowell. In 1843 the whole
Whistler family went to Russia, where the father had been called by the
Czar to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. In St. Petersburg the
children were carefully tutored, especially in such polite learning
as the languages and the arts. Whistler was already drawing in a
boyish way, and was no doubt receiving impressions of art from various
sources. In 1847 he was in England for the summer with his mother, and
again in 1849 he went there for the winter because his health could
not stand the Russian climate. In the latter year his father died,
and shortly thereafter Mrs. Whistler, with the children, returned
to America. Whistler the boy was sent to school at Pomfret, and his
mother records that he was still “an excitable spirit with littler
perseverance,” and had “habits of indolence.”
[11] _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_, by E. R. and J. Pennell,
Philadelphia, 1911.
Two years of Pomfret and he was entered as a cadet at the West Point
Military Academy. He remained there three years, and was dropped in
1854 because deficient in chemistry. Besides, he could not remember
dates, and at cavalry drill he had difficulty in keeping on his horse.
These seem slight reasons for dropping his name from the rolls, but the
West Point requirements in those days, as now, were rather rigorous. He
appealed to Washington for reinstatement but was denied. In its place
a job was offered him in the Coast Survey. He accepted and drew on
government maps for some months, resigning in 1855. The same year he
went to Paris to study art and entered the studio of Gleyre, one of the
leading semiclassic painters of the time.
Whistler’s boyhood and youth suggest little out of the ordinary except
that he was better born, better educated, and had better advantages
than the average aspiring youth. In art he had left only the usual
record of desultory drawings. Professor Weir at West Point had given
him lessons, but nothing remarkable resulted therefrom. Some of the
sketches of his West Point days are preserved, and while they are not
astonishing, they are nevertheless moderately indicative of the coming
master. Two drawings called “The Valentine” and “Sam Weller and Mary”
have the same small delicate line and an attempt at tone by shadings
and hatchings that characterize his etchings and lithographs of later
date. But Whistler’s career does not begin for us until he reached
Paris in 1855--the year before La Farge’s arrival.
There are conflicting stories about what he did or did not do under
Gleyre. He must have learned something of drawing and construction
besides such small studio devices as arranging colors on the palette,
preparing the canvas, using ivory-black as a base of tone--a method
which he retained all his life. In actual handling of the brush he
seems to have gotten something from his associates, Fantin-Latour and
Degas, who were then following Courbet. Evidently he did not care for
the routine of the _atelier_. Drouet, the sculptor, who was one of his
intimates, did not think that he worked much but was well disposed
toward jokes, pranks, and a good time. By way of interlude during his
two years with Gleyre he went with a companion on a trip through Alsace
and did some etchings, known as the French set. In 1857 he made a trip
to England and studied pictures at the Manchester Exhibition. Returned
to Paris, he remained there until 1859, living in the Latin Quarter,
copying pictures at the Louvre, and doing original work of his own. His
first notable picture, “At the Piano,” was sent to the Salon of 1859
and rejected, though two of his etchings were accepted. Sent to the
Royal Academy the same year, the picture and the etchings were well
received and praised.
There were many journeyings backward and forward from London during
this year. Whistler’s sister had married Seymour Haden and was living
there; his student friends of Paris days--Poynter, Armstrong, Ionides,
Du Maurier--were there and he had not as yet quarrelled with them;
above all, the Thames was there. So finally he took up his residence
in London and began work along the river. He did eleven etchings of
the Thames set, and the next year painted the “Wapping,” the “Thames
in Ice,” and later in the year “The Music Room,” besides a number of
portraits. In 1861 he was in Brittany doing the “Coast of Brittany”
in the style of Courbet, then in Paris at work on “The White Girl,”
and later at Biarritz painting “The Blue Wave,” again in the style of
Courbet.
Up to this time everything had gone fairly well with him. He had had
an artistic success at the English exhibitions, though his “White Girl”
had been rejected; many friends--Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swinburne,
and others--recognized his ability; there was as yet no marked
denunciation from press or public. It was not called for, even from a
Philistine point of view. Nothing very ultra or bizarre showed in his
painting. It was modern, but it was the modernity of Gleyre, Courbet,
Fantin--the advanced painting of the times. The pattern of his pictures
was perhaps something of an innovation, because already he had begun
flattening it. That may have been the reason for the rejection of “At
the Piano” and “The White Girl.” But there could have been nothing very
forced about the flattening then, for to-day the pictures look just
a little old-fashioned. For the realistic requirements of 1860 they
were extremely well planned and executed, and the wonder now is that
every one did not give them positive recognition at once. Perhaps the
handling was a little too free and the modelling of the figures too low
in relief for the man in the street, but on the whole there was small
cause for complaint on the part of the young painter.
If there was little question at this time about Whistler’s pictures,
there was none at all about his etchings. Every one, even the stodgiest
of Britons, liked them. Perhaps that was due again to their conformity
to custom. There was little about the early work very different from
that of other etchers except that it was freer, surer, and better.
The long swinging line, as in the dry point of “Jo,” or the sharply
contrasted blacks, as in the “Drouet,” were given with emphasis.
Contrast rather than uniformity was the aim and there was little
attempt at pronounced tone effect, or flattening of the figure,
or disturbance of perspective--the thing most dear to the viewing
public. In fact, Whistler’s etchings have always been exempt from
the denunciation of his paintings. People could see in them things
realistic and representative; the decorative pattern did not bother
them.
There was no hue and cry raised in England over Whistler’s early work
because it was not vehemently radical or audaciously assertive. He had
accepted and followed the classic tradition of Gleyre, had modified it
by studies of Rembrandt, Courbet, Fantin, Manet, had bettered it by
observations and methods entirely his own; but he was going with the
tide, not against it or across it. Had he died at, say, twenty-seven,
and the world had only his early etchings, “The White Girl,” “At the
Piano,” and “The Music Room,” to go by, it is doubtful if his dozen
biographies would have been written, or that he would have held more
than a modest niche in the hall of fame. It was when he became a great
innovator that he met with vituperation, and, by the same token, it was
only then that he became a really great artist.
The innovation came with his modification of the realistic tradition
of the Western world and his introduction of the decorative tradition
of the Eastern world. The latter was a better-based, a fairer, a more
alluring tradition than the one he had been reared in; but he did
not, could not, go over to it in its entirety and turn himself into
an Occidental painter on silk. That would have been mere forceless
imitation. Instead of doing so, he strove to graft the Eastern shoot
upon the Western stock, to take what was best of Japanese art and blend
it with French art, thus harmonizing the two traditions. Representative
figures from the Western world were put into an Eastern pattern and
made to do decorative service. The Thames was turned into nocturnes,
portraits were changed to arrangements in grays or browns or blacks,
and London _genre_ became so many symphonies or harmonies in gold,
blue, or old rose. The result was a rare bouquet of orchids which the
English public, reared on primroses and daisies, did not find in its
botany book and could not understand. No wonder there was confusion,
misunderstanding, and denunciation. With his Oriental gospel Whistler
in London was scoffed at and reviled. He had brought a new faith to
English art, but no one believed in it or would receive it. There was
nothing to do but stone the evangelist. The stoning roused his ire.
“though young he was a Tartar
And not at all disposed to prove a martyr.”
And so the quarrel began and ran on for forty years, until the painter
died, and the British public bought his pictures and hung them in its
national galleries, and the incident was declared closed. The story is
old in art but this one possesses distinctly modern variations.
[Illustration: “Nocturne. Gray and Silver. Chelsea Embankment,” by
James A. McNeill Whistler.
In the Freer Collection, Smithsonian Institution.]
Whistler had probably begun the study of Japanese art before 1860, and
there is equal probability that in Paris he saw not the best examples
of it, but only its latter-day manifestations in the color prints of
Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige. However that may have been, he saw
enough to change his ideas about pattern and to turn him half-way
round, at least, from the representative to the decorative. That was
the beginning of the misunderstanding. Time out of mind artist and
public had been conscious that painting possessed the dimensions of
height and breadth, and, by illusion, was capable of a third dimension
in depth or thickness. The illusion was produced by variations of
light, shade, or color which gave modelling. From long custom a
preference grew up for figures modelled out--a depth by protrusion
rather than by recession. When, therefore, Whistler came to the fore
and insisted that the third dimension was something of a vulgarity and
that figures should not be round and stand out but be flat and _stand
in_, there was instant disagreement.
He went further. Linear perspective was a cheap accomplishment and the
delight in it was unintelligent. There was infinitely more distinction
in aerial perspective whereby recession and depth were produced by
a degradation of values. Aerial perspective was, in fact, the only
perspective worth while. There should not be too much depth. The
pattern should be kept flat and the picture should not “break through
the wall” but be a part of it. Moreover, contrast of color was less
decorative, less charming, than accord. A picture should be pitched in
a certain tonal key and maintain the tone throughout. The minor chords
were more refined than those of higher pitch and greater resonance; a
twilight or a midnight was more lovely than “a foolish sunset.” Finally
the picture was finished when its decorative pattern was complete. The
whole meaning of the picture was in its look. It should make no other
appeal. Piety, patriotism, sentiment, emotion, story were all barred
out as beside the mark--foreign to the medium.
All this Whistler said in his pictures and it irritated him that the
public would not recognize his point of view, but chose instead to
judge his work by the standards of a Leighton and a Millais. By way
of supplement he sought to explain with tongue and pen, but he used
too many metaphors, paradoxes, and sophisms, with the result that the
audience was more mystified than ever. He achieved a reputation for
insincerity; was derided as a coxcomb, a mountebank, an impostor, a
charlatan. Finally it was discovered that some of the things he said
were sharp-pointed, that he was a wit, a dandy, a gay fellow. And they
laughed. They would not take either his word or his art seriously. It
was admitted, with some complacency, that he was a good etcher, but as
a painter he had not fulfilled expectations. The prophet had arrived
ahead of his time.
The Japanese influence--the most potent of all in Whistler’s art--began
to show itself gradually and did not come out entirely in the open
until such pictures as the “Lange Leizen,” “The Gold Screen,” “The
Balcony,” and the “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” appeared. With
them not only the flat pattern but Tokio porcelains, fans, screens,
robes were shown. There was some incongruity in the appearances,
which Whistler did not seek to conceal. The figure in the “Lange
Leizen” is English, sits on a chair like an English model, and is in
an English interior; but Japanese costume and blue-and-white pots
and jars are introduced. Whistler regarded it as a color scheme and
called it “An Arrangement in Purple and Rose,” but his audience saw
only the incongruity. “The Balcony” again was mystifying. There were
four figures in Japanese robes on an iron-railed platform with an
outlook on the Thames. There were bamboo screens and potted azaleas and
blue-and-white tea things. Again there was the impossible--Japan set
down in London. The subtitle, “A Harmony in Flesh Color and Green,”
explained nothing. The picture was judged by its meaning, not by its
appearance, and, of course, it meant nothing in an English sense.
The “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” was even more startling. Every
one knew it was a young Greek girl who posed as the Princesse, and
the masquerade of Japanese robe and rug and screen and fan was only a
pretense. The subtitle of “Rose and Silver” again did not enlighten.
What was wanted was the common sense of it and not the harmony or the
arrangement. But it had no common sense; it was merely a fantasy in
color. Persistently they looked for the wrong thing and would not see
what the painter wished them to see. It was just so with “The Little
White Girl”--a beautiful symphony in white showing a young girl in
muslin leaning against a white mantel with her face reflected in a
mirror. It was Japanese only in the fan, the flowers, and the vase, but
the arrangement was too flat for public appreciation, and the girl was
declared the “most bizarre of bipeds.”
[Illustration: “The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine,” by James A.
McNeill Whistler.
In the Freer Collection, Smithsonian Institution.]
All through the sixties this misapprehension of purpose and aim
persisted, and toward 1870 another riddle was presented with the
appearance of the nocturnes. They were things done along the Thames at
dusk and were revelations of that blue-air envelope which forms when
the shadow of the world begins to creep up the Eastern sky. The idea
had perhaps been suggested to Whistler in the color prints of Hiroshige
and he had afterward found its reality in English twilights. Such a
motive was quite the opposite of Turner’s blazing sunset upon which the
generations had been reared. Everything was muffled, vague in outline,
half seen as to place. Much was left to the imagination, and as for
the composition, it was arranged with the greatest simplicity. Indeed,
it was so simple that people thought it must be foolish and said so
without hesitation.
Again the subtitles of “Blue and Gold” and “Black and Gold” carried no
meaning. Even the experienced Ruskin could see nothing in the later
“Falling Rocket” but “a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public’s
face.” It was “cockney impudence” and “wilful imposture.” That was more
than Whistler could stand, and he began a libel suit against Ruskin in
the course of which the Attorney-General of England said he “did not
know when so much amusement had been afforded the British public as
by Mr. Whistler’s pictures.” The trial was a farce and the laugh went
against Whistler. But he laughs best who laughs last, and it has not
been the British public that has done the latest laughing.
There had been merriment before that, and--incredible as it may
seem--over Whistler’s now celebrated portrait of his mother. It
was admitted to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1872 only after a
well-known academician had threatened to resign if it were rejected.
It was not wanted, but having been received, it was treated as a joke.
London revised its opinion about the portrait later on. After the
French Government bought it for the Luxembourg it was thought, even by
the hosts of Philistia, to be Whistler’s best effort, and there was
much talk of its refined motherly spirit and decent air--praises that
the painter resented, telling the public that the sitter was no affair
of theirs and that their only interest should be in “the arrangement in
gray and black.”
The portrait of Carlyle followed, and was not unlike the mother
portrait in its color scheme and pattern. Nothing was round in
modelling, or projected, or stood out in the canvas. The wall, the
chair, the figure, even the head, were flattened, and to that extent
rendered incomprehensible to the general. The ponderous _Times_
proclaimed that “before such pictures ... critic and spectator are
alike puzzled. Criticism and admiration seem alike impossible, and
the mind vacillates between a feeling that the artist is playing a
practical joke upon the spectator or that the painter is suffering from
some peculiar optical illusion.” Eventually the Carlyle won its way,
and is now one of the treasures of the Glasgow Corporation Art Gallery.
But for years no one would touch it with a pair of tongs.
Both the Carlyle and the mother portraits had their prototypes in the
groups of Frans Hals at Haarlem. Whistler much admired Hals’s late
portraits of Women Regents there, and found in them his “arrangement in
gray and black.” But about the same time with the Carlyle he painted
a portrait of Miss Alexander, the like of which had never before been
seen. It was the portrait of a little girl, hat in hand, standing at
full length in a room, with daisies at the side and butterflies at the
back. The title of it was a “Harmony in Gray and Green.” The pattern
was beautiful, the color delightful, the pose childlike, and even
realistic. But London would not have it. It was “gruesomeness in gray,”
“a rhapsody in raw child and cobwebs,” “a disagreeable presentment,”
and “uncompromisingly vulgar.” Not even in the turbulent times of
Delacroix and “the drunken broom” had criticism so cheapened its array
and shot so wide of the mark.
In spite of abuse Whistler continued producing portraits--one of
Leyland in evening dress standing at full length, an “arrangement in
black”; one of Mrs. Leyland, never entirely completed, a very beautiful
“symphony in flesh color and pink”; one of Mrs. Huth in black velvet,
another “arrangement in black.” They were all realistic enough as
regards the likeness but decoratively arranged as regards pattern and
color. They were, once more, the blended view of the West and the East,
and Whistler never tried to disguise the fact. He sought to place the
figure in the canvas as far as he stood from the sitter when painting
the picture, but otherwise he adhered to the flattening of the pattern,
the simplicity of the arrangement, and the predominance of a tone of
color.
In 1876 Whistler was given _carte blanche_ to produce one of his tone
effects in a room at the Leyland house. This afterward became known
as the Peacock Room. It held the picture of the “Princesse du Pays
de la Porcelaine” at one end, was decorated elsewhere with peacocks,
furnished with cabinets of blue-and-white china, and set off with
blue and gold in the walls and ceiling. The idea of the peacocks had
probably come to Whistler from some Japanese master, perhaps Okio, and
the rest of it was his own arrangement of color. The next year was
that of the suit against Ruskin. London laughed and Whistler shortly
thereafter went into bankruptcy. Everything was seized and sold,
bringing little or nothing. The tide was at its lowest ebb, and the
painter was left stranded, but by no means dead or even moribund.
When he had sufficiently recuperated he went off to Venice, where he
gathered a little coterie of admirers about him who referred to him as
“the master,” and where he talked much, and did some etchings and some
pastels on colored paper. The first series of Venetian etchings, twelve
in number, were done in the summer of 1880, and possibly he never went
beyond such plates as “The Rialto,” “The Bridge”, and “The Traghetto.”
They seem the most flawless of his etched work. As for the pastels,
they were largely notes of color, line, or movement, and while charming
as notes, they were not impeccable in drawing. They were never intended
to be realistic in any modern sense; they were, in fact, mere flying
autumn leaves that meant nothing aside from form and color and their
airy lightness.
In November Whistler returned to London, and the sniping and
sharpshooting began again. It was temporarily interrupted by the death
of his mother in January, but soon broke out anew. Portraits were being
painted--that of Duret in evening clothes with a domino on his arm,
and one of Lady Archibald Campbell, called “The Yellow Buskin,” an
“arrangement in black,” being the most notable. “The Yellow Buskin,”
now in the Fairmount Park Gallery, Philadelphia, appeals to many
people as perhaps Whistler’s most spirited and effective portrait, but
London criticism viewed it lightly. The _Morning Advertiser_ said “its
obvious affectations render the work displeasing,” and another critic
stated that “he has placed one of his portraits on an asphalt floor
and against a coal-black background, the whole apparently representing
a dressy woman in an inferno of the worldly.” The public was equally
unconvinced. So in 1884 Whistler mounted the platform at Princes Hall
and in his _Ten O’Clock_ set forth not only his philosophy of art but
his scorn and contempt for almost everybody and everything excepting
art and artists. The lecture created a stir, was repeated at Oxford and
Cambridge, and Whistler became famous as one who could write even if
he could not paint. Oddly enough, his lecture seemed to command more
respect than his pictures, though it had not a tithe of their sincerity.
At any rate, the painter’s fortunes now began to mend. He joined the
Society of British Artists, and two years later became its president.
In 1888 he was married to Beatrix Godwin, widow of E. B. Godwin, the
architect, afterward moving to No. 21 Cheyne Walk, where many orders
for portraits came to him. Success and honors came also. France gave
him the Legion of Honor, Bavaria made him an academician, he had the
Cross of St. Michael, and later on Glasgow University gave him an
LL.D. His pictures at auction increased in price five and ten fold;
his commission prices were in proportion. He grew so affluent that he
could even decline to paint a ceiling for the Boston Public Library. At
last the light was beginning to dawn--a trifle late, to be sure, but
nevertheless it was welcomed by the painter.
[Illustration: “The Yellow Buskin,” by James A. McNeill Whistler.
In the W. P. Wilstach Collection, Fairmount Park Gallery.]
The rest is soon told. In 1892 he moved to Paris and lived in the rue
du Bac. A studio was opened for pupils in Paris at which he agreed to
give lessons. It was popular at first, but did not last long. He
travelled back and forth to London a good deal, and finally returned
to England to live. Quarrels had followed him to Paris and the Eden
trial had taken place there. It was unfortunate. _Trilby_ had been
written and Whistler was parodied in it, which caused another tempest
in a teapot. Then Mrs. Whistler died, and that was not only a great
shock but a lasting grief. He never quite got over it. He wandered to
Paris and Rome, but he cared little for them; he kept at work with
feverish energy, but he accomplished little. He was evidently broken,
not only in spirit but in body; and his death in July, 1903, was hardly
a surprise to his more intimate friends. The overstrung bow at last had
snapped.
For many years Whistler had been wrongly estimated alike by friend
and foe. That one admired and the other condemned did not change
the measure of extravagance. There was exaggeration on both sides.
Since his death his critics have held their tongues, but many of his
admirers have burst into print with impressions and reminiscences that
are quite out of proportion and give a misleading idea of the man and
the painter. The best account of him is that of the Pennells. They
were devoted to him and wrote enthusiastically about him, as they
should; but they did not fail to give the pros and cons in parallel
columns. Moreover, they did not make him out a jester with cap and
bells, a poseur, a wit, and a fop, but a very sincere and serious
artist stung to resentment by the stupidity and studied insults of
a perverse generation. That is precisely the right point of view,
but unfortunately the Pennells are about the only ones who have
consistently held it. The other accounts, for the most part, deal
with his personal appearance, his witticisms, his eccentricities, his
quarrels, and let his art go with a few rhapsodic generalities.
As for the descriptions of Whistler’s personality, they give a false
impression by undue emphasis on certain appearances. My acquaintance
with him was after 1890, though I had met him some years before. At
no time was I impressed with his “flashing” eye, or his “claw-like”
hands, or his “white lock,” or his “dandified” costume. They were not
marked features unless one were looking for them. He was slightly
built, refined-looking, and carried himself well, even gracefully. The
Chase portrait of him is so foolish that even Chase could not show it
without apologies and explanations; and as for the Boldini portrait,
it is thoroughly Mephistophelian. About the latter, Whistler said:
“They say that looks like me; but I hope I don’t look like that.” The
portrait is a typical Boldini, with all that that implies of vulgarity
and insinuation. But Whistler looked like a gentleman, not like a
_boulevardier_.
His manner was courteous and his disposition usually good-natured. I
never saw anything of his waspishness, nor heard any of his vitriolic
retorts. He talked soberly and very sensibly unless aroused or driven
into a corner by argument. Then he would fight back viciously enough
and with excellent wit. From some quick answers to foolish people he
finally became known for repartee and his name was used as a peg upon
which many sharp sayings were hung, and he quite innocent of them.
The only bright retort from him that I ever heard was made at my own
expense. I recount it as illustrative of his brightness.
One night at the Pennells’, Whistler had been grumbling in an amusing
way over art criticism and art critics. No one answered him. He had the
floor entirely to himself and the rest of us were content to smile.
Near eleven o’clock, as I rose to go, and Whistler and Pennell went
with me to the door, I ventured to say that art critics were not very
different from other people, that they did the best they could, but
were human and often erred. It was good-natured deprecation of his
point of view, which he met by putting his hand on my shoulder and
saying with equal good nature:
“Oh, my dear Van Dyke, don’t misunderstand. We none of us think of you
as an art critic.” Everybody laughed, myself included. There was not
a particle of venom in it. I had written about him in praise in the
early eighties when others were abusing him and he had thanked me for
it; I was in his good books. To be sure, the retort was hardly new.
John Brougham had launched it at Lester Wallack many years before. But
the cleverness of it lay in its application.
Whistler liked to talk, especially if there was an audience of half a
dozen. He was then very willing to fill space in the spot-light and
conduct the session, especially if art was up for discussion. Another
night, at a Pennell dinner, a very clever man--one of the editors of
the _Daily Telegraph_--was present. He had recently returned from
the far North--beyond Spitzbergen--and had been telling us about the
brilliancy of the Northern color. Whistler, beside whom I sat, was not
interested and kept tugging at my arm, telling me that it was mere raw
color and not art. To that I finally had to make reply that I cared
not a rap whether the color was artistic or not, that I was interested
in the mere fact of its brilliancy. With that he flung around in his
chair, turning his back on me, much as a child might do, and remained
silent until the subject changed.
But it is an error to infer that because he was often witty and
occasionally petty, wit and pettishness were his outstanding
characteristics. By setting forth unrelieved chapters of his stories
and sayings the impression has been produced that he started a new
quarrel each morning before breakfast and shot envenomed shafts until
sunset. That his witticisms were scattered over a period of forty years
is neither stated nor implied. As a matter of fact, he was almost
always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language,
talked most sensibly and persuasively. I remember many interesting
and informing talks with him when there was no jesting and not even
smiling. In his own studio, with his own pictures on the easel and he
explaining his intention and its development on the canvas, he was at
his best. He was then a reasonable, sensible painter, with none of the
pose of the _Ten O’Clock_ and none of the vanity of _The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies_. I have never met a more striking contradiction in an
individual, and it always seemed to me that the Whistler of the sharp
tongue and pen was not the true Whistler but merely a character assumed
for the occasion.
His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly
brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view.
Take from the _Ten O’Clock_, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence:
“There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving
nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that
he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art
happens--no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the
vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make
it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another
half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that
art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth.
Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world.
There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the
unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But
he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was
merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in
a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a
twilight or a midnight. The _Ten O’Clock_ indeed explains Whistler’s
art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written.
His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set
forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such
an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually
wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative
pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is
“usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there
are too many trees in the country.” There were--for Whistler’s art.
But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler
arguments--the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing
national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to
produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the
want of logic or historical truth in the _Ten O’Clock_. One might as
well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture
was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It
was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform
delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading.
Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it
would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in
itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.
That he wrote extremely well makes it all the more unfortunate that he
wrote at all. The letters of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ are
amusing, but leave an impression of flippancy and mere cleverness.
These were qualities rightly enough used in a rough-and-tumble
newspaper quarrel, but the reader does not leave them there.
Unwittingly he looks for the same qualities in Whistler’s portraits and
pastels, perhaps reads them into the art itself. Worse yet, he possibly
arrives at the conclusion that the art is of less interest than the
quarrels, of less moment than the passing gibe of the “foolish sunset,”
or the casual irrelevance of “dragging in Velasquez.” Once more, it is
a pity that Whistler the painter has to be confused with Whistler the
critic-baiter. However well one comes out of a fight, it is generally
with rumpled plumage and a lack of dignity. Whistler could well have
afforded to go his way in silence. Why did he have to kick at every
cur that barked at his heels? Degas said he acted as though he had no
talent, and Degas was right.
After these books of bickerings one comes back to Whistler’s pictures
with relief, for they at least are serious. That is not, however, to
say that they are the greatest this, or the most wonderful that, in
all painting. They are far from being impeccable, but they are not the
wherewithal to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No competent
person nowadays thinks them other than very sincere art. His brothers
of the craft have, indeed, so elevated them and him, so pedestalled and
niched them both, that it is very doubtful if they can long hold out
in their rarefied atmosphere. Again and again has the world been told
that he was a faultless draftsman, that his brush was equal to that of
Velasquez, and that his needle outdid Rembrandt. He did not believe so
himself, nor, soberly considered, does his art affirm it.
The Pennell book contains photographs of a number of pictures labelled
“destroyed,” and there were scores of canvases that never got so far as
even to be photographed. Many of the pictures that escaped destruction
are faulty in drawing, lacking in construction, out of proportion, or
smitten with stiffness in the joints. Connie Gilchrist on the stage
skipped the rope delightfully, but in Whistler’s portrait called “The
Gold Girl” she is petrified. The “Sarasate” seems pinched in scale,
the “Irving as Philip” is unbelievable in construction, the “Leyland”
legs had to be redrawn from a model. Whistler glorified the people of
Velasquez because “they stand upon their legs.” In his studio, showing
his own portraits, his first question about each figure was: “How does
it stand?” And then: “Does it stand easily, stand firm, stand in? Is
it placed right on the canvas, has it enough body, enough atmospheric
setting?” These were questions that had to do with realistic or
representative appearance. Again and again he rubbed out the whole
day’s work or destroyed the picture entirely. And he could write of
himself to his printer in the severest terms, thus: “No, my drawing or
sketch or whatever you choose, is damnable and no more like the superb
original than if it had been done by the worst and most incompetent
enemy.... There must be no record of this abomination.”
This, in measure, is the experience of every artist. He produces
with difficulty and has scores of failures. It was not to Whistler’s
discredit that he was so severe a judge of himself, but perhaps it
dispels the delusion of his being an impeccable craftsman. Besides,
there was an unusual reason for his lack of success with many pictures.
It has been already suggested that he strove to harmonize the
conflicting traditions of the West and the East. He was born and bred
to the realism of the third dimension--to the protrusion or recession
in space of planes, figures, lights, and colors. Midway in his career
he took up with the decorative in Eastern art and strove to show the
representative figure of the French with the flattened formula of the
Japanese.
Whistler was thus on a seesaw the greater part of his artistic life,
trying to maintain a balance between these two formulas. With almost
every picture it was too much realism or too much decoration. To make
the union more perfect he began the remorseless cutting down of the
subject, reaching a limit in his nocturnes which were finally reduced
to little more than night-sky effects. He cut out modelling and outline
until the portrait of “Mrs. Leyland” became a mere tonal scheme, as
flat almost as the wall at the back. Light, too, was dimmed and color
lost its brilliancy in a prevailing harmony of low tones. Finally,
the brush which had been heavily loaded in his Courbet days and ran
freely (as witness the dress patterns even in the later “Lange Leizen”)
became thin, watery, absorbent, almost diaphanous in its feathery
imperceptible touch. On top of all this, and to further blend the
representative into the decorative and draw the picture together, there
occasionally came a thin wash of transparent gray or brown, covering
the whole canvas and binding the drawing, the light, the color into one
tonal envelope. In the final analysis, the canvas was rightly enough
called an arrangement, a harmony, a symphony, a nocturne--what you
will. Anything else was merely suggestion.
The etchings were not so amenable to Japanese pattern as the paintings,
water-colors, and pastels, yet even in them there was the disposition,
not so much toward flattening the planes as eliminating details, making
suggestion answer for realization, and, later on, the further attempt
to produce a tone effect by small scratchings and hatchings on the
plate. The inclination is perhaps better shown in his lithotints, such
as that of “The Thames” (Lithotint W. 125), than in the etchings.
The decorative arrangement was his view of what art should be and was
more or less manifested in everything he did. Even the _Ten O’Clock_
is more decorative than realistic. The arrangement of the sentences
and paragraphs is charming, and whether they mean anything or not is
of small importance. Of course Whistler would have objected to being
thus hung by his own rope, but he deliberately subordinated the sense
of his sentences to their rhythm and tone. People who write (even art
critics) are aware of what constitutes pattern and color in words and
they are well pleased that the _Ten O’Clock_ was not representative but
just as it is--that is, decorative and delightful. The painter people,
however, seem to regard it as the inspired gospel of art and every word
of it true. From which one may infer that the artist, when outside
of his _métier_, can look at the wrong thing with that persistence
sometimes thought peculiar to the unattached writer.
In the final analysis Whistler’s fame must rest upon his pictures,
though a certain amount of notoriety will probably always be given
his sayings and a proper admiration accompany his writings. As a
painter and an etcher he has a now-unquestioned place and he will
hold it. Nothing in nineteenth-century art is quite of a kind with
his. It stands alone in its aim and purpose, belongs to no art
movement of the time, proclaims the ideals of no race or people. As
for the usual motives of painting, Whistler scorned them or denied
them. He cared nothing about classicism or romanticism, nothing about
sentiment, feeling, passion, or action. The dramatic, the tragic, the
domestic, the illustrative were foreign to him. Even nature put him
out. The country bored him, and the sea was only so much blue paint
in a pattern. He was a maker of beautiful schemes of color and line,
with just enough of human interest about them to lend a meaning and
occasionally a touch of intimacy.
That seems like reducing his art to a very simple affair, but, on the
contrary, within the self-imposed limitations there was room for the
greatest variety. He did portraits, figures, genre pieces, sea-pieces,
river-views; he worked in oils, water-colors, pastels; he etched
many plates that are to-day the joy of connoisseurs, and he vastly
improved the almost forgotten art of lithography. The breadth of his
accomplishment was wide and the excellence of it high. Nothing that he
ever did but has some note of color, some wave of line, some fastidious
arrangement or grouping that serves as a mark of distinction. He did
hundreds of pastels and water-colors no larger than one’s hand, that
contain lovely figures and draperies, as, for example, the “Annabel
Lee”; or gave suggestions of the sea or shore akin to “The Blue Wave,”
or spread sky patterns comparable to the “Battersea Bridge.” These
pictures are now widely scattered, and one does not realize how truly
decorative their planning until he meets them to-day, hanging singly
or in pairs, in some drawing-room. There they put other modern work
out of countenance by the way they do not “break through the wall” but
enhance and beautify it. It is household art of a most distinguished
character in that it goes in the household and takes its place without
quarrelling with everything about it. I have already quoted La Farge to
the effect that in using the word “decorative” he was saying the best
thing he could about a picture. There he and Whistler were in perfect
agreement.
The deriding of Whistler was not indulged in by press and public
alone. The painter people--the inspired ones, who by reason of their
calling are the only ones competent to judge of art--stoned him, too.
Royal academicians dealt him harder knocks than plebeian critics.
But he always had a following of his own, and before he died the
following had grown into a procession. Since his death his influence
has been more far-reaching than that of any modern. His pictures
were not only adopted, assimilated, imitated in England and France
but all over Europe. Here in America the exhibitions still show his
color schemes and arrangements as comprehended by his admiring young
converts. Without taking on pupils, as Couture and Gleyre had done, he
nevertheless became far more of a _chef d’Ecole_ than either of them.
That is what he would have called perhaps handing on the tradition. He
believed that he himself was an inheritor and a transmitter--one of the
links in the great art chain.
But it was not the American tradition that Whistler handed on. We
claim him as one of us because he was born here, but his art does
not represent us in any way. His Thames nocturnes are not those of
the Hudson, his portraits are not of our people, and his decorative
patterns never were seen in American life or art. He handed on the
blended traditions of Gleyre and Hiroshige, not the legend of Copley
and Stuart and Durand. That may be matter for regret in history but it
surely is not to be regretted in art. For Whistler gave us a new and a
beautiful point of view in painting. Realist, idealist, impressionist,
cubist, futurist--none of the terms describe him or even suggest his
work. As an artist he was unique, and his art, instead of reproducing
a species, stemmed out into a new variety of surpassing loveliness and
beauty. We would not be without it. We are not sure that its “name and
fame will live forever,” as the Pennells put it, but it will live.
VIII
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE
A distribution and pigeonholing of our nine American painters as
regards aim and tendency would perhaps place Inness, Wyant, and Martin
among the most intelligent and sympathetic of the earlier men; Homer,
La Farge, and Whistler the most detached and self-sufficient of the
middle men, and Chase, Alexander, and Sargent the most facile and
best trained of the younger men. The last three may, indeed, stand as
epitomizing the art movement which took form and gave tongue in the
Society of American Artists.
That movement was epoch-making. There was awakening to the fact that
painting in America as a craft was not technically understood, that it
was not properly taught--could not be taught in America. With that came
the departure for Europe of many young students and their training in
the studios of Munich and Paris. When the Society of American Artists
finally got under way in the early eighties its initial reason for
existence was that its members at least knew how to paint. They had
been abroad and learned the grammar of their art and were now returned
to show their countrymen the finished craftsman. Sargent’s influence
was largely through the example of his portraits and Alexander’s vogue
was to come a little later; but Chase was the one that arrived early in
the day, carried the banner, and announced that art had come to town.
All three of these men grounded themselves in technical method which
seemed the necessity of the hour, and all three of them have remained
so bedded in method that their art has rarely risen above it or
beyond it. Chase, more radical than the others, proclaimed his belief
that method was art itself and that a brilliant, dashing manner took
precedence over matter. He would not admit that art was more than a
surface expression. His belief was, of course, properly adjusted to his
own mental equipment. He and Whistler, with many another artist, could
cleverly compound for qualities
“they were inclined to
By damning those they had no mind to.”
Unconsciously, no doubt, every one’s tendency is to regard his own
limitations as self-imposed and his work right in kind if not in
degree. Perhaps that is what Chase meant in a talk at the National Arts
Club some years ago when he said: “They say I am conceited. I don’t
deny it. I believe in myself. I do and I must.” As philosophy that may
not be very profound but as a working faith, paint-brush in hand, it is
superb. With such faith and purpose Chase produced scores of pictures
that showed his declared point of view, and trained hundreds of pupils
not only in his enthusiasm but in his own crisp, clean handling. He was
a painter from beginning to end, and exemplified the aim and carry of
the Society of American Artists better than any one artist of his time.
He came out of the near West, having been born in Williamsburg,
Indiana, in 1849. The village was a small one, less than two hundred
inhabitants when Chase was a boy, and what elementary schooling he
received there may be imagined. His parents were Indiana people,
and the home influence probably did not incline him to art. He saw
illustrations in magazines and books and that put the childish wish
in his head to “make pictures for books.” He drew with colored
pencils, had the little water-color cubes known to all children, and
soon made a local reputation among schoolmates and family friends
for drawing portraits. At twelve his parents moved to Indianapolis,
and at sixteen he entered his father’s shoe-store as a clerk. The
biographies of painters[12] almost always afford such incidents as
these. They are supposed to indicate genius trying to orient itself,
but perhaps they are no more than vacillations of the youthful mind. At
that time Chase had not definitely decided upon art as a career. At
nineteen he thought to be some day a naval officer. As a preliminary
step he enlisted as a sailor at Annapolis, and was assigned to the
training-ship _Portsmouth_. He probably did not know what else to do
and it was an adventure at least; but he soon discovered that it was
also a mistake. His father got him out of it and together they went
back to the family shoe-shop in Indianapolis.
[12] There is an excellent biography of Chase--_The Life and Art of
William Merritt Chase_, by Katharine Metcalf Roof, New York, 1917.
There was some more experimental portraiture, with members of the
household and the family calf as models, and then Chase was sent to
a local painter by the name of Benjamin Hayes, who accepted him as a
pupil. Art definitely began for him then and there. He was with Hayes
several months--long enough to take a studio and set up as a painter on
his own account. At twenty he went to New York with a letter to J. O.
Eaton, whose pupil he became and with whom he remained for two years.
He seems to have had an early liking for independent quarters, for
while a student in New York he set up another studio in Twenty-third
Street. After his two years with Eaton he once more went back to the
paternal roof, then in St. Louis. Here he occupied a studio with J.
W. Pattison, and for a year painted pictures, principally pictures of
still-life. Then he happened to see a picture by John Mulvaney, and
that gave him the idea of going abroad for study.
Some St. Louis patrons advanced money to him and he went to Munich--a
city at that time perhaps more frequented by art students than Paris.
Duveneck, Dielman, Currier, Shirlaw were there, and Chase at once
entered into the student life of the city. He was enrolled in the
school of the Munich Royal Academy, with Kaulbach at its head, and he
was also a student under Piloty; but the outside influence of Leibl
was potent upon all the Munich students at that time, Chase included.
In addition he studied to his profit the old masters in the Alte
Pinacothek, especially Van Dyck, and was susceptible to impressions
from Duveneck and perhaps Habermann, a German student friend. Some
years ago in a European retrospective exhibition I was struck by
a Habermann portrait that was practically a duplicate of Chase’s
“Ready for the Ride,” but whether it was Chase following Habermann or
Habermann following Chase, I could not determine.
With his various activities Chase cut quite a figure in the student
world of Munich and was regarded as a coming man. He won competitions,
painted Piloty’s children, painted “The Turkish Page,” the Duveneck
portrait called “The Smoker,” “The Jester,” “The Dowager,” “The
Apprentice Boy,” “The Broken Jug,” and other works. A chance to review
some of these pictures was recently afforded at the Panama-Pacific
Exposition at San Francisco, where Chase was represented by a roomful
of pictures, and many people were astonished to find how very solidly
and beautifully painted were these early examples. They were, of
course, dark in illumination with some bitumen in the shadows. It
was studio light, not _plein air_ that Munich taught. It took Chase
a number of years to arrive at a higher key of light, but in other
matters of technique he had become something of a master before leaving
Munich--so much so that he was asked to remain as an instructor in the
Bavarian Academy. He declined, however, and in 1877 went to Venice,
where he joined Duveneck and Twachtman and remained for nearly a year.
Venice meant not a great deal to Chase. He painted it, but in the
formal Munich manner, and with little of the local light or color
of the place. While there he fell upon hard times, was in financial
straits, and became ill, possibly as the result of privations. But
he continued painting, and, what is more astonishing, while in dire
poverty he began collecting all sorts of artistic plunder. This
was the beginning of a taste that he indulged in all his life. He
bought pictures, rugs, brocades, silks, brass, guns, swords, jewels,
rings--anything that was beautiful or artistic in design or color. At
different times he had large collections of antiquities, and was ever
hunting for more. At Venice he added two monkeys to his possessions,
and when a few months later he returned to New York and took his Tenth
Street studio he had several strange parrots and odd dogs as adjuncts
to the place. The high walls of the big studio were hung with bits of
tapestries, old velvets, pictures; the floor was covered with Oriental
rugs; the tables were littered with clocks, pistols, old books, brass
bowls; and the screens were draped with silks and brocades. It was the
first “artistic” studio in New York.
This was in 1877 and Chase had returned to New York to become a
teacher in the newly established Art Students League. That was the
beginning of his long and very useful career as a teacher. The Art
Students League and the Society of American Artists were started about
the same time, the Metropolitan Museum having preceded them by a few
years. The movement for art was under way and Chase had arrived at the
psychological moment. Associated with Beckwith, Blum, Shirlaw, and
others he immediately took a positive interest in current art matters.
The big studio became the gathering-place of the young men, where
resolutions were passed and committees were set in motion. Society also
found its way there, for Chase gave Saturday receptions when the door
with the vibrating lyre on the back of it was swung open by a colored
servant in fez and gown, and pictures and antiquities were displayed
and talked about by the painter himself. At other times dinners
and dances were given there, to which came many notables. People
from the opera sang, Carmencita danced, and society people posed in
picture-frames for the characters of Titian and Van Dyck. Chase had a
decided vogue, social as well as artistic, almost from the very start.
As a painter he was taken seriously and received his meed of praise
with few dissenting voices. Almost every one in the press and magazines
hailed him as the much-needed person--the man who technically knew
how to paint. His pictures at no time ever sold very well, but that
was for the reason perhaps that they never possessed an intimate
human interest, not because they were indifferently painted. On the
whole, though some of the elders looked askance at his broad brushing,
or thought his themes somewhat material and superficial, he had no
grievance of a Whistler kind against either critic or public. The art
clubs elected him to membership, he spent his first summer after his
return in a trip through the Erie Canal with the Tile Club, in 1880 he
became a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1883 its
president. The same year he had organized and sent to Munich the first
group of American pictures for exhibition there.
A curiosity as to how art had been produced by other people, in other
times and countries as well as our own, was always with Chase. He was a
great traveller, a great student of art, a great haunter of galleries
and museums. In the thirty or more years that I knew him I had met him
at different times in almost every gallery of Europe. Only a year or so
before the Great War I was working in the Uffizi one hot July afternoon
after every one had left the place. I had been alone for several hours
when I heard steps approaching me down the long corridor. It was late
and one of the attendants was probably coming to tell me it was time to
close. But no; instead of that I heard in very good English:
“At it again, I see! At it again!”
I turned around to find Chase standing there. He, too, had stayed on in
the heat after the crowd had gone, and had no doubt been prying into
some Titian or questioning some Rembrandt or Rubens!
For many years he kept voyaging to Europe summer after summer. I never
chanced to cross with him, but one spring, while bidding farewell
to some friends who were sailing, I saw Chase jump out of a cab and
scramble up the landing-stage--the last man to arrive--and still giving
some directions over his shoulder to his colored man, who remained on
the dock. On every steamer he sailed in he organized art, painted the
cabin or smoke-room panels, sketched the captain, and made a portrait
of the ship’s beauty. Arrived in Europe, he went to see not only
exhibitions and museums but brothers of the craft in their studios.
He spoke no French, Spanish, or Italian, and had only a limited
vocabulary in German, but that made no difference. He got on better
with Boldini and Alfred Stevens in Paris using the sign language than
with Whistler in London exchanging biting English. Everywhere he was
welcomed and treated as a man of distinction in his profession, and
everywhere he saw something new and was perhaps influenced thereby.
He was eager to learn and susceptible to impression--so much so that
he was said to have followed at different times Leibl, Stevens, Rico,
Fortuny, Whistler; but the things which Chase followed were minor
matters of handling or arrangement and did not affect his personal
point of view. They were superficial fancies and were soon merged,
fused, or abandoned. Some of the old masters, Velasquez, Titian,
Hals, Rembrandt, had a stronger influence upon him, but these men he
never tried to follow. It was their high artistic plane that gave him
inspiration. Standing before Titian’s “Young Englishman” in the Pitti,
his admiration for its superb poise and lofty dignity was unbounded. It
was faultless and flawless intellectually and technically. The left eye
was out of drawing, but Titian intended it so. It gave the face more
character. He never even wanted to suspect that the restorer in the
cleaning-room was perhaps responsible for the bad drawing of the eye.
Titian was above criticism.
Chase was never mean in his enthusiasms. He loved whole-heartedly.
Before Velasquez at Madrid everything was just as it should be. He
was the greatest of them all--the master craftsman of the craft; in
the Louvre he protested that no one had ever equalled or approached
such still-life painting as that of Chardin; at Haarlem he was just as
unstinted in praise of Frans Hals. And he was right about them all.
He was a very good judge of pictures and picked out no questionable
masters for admiration. Where he found a great masterpiece in a
gallery, there he unslung his kit, sat down, and made a copy. He at
different times produced very remarkable copies of Velasquez, Hals,
Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ribera, Watteau. Whatever past art had to
teach, Chase was eager to learn. He kept a receptive mind and a live
interest in all phases of painting, and had more inherent knowledge
of craftsmanship than any of his contemporaries. The literary history
of art he knew nothing about, and probably could not have told within
a hundred years when Velasquez or Hals was born. That side of art has
small interest for artists, and for Chase it was more or less of a
blank space.
His summer trips to Europe began in 1881, when he went to Paris and
Madrid, making in the latter city a copy of the “Tapestry Weavers.”
The next year he was again in Spain with Blum and Vinton. At that
time Madrid was a great place for brass, pictures, stuffs, curios,
and Chase bought without stint. He needed materials for still-life
pictures and, besides, the big Tenth Street studio absorbed no end
of furnishings. The summer of 1883 found him in Holland, living at
Zandvoort with Blum, and painting Blum in a large garden-picture called
“The Tiff.” In 1885 he went to see Whistler in London. They started
out on terms of mutual admiration, painted each other’s portraits,
travelled in Holland together, but finally ended up by quarrelling.
The Whistler portrait of Chase has disappeared, or at least its
whereabouts, if it still exists, is unknown; but the Chase portrait
of Whistler is extant and now in the Metropolitan Museum. Whistler
declared it “a monstrous lampoon,” and he was about right in saying so.
It is Whistler the _poseur_, not the real man. Certain eccentricities
or personal peculiarities were so extravagantly presented that the
characterization became little less than caricature.
In 1886 Chase was married to Miss Gerson and for a few years the
European trips were abandoned. He was still teaching in the League,
was president of the Society of American Artists, and was holding
exhibitions of his work at the Boston Art Club and elsewhere. He
began doing some open-air pastels in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. A
small club called the “Painters in Pastel” had been organized in
New York with Blum as president, and Chase, Beckwith, La Farge,
Twachtman, Weir, Wiles as members. Chase became interested in the
gay color-possibilities of the medium and proceeded to apply it to
park scenes with children, flowers, water, and trees. Years before,
Alfred Stevens had told him that his Munich scheme of light was too
dark and Chase immediately began to lighten it. Perhaps the medium of
pastel finally drove out the last vestige of Munich, for certainly his
open-air pictures, without suggesting _pointillisme_ or impressionism
or optical mixture of any kind, took on very light and brilliant
colorings. They were charming expositions of color and sunlight, and
were regarded at the time as something of a departure.
His works in oil measurably responded to the newly discovered
brightness of his pastels, but they were always somewhat lower in
key. Something of Munich method clung to his portraits even into the
nineties. The “Lady in Black” (a portrait of Mrs. Leslie Cotton) in the
Metropolitan Museum is an illustration to the point. It is excellent if
somewhat sombre portraiture. Both Chase and Sargent painted Carmencita,
the dancer, in 1890, Sargent’s picture being now in the Luxembourg
and Chase’s in the Metropolitan Museum. The Chase shows very well his
illumination, his color scheme, his drawing, and his brush-work at that
time. Without radically changing them, he varied them from year to year
to an extent that might almost be called a new manner or style. He was
always changing, as became a painter who counted his education as never
complete while he lived.
He was widely known at this time through many pictures in annual
exhibitions and by separate exhibitions of his works, as, for instance,
that at Buffalo in 1891. The Academy of Design had overcome what
prejudices against him it may have had and elected him to membership,
he had started teaching in Brooklyn, and the same year his idea of a
summer art school at Shinnecock, Long Island, came to realization.
A house and studio, a class and a cottage colony were all started
and completed out there in the sand-dunes by the sea, and one of the
most picturesque art schools in America was soon under way. It was
then and there that Chase did perhaps his best teaching and painted
his best work not only in landscape, shore piece, and marine, but in
portraiture, genre, and still-life. The portrait of his mother, done at
Shinnecock, was almost certainly inspired by the fine early Rembrandt
of an aged woman in the National Gallery, and yet there is hardly a
line of resemblance that can be traced. The Chase portrait is very
sober, serious, almost severe in its white cap and black silk dress.
It has no flourish of brush nor flare of color, and, like the Whistler
portrait of his mother, seems to have more fine feeling about it than
any other portrait of his that comes to mind. This, one can imagine,
came about in both cases because the subjects were intimately known
to the painters, and their appearances had been under long reflection
before either painter put brush to canvas.
It was perhaps a shortcoming of Chase’s art that he insisted upon
merely seeing his subject and not thinking about it. The appearance to
him was everything, the reflection or thought about it nothing. Yet the
pictures of his that people like best are the ones where some thinking
was done. The mother portrait is the instance just given, and better
still than that perhaps is the “Woman with a White Shawl,” now in the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The latter is beautifully drawn and
painted, rightly placed on the canvas, true in values, technically
as nearly right as anything Chase ever did, but, oddly enough, one
does not think of it technically nor regard it at first decoratively.
It is the fine humanity of it--the eternal womanly--that catches the
fancy. It is the portrait of a sensitive, refined American woman--in a
way the ideal of a type that every American has seen or at some time
has known about. Chase, with all his talk about dealing with surfaces
only, sometimes talked the other way and expanded on character. He
knew the paint-brush could go beneath the surface, for his own brush
occasionally brought up astonishing results. The “Woman with a White
Shawl” in its fine sympathy and inherent refinement of character may
be regarded as Chase’s high-water mark in portraiture. His portraits of
men like those of Louis Windmuller, Dean Grosvenor, Robert Underwood
Johnson, hardly reach up to it. They lack interest.
At the same time with the “Woman with a White Shawl” he did the
“Alice,” now in the Chicago Art Institute--a young girl with a ribbon
thrown back of her shoulders almost like a skipping-rope. But this
is just the ordinary Chase--that is, an excellent and well-drawn and
rightly painted girl of twelve moving across the room with a smiling,
somewhat unintelligent, face. The only thinking that Chase put in this
picture was in regard to the action or movement of the figure. The rest
was merely so much still-life painted for its surface texture as one
might paint a brass bucket or the scales of a fish. And yet the “Alice”
is an excellent picture and exhibits Chase’s theory of art quite
perfectly. But it also demonstrates the truth that the sum of art does
not lie on the surface, that the model alone is possibly not sufficient
in itself to make up the highest kind of pictorial beauty, and that the
intellectual and emotional nature of the painter is a potent factor
in all great art. Chase at heart knew that. Titian’s portraits had
convinced him of it years before.
[Illustration: “The Woman with the White Shawl,” by William Merritt
Chase.
In the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.]
Honors, prizes, and medals were coming to him, his teaching was very
successful, he had a large following, and was thought the most
considerable of our art leaders; but beneath the surface all was
not so placid or so pleasant. In 1895 he was no longer president
of the Society, he gave up his Brooklyn class, and also his Tenth
Street studio. Artistic extravagance or want of revenue or some other
financial disability had placed him in straitened circumstances. All
of his pictures and collections had to be sold to pay his debts. With
characteristic indifference he gave a farewell dinner in the big studio
before leaving it, gathered together what possessions remained to him
in a house in Stuyvesant Square, and shortly thereafter, with his
family and a number of pupils, went to Spain.
In June he returned to Shinnecock, and in the autumn took a studio at
Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, and opened at Fifty-seventh Street
the Chase School. This school soon became the New York School of Art,
and Chase was at its head for eleven years. He also went on teaching
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, going over to Philadelphia
every week for the purpose. Then for half a dozen years he taught and
painted at Shinnecock with little travel interspersed. It was during
these years that he did the “Grey Kimono” and the “Red Box,” portraits
arranged with Japanese accessories that showed brilliant coloring,
swift handling, and rather superficial characterization. There was none
of the Japanese spirit or even method about them. Then, too, he did
many shore pieces and views of the sea with the Shinnecock dunes in
the foreground. In these pictures he often placed in the first plane
small children in white, with a note of color in hats or ribbons, or
a reading woman with a bright parasol. The bright spots of color lent
brilliancy of effect and the white dresses gave a high pitch of light.
They were very attractive pictures, and some of the seas put in the
backgrounds had notes of power about them; but usually the product was
merely a handsome decorative pattern--just what the painter intended it
should be.
Occasionally, too, while at Shinnecock, Chase painted views of the
sea, unadorned or unalloyed by beach or shore or people, that were
very effective in wave movement and color. He had a finer feeling for
color and texture than Winslow Homer but he never had Homer’s grasp of
power. In his studio at Shinnecock he painted portraits, genre, and
still-life--some of the last being fish. Here, in still-life, with
his cunning handling and with color and texture as the chief motive,
he appeared to great advantage. By many people his fish-painting
is regarded as his highest achievement. In no less than half a
dozen museums in the United States he is represented by still-life
pictures in which the bulk, the weight, the limpness of dead fish are
convincingly shown, but where perhaps greater emphasis is thrown on the
slippery wet surfaces with their iridescent colorings. A few years
before he died, in showing a new fish-picture in his studio he remarked
to me with some deprecation in his manner that he supposed after he was
gone he would be known as a fish-painter! He had made the same protest
to others.
[Illustration: “Afternoon at Peconic,” by William Merritt Chase.]
A short trip to London was taken in 1902. His pupils had asked him
to sit to Sargent for his portrait and he did so. The portrait was
afterward given to the Metropolitan Museum, where it now hangs. Chase
greatly admired Sargent’s sureness and facility and often referred his
students to Sargent’s portraits for their study. He was always generous
in recognition of good work, even where perhaps he did not like the
worker’s point of view, as with Boldini, for example. Sargent and
Boldini could outfoot him on his own ground, but that did not matter.
He could still cheer for them.
It was during 1902 that Chase conceived the remarkable idea of not
only going to Europe himself for the summer months but taking with
him his entire class of students. The first contingent went with him
to Holland, and at Haarlem one night at dinner he gave me an account
of the venture and its success. His pupils had not only profited
by foreign scene and museum but he had taken them to see certain
well-known painters in their studios and shown them the modern methods
of painting. The next year he took the class to England, located it on
Hampstead Heath, and introduced it at the studios of Sargent, Abbey,
Lavery, Alma-Tadema, Shannon. The year of 1905 the class was in Madrid
and after that for a number of years in Florence. Chase bought a villa
in Florence, but apparently it was little more than a storehouse for
objects of art which he was still collecting. He spent much time at
Venice, and both there and at Florence would take his pupils to the
great galleries and point out to them what was excellent in the old
masters. It was a new method of art teaching and satisfactory results
came from it.
Chase’s winters had been spent in New York and he kept moving in both
his habitations and his occupations. He left the Fifth Avenue studio
for a large rambling place on Fourth Avenue, where rooms opened into
rooms, and where he continued painting people and fish. He again
took up teaching at the Art Students League, sent pictures to the
International Exhibition at Berlin, held an exhibition of his own
at Cincinnati, went to California where he had a summer school at
Carmel-by-the-Sea, served as a member of the Panama-Pacific Exposition
jury. His energy and his interest were unflagging. He painted and
taught and talked, he came and went and came again, as no other painter
in American art-history. His industry alone would command respect. Even
when he fell into his final illness and was taken to Atlantic City for
change of air he had canvases and brushes packed and sent with him. He
might be able to paint down there. At the last, when too weak to read,
it pleased him to go over, with his wife, all the beautiful pictures
they had seen together and compare their likings. His enthusiasm was
always something to be remembered; and when in October, 1916, he
died, there was a pronounced feeling in art circles that not only a
torch-bearer, but a devoted lover of art had gone on.
There was nothing complicated or hidden or mysterious about either
Chase or his art. He frankly stated his aim, faith, and practice
more than once and adhered to his beliefs for more than forty years.
He cared nothing about theories or philosophies or ideals and was
not led off by realism, impressionism, or cubism. He talked much on
art, not only to his classes but to miscellaneous audiences; but he
indulged in no metaphysical flights and spoke a language that all could
understand. As a practical painter his primary concern was with the
ability to paint. The picture should be technically and mechanically
a good piece of workmanship. The grammar of art first, and what you
may have to say with it afterward. At times he intimated that things,
by no means technical, could be said with the paint-brush, as, for
example, this utterance: “The value of a work of art depends simply
and solely on the height of inspiration, on the greatness of soul,
of the man who produced it.” But, generally speaking, Chase cared
not too much for “soul” in art and produced little of it in his own
pictures. His creed of painting was better stated in another sentence.
“The essential phases of a great picture are three in number, namely:
truth, interesting treatment, and quality.” By truth he meant that the
picture should give the impression of a thing well seen. By interesting
treatment he meant verve, spirit, enthusiasm, the interest of the
artist--an interest which should express itself in his manner of
treatment. Regarding this he continued:
“To my mind, one of the simplest explanations of this matter of
technique is to say that it is the eloquence of art. When a speaker has
the gift of fine oratory we hang upon his words and gestures, we are
spellbound by his intensity and his style, no matter on what subject he
chooses to address us. I fear some people confuse technique with the
use of a slashing brush and big rough strokes of paint. Let me refer
them to the works of the Primitives or to Holbein, whose calm surfaces
show us one of the world’s greatest masters of the technical side of
art.”[13]
[13] “Notes from Talks by William M. Chase” in _The American Magazine
of Art_, September, 1917.
It will be noted that Chase in his pertinent likeness of painting to
oratory eliminates the content or thing said and puts the art and the
oratory all in the manner of saying. And therein he is perhaps right
so far as the matter can be separated from the manner. He puts the
subject aside as one might say there is no poetry in Darwin, nothing
æsthetic or artistic, though he says much of great value, whereas there
is poetry in Swinburne though it is often difficult to find out whether
he is saying anything at all or merely putting out a pretty run or
rhythm of language. It was a pretty run of the brush that Chase fancied
above everything else.
“Subject is not important. Anything can be made attractive. Not long
ago I painted a pipe, a loaf, and a bowl of milk.... I would not be
unwilling to rest my reputation on it.... Let your brush sweep freely.
Better to lose it than to give way to timidity which soon becomes a
habit.... Better be dashingly bad and interesting.”[14]
[14] _Ibid._
It was thus he talked to his pupils trying to convince them that art
lay in an enthusiastic individual manner. He believed that--believed
that the art of painting lay in clever manipulation, in gusto, in
manual dexterity. But that did not mean a slashing about at haphazard
with a heavily loaded brush.
“Too many are hurrying on to give what is called ‘finish’ before they
have grounded their work in the truth which must inform and uphold the
entire structure.... Digest the subject fully before beginning. See it
fully done and well done--perhaps as some special painter whose work
you admire would do it. To begin to paint without deciding fully what
your sketch is to be, would be like a lecturer beginning to talk before
knowing what he was going to say.”[15]
[15] _Ibid._
Now that is excellent doctrine and Chase himself followed it in his own
practice. In 1890 I sat to him for a portrait and I recall his saying
then before he put brush to the canvas: “I try to see you on the canvas
all finished and then I start in to paint you as I see you in my mind.”
Later on in the painting he was fussed by the collar being askew; he
damned it, said it was not rightly seen or drawn, scraped it out and
did it over again. He was concerned about getting a certain amount of
realistic truth as well as easy brush-work, and talked much about the
right seeing of the model. But there was a contradiction in temperament
just here that came in to invalidate his aim only too often.
Enthusiasm is usually impatient of delay or restraint; it is always
eager for action. Yet one cannot fully understand even so obvious
an object as the model on the stand without reflection. It must be
seen and thought over and contemplated before one takes up the brush.
Nothing very great comes from dashing down on canvas something seen
for an instant only. But Chase, in spite of his talk, was not one who
reflected long or had the contemplative mind. He seldom fell into a
revery or lost himself in a labyrinth of thought. He had virtuosity and
was an _improvisateur_. The lilt and fling of his work were brilliant
in the extreme; and it is perhaps foolish to criticise it because
lacking in thought or reflection, and yet that is the comment oftenest
heard regarding it. His pictures are declared to have neither depth of
feeling nor depth of thought, and the works that are accounted his best
are the exceptions that prove the rule.
It has been noted also that Chase’s paintings were never very
elaborate in composition. He did nothing of a historical or academic
nature--nothing even in figure-painting beyond two or three figures.
Putting figures together with line and light, in plane and pattern,
perhaps called for too much reflection. It was easier to place a model
in a kimono against a screen or to arrange a fish in a plate or on a
table, or to put together a pipe, a loaf, and a bowl. He was in a hurry
to get at the canvas, and wanted none of the enthusiasm to evaporate.
Just so with his color scheme. He would not think over it until he
could feel it swell like a symphony, but instead put in unconsidered
colors that were perhaps agreeable enough in themselves, and then added
a dash of sharp red to catch the eye and make the picture “sing.” But
it was usually a common enough song that it sang. Distinction of color
is not obtained by merely arranging studio properties on canvas. Some
instinct and a good deal of feeling go to the making of the finest
color projects. So, again, we find that perhaps the common objection to
Chase’s color that it has no quality is more or less well-founded.
He knew how to draw, for he had a severe enough schooling at Munich,
but in later life he oftentimes ran over drawing, hid it under that
easy brush-stroke which he liked so much and which he usually handled
so effectively. Sometimes it went astray. It was not the premeditated
sweep of Rubens or the infallible touch of Velasquez. It was more like
Goya or Stevens or Vollon--painters whose brushes were not always
impeccable. However, the brush of Chase was sure enough, and with its
spirit and swift movement it certainly gave that oratorical effect
to which he compared painting. It is vivacious and with its facility
creates the feeling of knowledge and mastery. That was something
achieved at least. A surface by Chase usually shows that a skilled
workman has left his mark upon it.
His idea about quality in art was that it came: “As a result of perfect
balance of all the parts and may be manifested in a color or tone
or composition. In the greatest pictures it is found in all three,
and then you may be sure you are before the most consummate of human
works.”[16]
[16] _Ibid._
[Illustration: “Child Dancing,” by William Merritt Chase.]
The definition is not a good one, and he apologized for his
inability to define quality by saying that it is like trying to “tell
the difference between music and mere sound.” But quality is not
precisely either melody or harmony, though it _is_ the difference
between music and mere sound. It is the difference also between silk
and gingham, between an air blue and a baby-blue, between a luminous
shadow and gray paint, between a forceful, telling line and a halting,
rambling one. Quality is the badge of distinction--that something which
puts a _cachet_ of authority upon a work of art and places it among
the masterpieces of all time. Did Chase have it? Yes, occasionally.
Such works as the “Woman with a White Shawl” possess it. From which it
may be inferred that quality is more or less dependent upon thinking,
reflection, mood--things which were not always apparent in Chase’s art.
Yet he did much thinking along certain paths and had something very
important to say to his age and generation about sound technique, good
workmanship. In a literary or illustrative sense he recorded no more
romance, history, passion, power, or pathos than Whistler. He told
no story in paint, indulged in no dramatic climaxes, was guiltless
of emotion, and perhaps incapable of poetry. He was a workman, a
consummate craftsman in a goldsmith sense, and he did his thinking
about his work, put his storm and stress and soul into his palette
and brush. As a workman he was distinguished by a manner of his own
which is sometimes referred to as his style--his individual style.
His method, rather than his style, he passed on to his pupils, and
his influence upon them was perhaps greater than upon the community
at large. He taught more young people how to handle a brush than any
painter of any time, not excepting Rubens. Several thousand pupils came
under his influence, were stimulated by his enthusiasm, and encouraged
by his words. He was an excellent teacher, and American art is perhaps
more beholden to him for what he taught than for the things he painted.
For the pupils now carry on the teaching, and perhaps from them may
come a greater and a loftier art than Chase himself was able to
produce. The force of good teaching is cumulative and eventually it
develops into that body of belief and practice which I have called
tradition. Chase, like Whistler, was not an inheritor of any American
tradition, but he established one of his own and passed it on to his
followers. He based his pupils in good technical workmanship and taught
the fundamental value of craftsmanship. It was a teaching badly needed
in his America; he gave it importance and place in the schools and
became, perhaps without his knowing it, a master leader in the craft.
Chase’s painting is the concrete embodiment of his teaching--the
illustration of it. It has the obvious limitations of his method and
belief. To pass it by because it has not the romance of a Ryder or
the poetry of a Martin or the significance of a La Farge is to miss
its meaning entirely. He is just as frankly dealing with the surface
as Whistler, with the mere difference that Whistler asks us to regard
him decoratively and Chase desires to be looked at technically, as one
might consider a Stevens, a Vollon, a Fortuny, or a Boldini. We surely
are not so narrow in outlook as to deny admiration and high rank to
such masters of the brush as these. They are artists in the narrow
sense that they deal with art alone and consider painting only from the
æsthetic point of view, but who shall say they are not precisely and
exactly right? Each turn of the screw, each new generation in art, pins
us down more narrowly and positively to the material. Perhaps Whistler
and Chase were wrong only in being ahead of their time.
At any rate, the belief in material and method as art _per se_, however
it may jar preconceived notions, will have to be reckoned with.
And here in America its most considerable advocate will have to be
taken seriously. By certain standards we may judge his art as merely
clever, but he conceived it and wrought it in all seriousness. Does
a sword-hilt by Sansovino, or a salt dish by Cellini, or a screen by
Utamaro lack in either seriousness or art? Why not then a canvas, in
the same spirit of the skilled workman, by Whistler or Chase? Why not?
IX
JOHN W. ALEXANDER
Chase and Alexander were of the same faith in art though they varied
in ritual. They both believed in the finality of good workmanship
decoratively displayed. They had differing views of what constituted
design and color, their atmosphere and light were not the same,
and each had his peculiar handling; but with all this latitude for
variation in method there was no essential difference in æsthetic aim
or purpose. The portrait of a lady was to both of them not primarily a
revelation of the lady but a presentation of a decorative pattern in
which the sitter and her garmenting held large place because conforming
happily to an “arrangement.” This, of course, was the Whistlerian point
of view with which Chase and Alexander were in sympathy. All three of
them frequently rose above their creed and told tales of the lady’s
charm, or womanly instincts, or perhaps gave suggestion that she was a
lady and not merely a studio model dressed for the part; but usually
they were content with arranging her in a pattern as an entomologist
might spread and pin to advantage a golden butterfly on a blue-green
ground.
To question their practice is to take sides in a very old quarrel
in art. For they were the David and Ingres of the new dispensation.
Their works were based in method, though the method was brush-work
rather than drawing, and they were pronounced in arrangement though
the arrangement was a pattern of light and color instead of line and
group composition. Set over against them are the Delacroixs and Millets
of to-day who are no longer romantic and dramatic, but lay stress on
sentiment, feeling, significance, character, strength rather than mere
pattern. It is not necessary to name them, for every one will recognize
the species and call to mind the types. There are always two sides to
a quarrel, and there are several sides to art. It may be a symphony
of color as Whistler insisted, an arrangement of line or a matter of
facile workmanship as Alexander and Chase contended. No one will deny
that. In fact there is a modern disposition to locate the art of a
picture strictly within the limits of craftsmanship. But a picture may
express something more than the skill of the painter. Many of the craft
have shown that it is a means of expressing moods, passions, feelings,
sentiments, emotions; they insist that line and color, and all the
what-not of technique, are merely the means to an end and not the end
itself. Both arguments have merit and are abundantly exemplified in
practice. And why not something worth while, something acceptable, in
both?
There was good reason why Chase and Alexander should be accepted,
because they came at a time when method in America was in sad need
of reconstruction. Modern craftsmanship was practically unknown.
They brought it into vogue, established it as the grammar of art,
gave it the prominence it deserved. It was then, as now, the _sine
qua non_ of art. One must know how before he can say very much of
moment. There have been painters and poets with very limited skill
who have said things the world is glad to remember, but they are the
exceptions rather than the rule. The Shakespeares, Goethes, Titians,
and Rembrandts were all highly trained craftsmen. They had great things
to say, surely; but should we have heard them had they belonged to the
unskilled? How many in all the arts have had
“The vision and the faculty divine
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse!”
We need not, then, think lightly of the craftsman in American art. He
has proved a much-needed person in the school. And his work has also
turned out to be a very agreeable factor in the home. Art of a decided
quality does lie in the eye and the hand. It can be greatly enhanced
in significance by the addition of a mind and a soul, but these latter
must be approached through the former to attain their full expression.
For, to repeat, technique or craftsmanship is at the bottom of all
artistic expression.
Alexander learned to paint in practically the same roundabout way
as Chase. He was born in Alleghany City in 1856, and as a child was
reared by his grandparents, his father and mother having died early. At
twelve he was a telegraph messenger, and shortly afterward, with the
death of his grandparents, he came under the guardianship of Colonel
Edward J. Allen. He was persuaded to give up the telegraph work and go
to school, but at eighteen he broke away and went to New York. He had
given signs as a boy of artistic tendencies, his drawings had attracted
some attention, and he went to New York to make illustrations for the
Harpers. There was some disappointment at first. The Harpers had not
heard of him and did not want his artistic services, not even as an
apprentice. But they needed an office boy. He accepted the place, and
through it got into the art department, where he finally came to work
upon blocks and plates. Charles Parsons was then in charge of the
department, and E. A. Abbey, Stanley Reinhart, and A. B. Frost were
there. Alexander learned much from their counsel and example. From 1875
to 1877 there appeared in _Harper’s Weekly_ an occasional political
cartoon signed “Alexander,” and in 1877 during the great strike in
Pittsburgh there were a number of large sketches and illustrations
signed “J. W. Alexander.” Later on he did for the Harper publications
and also for the _Century Magazine_ various illustrations signed “J. W.
A.”; but this was after he had been to Munich and had had some exact
training.
He remained with the Harpers three years, and then with Albert G.
Reinhart he went to Europe. The pair had intended to study art in
Paris at the _Ecole des Beaux Arts_, but on arrival there they found
the school closed for the summer. With no French to their name, Paris
was a little dreary, and they drifted on to Munich--because Reinhart
understood a little German, it is said. The Munich Academy was open,
and Alexander entered the classes of Professor Benzcur and remained
there for some three months. The teaching proved too academic and the
living in Munich too high for him, and he went to Polling, a small
town in Bavaria, where there was an American art colony under the
shepherding of Frank Duveneck. Shirlaw, Currier, Joseph De Camp, Ross
Turner were of the group. Alexander fell into good company and began at
once to profit by the association. While at Polling he sent sketches
to the student’s exhibition at Munich and won for them a bronze
medals--his first honor. Two years were passed in Bavaria and then he
joined Duveneck’s class to study art in Italy. There were twenty-three
in the class, and Alexander with Duveneck went ahead to Florence to
engage studios for them.
Two winters were spent at Florence--the summer months being more
agreeably put in at Venice. It was at Venice in the summer of 1880 that
Alexander met Whistler and received counsel and direction from him.
The advice was very potent in helping him out of the dark Munich rut
and suggesting that the decorative was perhaps more important than the
merely realistic or representative. Indeed the Whistler influence was
the most compelling the young student had yet encountered. It made a
decided impression upon him and changed perhaps the whole trend of his
art. For while Alexander never imitated Whistler’s schemes or patterns,
he accepted the decorative point of view, giving it out in his own way
with many changes and modifications brought about by later observation
in Paris. He was always impressionable and quick to adopt new ideas,
and yet it is almost impossible in his work to trace home any feature
to a given source. In that respect he was perhaps more original than
Chase or even Whistler himself.
While in Florence he supported himself by sending drawings to the
Harper publications and teaching a class of students; but he soon
realized that he was holding back his own progress by such work, and in
1881 he decided to return to America. Arrived at Pittsburgh, he made a
trip down the Ohio and the Mississippi with Fred Muller to illustrate
an article on “King Coal’s Highway.” The article appeared in _Harper’s
Monthly_ for January, 1882. The illustrations were realistic enough,
but not remarkable in any way. They created no furor. Alexander came
on shortly thereafter to New York, took a studio in the German Bank
Building, at Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and soon was doing a
portrait of a little daughter of Henry Harper. He moved to the Chelsea
Studios in Twenty-third Street, continued with portraiture, and became
interested in the art movements of the time. People looked upon him as
a young man of ability. He had not Chase’s vogue but he, nevertheless,
had his group of admirers.
In 1881 he was in Spain and Morocco, and in 1886 he went to England
for the _Century Magazine_, having been commissioned to do certain
portraits of literary men--George Bancroft, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis
Stevenson. He did Stevenson at Bournemouth, stopping with him while
sketching him. He also did Austin Dobson, and went to Ireland to draw
some illustrations for articles by Charles de Kay. The portraits
were apparently sketches in charcoal and gave only a summary of the
heads. They were well done and rightly emphasized for reproduction.
The illustrations for the Ireland articles were decidedly good in the
landscapes--something for which Alexander had a talent, but which he
never cared to follow up until late in life and then apparently for
his own pleasure. This work and, in fact, that of the next half-dozen
years did not bring Alexander into any great prominence in America. He
had not found himself--he had not “arrived” in a large sense.
Up to 1890 his work had hardly so much as suggested his later bent or
method. The “Head of a Boy” and “Sketch of a Boy,” shown in a recent
memorial exhibition at the Century Club, are both of them early efforts
done at Polling. They are in the dark Munich style of Duveneck and not
unlike things that Shirlaw and Chase were doing a few years earlier.
“Old Cole” in the same exhibition, done in 1881, again indicates Munich
teaching. The lights are surrounded by darks and the darks are darkened
by bitumen. There is no attempt at fine color or decorative pattern,
but rather a desire for the realistic largeness of the model with a
resultant brusque modelling and some dragging of a heavily loaded
brush. The portrait of “Thurlow Weed” gives a big strong head relieved
by being in high light and again surrounded by darks. One might think
from a casual glance that it had been inspired by Lenbach. The portrait
of “Jefferson as Bob Acres,” while it still shows Munich methods, is
something of a departure. It is a costume and footlight portrait with
the lights very high, the shadows pronounced, the color very gay. It
was well set, well drawn, easily painted upon ordinary canvas, and in
the usual oil medium. The portrait had spirit and life about it and
yet gave small indication of what Alexander’s style would ultimately
become. Just so with the rather fine portrait of “Walt Whitman,” now
in the Metropolitan Museum. The hark back to Lenbach in the insistent
relief of the head and hands as spots of white surrounded by dark is
quite apparent. Perhaps here there is a pose of the figure and a sweep
of the beard that suggest Alexander’s later swing and swirl of lines,
but it is not very marked.
This work, done for the most part before he was thirty, was talked
about and praised in New York art circles, but it was really Paris that
gave Alexander rank. He had been married in 1887 to Miss Elizabeth
Alexander, and in 1890 they went abroad for a few months that he might
recuperate from an attack of the grippe. They remained away eleven
years. The time was spent chiefly in Paris, and it was to the Société
Nationale des Beaux Arts that he sent, in 1893, three portraits that
made a decided hit. They were entitled “Portrait Gris,” “Portrait
Noir,” and “Portrait Jaune.” The titles suggest color schemes,
qualities of tone, garments arranged gracefully to fill space and
make a decorative pattern--in short, the things that thereafter gave
individuality to Alexander’s art. Paris immediately took notice of
them; the Société elected him an associate member, and the next year,
when he sent a panel of five portraits, he was elected a full member.
His reputation and his commissions from that time increased rapidly. He
was a success.
Alexander has been called “the most Parisian of the Americans,” and
yet just why one hardly knows. His refined taste, his sensitiveness,
his animation are less French than American, and it must be his method
that suggests Paris. But whom in Paris? What painter can you point
to as the original or even the inspiration of his style? Carrière,
Besnard, La Touche--you think of them only to dismiss them from mind.
Whistler, Albert Moore, Burne-Jones, the Japanese, afford little clew.
Perhaps the obvious explanation is that Alexander merely followed his
own inclination and developed a method and a style quite his own.
Others have done so before him and why not he? Very likely some one
suggested a coarse absorbent canvas with thin petroleum or turpentine
as a medium, or he may have seen the results obtained by such materials
in pictures at the Salon or elsewhere. Paris has always been replete
with new mediums and methods and has had its generations of painters
who could do no more with the new than with the old. But Alexander’s
painting was something more than an absorbent canvas. He had an
original point of view and the new materials merely helped him to
reveal it.
Perhaps his originality grew out of many observations and developed
from many sources. Duveneck in the realistic and Whistler with the
decorative each had their day and sway with him. Something of the
Japanese becomes apparent in a flattening of the canvas, in elimination
of non-essential features, in gaining a sketchy effect by filling in
large spaces with flat tones and throwing emphasis upon salient points
of high light and color. Finally comes an unusual employment of dress
in making a pattern of swirling lines which not only contrast with the
angles of the canvas but lend movement and life to the figure. The
use of drapery for line effect is, of course, apparent all through
art. Alexander may have taken suggestions regarding this from Greek
marbles or Italian pictures or Pre-Raphaelite glass. But so vague and
shadowy are all these sources of influence that one cannot trace them
home. Such pictures as “The Green Gown,” “A Rose,” “The Gossip,” “The
Ring,” have no counterpart in any painting, ancient or modern. One
comes back again to a former conclusion that they are Alexander’s own
creations--his distinct contribution to art.
How far does the contribution carry? Well, little farther than the
decorative face of the canvas. The handsome, well-gowned, and well-bred
young woman who holds the rose or ring or bowl is only part of a
color pattern on the canvas. She does not symbolize or signify much
of anything beyond that. You could not guess if she has a brain
or a heart or a soul. She is not a document or a problem or even a
character. Alexander did not believe that painting was a means of
epitomizing abstract ideas but merely a way of revealing graceful color
patterns that please the eye and hang harmoniously upon the wall. There
is nothing intensive or dramatic or even narrative about his work. It
is not sentimental or emotional or passion-strung. A late canvas like
that entitled “Husband, Wife, and Child” may suggest sentiment, but
only as a superfluity. The painter meant to stop with the completed
pattern.
Almost always the pattern is agreeable and sufficient in itself as art.
The space is happily filled with one figure, sometimes two, but seldom
more. The linear design meets the upright of the frame with flowing
lines in which repetition plays more of a part than contrast. “The Blue
Bowl” is a good illustration. The figure is placed diagonally upon the
canvas, the bowl lines are repeated in the head and shoulders, the
dress is spread in fan-like lines toward the far corner of the canvas.
The whole design is unusual and extraordinary but very graceful. So,
too, with “The Ring,” in the Metropolitan Museum, where a young woman
seated on a lounge with a large straw hat in her lap is holding up a
ring for admiration. The round hat somehow suggests a repetition of
the round head, and the dress lines repeat its curves. Great care is
taken with the linear arrangements of all these single figures. The
composition is carefully thought out, wrought out, brought out.
[Illustration: “The Ring,” by John W. Alexander.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Just as important as the design is the color scheme. It is, in fact,
so prominent that the title of the picture is often derived from it.
“The Green Gown” or “The Blue Bowl” are hints that green or blue is
the key in which the picture is pitched. The continuance or repetition
or perhaps slight variance of the green or blue runs through the whole
picture and produces what is called a tone or harmony or symphony in
green or blue. The aim with Alexander is precisely as with Whistler.
Neither of them harps on the one note to the exclusion of every other,
but the one note nevertheless prevails throughout. The picture by
Alexander called “The Rose” shows a young girl in dull green which
would be monotonous if insisted upon everywhere. It is relieved by the
pink of the flesh, the dark hair, the white linen, but above all by
the rose which the girl holds in her hand. The rose hue is in the same
tone of light as the green and emphasizes the latter because red is the
complementary color of green.
The appearance of complementary or slightly varying colors in the
central high lights argues the prevalence of a large half-tone in
the background and intermediate spaces. This half-tone when prepared
in a thin medium like petroleum and used upon a soft or absorbent
canvas sinks into the canvas, becomes an atmospheric depth, becomes
vague, indefinite, mysterious. To avoid too much monotony of half-tone
Alexander very often introduced a burst of light upon the figure. This
sounds like the old Rembrandt-Lenbach formula which he followed in
his early student days at Munich, but his later practice diffused the
illumination, made it less hard on the edges, and more atmospheric.
Even in certain pictures where a ray of sunshine is shot into a dark
room through an unlatched door the ray is not hard and the half-tone
gives it an atmospheric setting quite extraordinary.
Under these peculiar conditions of canvas, of tone, of illumination,
the drawing is often flattened, even abbreviated. The heads and
costumes are brushed in broadly, the hands are sometimes passed over
with a mere suggestion of form or value, the accessories are still
more vague in line, in bulk, in texture. Nothing but things of vital
importance are given. By suppression of the parts the painter gets
concentration on certain salient features of surface, or light or
color. With thin painting in the ground and shadows and fat painting
in the high lights the picture takes on the look of a large and easily
done sketch. A feeling of freedom, of spontaneity, is apparent, and
with it life, spirit, gusto in the recital.
There was more or less variation of this sketch-appearance in all
Alexander’s late canvases. Sometimes he drew with sharper edges
and more protrusive modelling and produced a more realistic effect;
but far oftener he gave merely a suggestion of form or created an
atmospheric nimbus with his tone that surrounded and enveloped the
figure. It has been frequently noted in these pages that almost every
painter oscillates between too much drawing and not enough. When
Alexander dismissed his form rather summarily for a tone or a texture,
his critics declared him vague, shadowy, merely decorative; when he
insisted upon the drawing and perhaps minimized his tone, he was
declared prosaic. He did not have to be told that he was between the
devil and the deep sea. Every painter knows it, or comes to know it,
before he has struggled through many canvases.
A more frequent comment on Alexander was that he was a painter
of attitudes and draperies--nature plus a pose. To avoid the
conventional he chose the accidental and the momentary rather than
the characteristic or permanent. He was seeking the decorative, and
his girl in green or gray or yellow was just a little more elegantly
disposed than in nature. It was frankly an “arrangement”--a placing of
the figure and a disposition of the accessories to the best advantage.
The robes were swung in gracefully with no sharp angle lines or crabbed
pothooks to break the flow. The photographer of to-day seeks to
produce the same graceful exaggeration but with less success. And the
realist who depicts the charwoman bending over the ash-barrel usually
exaggerates more positively the other way. If the beauty of the ugly
in an awkward pose may be accounted art, why not the beauty of the
charming in a graceful pose? Alexander got what he could out of his
handsome model, making her a little more graceful than reality, to be
sure, but did not Van Dyck, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, do the
same thing with marked success?
His portrait sitters differed from his abstract types holding a ring or
a blue bowl or a rose chiefly in the matter of a facial likeness. The
“arrangement” was carried out with the one as with the other, though
it was usually not so conspicuous in the portrait as in the type.
Perhaps because the costume and coloring of women were more adaptable
to the “arrangement” than the costume and coloring of men, the painter
achieved the reputation of being more successful with the former
as sitters than with the latter. Certainly in his most attractive
portraits of women he has not failed to use graceful composition, and
has gotten much pictorial effect out of his color, tone, and light.
The “Mrs. Hastings,” for instance, is both portrait and picture.
It is expectant in look and lively in spirit. The pose in profile,
which is repeated vaguely in the Winged Victory back of the figure,
is complemented by a color and a tone quite in keeping. It is one
of the painter’s best efforts. The “Mrs. Duryea” is perhaps a little
more conscious in its formality. The space is not so well filled and
the dress spreads too obviously. With the “Mrs. Ledyard Blair” the
dress again spreads for decorative effect and becomes pronounced in
importance. A similar result is apparent in the portrait known as the
“Woman in Gray” now in the Luxembourg. All of these last-mentioned
portraits have excellences quite aside from their decorative planning,
and the “Woman in Gray” had much to do in creating Alexander’s vogue in
Paris; but one turns from them to the refined simplicity of the “Miss
Dorothy Roosevelt” with some relief. Sometimes nature is not the better
for being “arranged.”
When it was necessary to insist upon characterization Alexander could
do it, and do it well. The “Mrs. Wheaton,” an old lady with gray hair
and lace cap, done in 1904, is excellent in its gentle (not brutal)
realization of the model. It is quite in the class with the Whistler
and Chase mother portraits, and in refinement is perhaps superior to
either of the others. The children canvases of “Eleanor Alexander” with
the doll in the chair or “Geraldine Russell” standing at full length
are equally good.
It is true enough that the grace and charm belonging to women and
children seemed to appeal to Alexander more than the sturdier qualities
of men. He painted many men but they were not always as forceful as
the “Fritz Thaulow.” That figure has bulk and body to it but again
no brutality. It is more forceful than the “Walt Whitman,” which is
just a little too much ironed out and smoothed down for the vociferous
original. The beard and hair and _soi-disant_ look are those of a
poet rather than Whitman--a distinction with a difference to some
people. The “Dr. Patton” in academic robes as president of Princeton is
probably as satisfactory as any of Alexander’s portraits of men. It is
a simple, well-drawn, convincing presentation, not surprising in any
way nor again falling short in any way.
All of this work is simple, large in design, not confused with detail
or small objects, and always with ample breathing room. Alexander
attempted no elaborate grouping or historical composition except in his
designs for mural decoration. The earlier pictures such as “Pandora”
and “The Pot of Basil” are merely single figures. “The Piano” is a
single figure with a piano, the “Memories” is two figures, as is also
the “Music Panel.” They are all spacious and do not crowd the canvas
or the frame. Occasionally he did landscapes--some of them up in
the hills about Cornish, New Hampshire--in which there is the same
simplicity of design and feeling of space in hillside, valley, and sky.
His landscapes have a decorative swing of line similar in kind to his
figure pictures, and there is something of the same tonal effect,
though less pronounced. In other words, the painter saw or read the
decorative into landscape as into figures, which may be considered a
mistake if one is looking for a realistic presentation, but is just as
certainly a success if one is looking for something to hang upon the
wall that shall not clash with every other object in the room.
[Illustration: “Walt Whitman” by John W. Alexander.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Therein lies a marked feature of Alexander’s work. It is art that can
be lived with. It takes its place in the household and accommodates
itself to almost any color scheme because of its neutral tone and lack
of glittering notes. How many modern easel pictures are keyed up to the
shrieking point, and are planned to outshriek their neighbors in an
exhibition! They are Salon pictures--“machines” that make a clatter and
having served their purpose go back to the studio and are faced against
the wainscoting. But Alexander’s pictures could be taken home without
danger of a family quarrel. They are delicate enough in pattern to go
in the drawing-room and refined enough in manner to be seen and not
heard.
Perhaps this very quality of refinement, so acceptable in his easel
pictures, was something of a defect in his mural decorations. The
greatly enlarged wall space of a public building called for more
intensity of color, more sharp contrast of angle lines, more loftiness
and elaborateness of composition than the painter dreamt of in his
art philosophy. His attempts at mural painting were somewhat sporadic.
It was not exactly his _métier_, and though he took it up with energy
when asked to do so, he succeeded in producing little more than an
enlargement of his easel pictures. The same tone, light, and color
of his portraits and single figures went into the groupings in the
Congressional Library, the Harrisburg Capitol, and the Carnegie
Institute at Pittsburgh. The Library decorations gave the “Evolution of
the Book” in six lunettes that illustrated the stages of book-making
rather than symbolized or epitomized them. At Harrisburg the theme was
the “Evolution of the State,” another set of fourteen lunettes. The
decoration at Pittsburgh was the most ambitious performance of the
three and sought to tell the story of Pittsburgh--the story of steel
and labor. It is called the “Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” with the city
personified by a knight in armor with a flaming sword in his hand
instead of the large female figure of conventional decoration. The
panels carry over three stories of the entrance-hall of the Carnegie
Institute and some five hundred figures are used. The first floor
shows the half-naked furnacemen at work amid smoke, steam, and fire
glare. The smoke and steam rise up and envelop, make an atmospheric
setting for, the allegorical figures of the second floor that from all
sides are bringing tributes to the mailed figure of Pittsburgh. The
allegorical figures are winged, robed in long trailing garments, and
drift lightly through the air or upon clouds. The third floor contains
lunettes typifying the arts and sciences.
The whole decoration is well thought out, and is put together, within
its framings of yellowish marble, with a distinctly decorative effect.
The tone of it is quiet, subdued, restful--perhaps too much so. The
figures are graceful, even the men--again, perhaps too much so. One
is not sorry that Labor is shown with cheerful face and normal body
rather than sad-browed, nerve-racked, and body-wrecked, after the
Zola-Meunier formula. That exaggeration has become just as conventional
and wearisome as the prettiness of Bouguereau, or the pettiness of
Meissonier. But Alexander’s workers are perhaps too elegant for
reality as his floating figures are too graceful for allegory. There
is a feeling that there is not enough mental grip about them. It is
paradoxical to say that the decoration is too decorative, but that
states the case quite rightly. The pattern and the color that set off
an easel picture appropriately fail to carry when employed on so vast
a scale of wall decoration--fail to carry from sheer attenuation of
motive and design. The Pittsburgh decoration has not enough strength
behind it to spread over five thousand feet of painted surface.
Strength was never a quality of Alexander’s art. He had skill, grace,
refinement, charm, style, but he never attempted to win by force or
power.
After his return from Paris in 1901 he took up his permanent residence
in New York and immediately entered into the art life of the city and
the country. He had received gold medals at Paris and St. Louis and
the Legion of Honor from France, had placed his pictures in public
galleries all the way from St. Petersburg and Odessa to Chicago, and
had become a member of some twenty art societies. In addition to
the McDowell Club and the School Art League he was the head of the
Federation of Fine Arts, the Society of Mural Painters, and from 1909
the president of the National Academy of Design. His interest in art
movements was great and the energy he gave to them was at the expense
not only of his painting but his health. As president of the Academy
of Design his devotion was unflagging even though it met with almost
everything but encouragement and success. During his presidency he took
up anew the problem of a building site which had been dragging along
for years. There had been failure in Fifty-seventh Street in 1896, and
over the Lenox Library plot in 1904, but Alexander failed four further
times with the sites of the Arsenal, the Central Park, Bryant Park, and
the Railroad Yard.
This with many other burdens he was carrying helped to wear him out. He
had never been robust. On the contrary, he was of delicate, refined
physique and possessed of a mental energy that far outran his bodily
strength. Moreover, he never knew how to spare himself. In his last
years with many overhead burdens to carry he could still take on new
enterprises. At Onteora, where he had a summer home, he became much
interested in costuming and decorative settings for the theatre, and
later, with Mrs. Alexander, made many designs for Miss Maude Adams’s
productions of “Jeanne d’Arc,” “Peter Pan,” “Chantecler,” and “The
Little Minister.” In New York he presided over the National Institute
of Arts and Letters, spoke at every gathering of art people, and was at
the beck and call of society whenever anything of an artistic nature
was desired. At the last--that is, in 1915--death came to him quite
suddenly.
Both socially and artistically Alexander had become a man of
distinction. Every one liked his refined, gentlemanly personality,
admired his art, and listened to his counsel. For these reasons and
because of his commanding position he came to have a strong influence
in all art matters. He had set a pattern that many of the younger
painters followed, and, like Chase, had helped to establish the
latter-day tradition of craftsmanship here in America. It was not
the exact craftsmanship of Chase or Alexander or Sargent that was
established, though each of them has had his imitators. The movement
for sound technical education in American art was of no one painter’s
devising. The three were typical of the movement, but there were
others--Weir, Twachtman, Beckwith, Blum, Brush, Thayer, Dewing, Cox,
Blashfield--who were of the same faith and who added their quota of
strength. All of them working together, with a common energy and
enthusiasm, have created a body of belief as to what constitutes
style and skill in art. They have established a tradition based in
sound craftsmanship than which nothing could be safer or better for
the future of American art. It was Alexander’s part to help lay the
foundation-stones. War or national madness or economic change may
prevent any splendid palace of art arising therefrom, but at least
Alexander and his contemporaries builded the firm foundation--builded
perhaps better than they knew.
X
JOHN S. SARGENT
The major events in Mr. Sargent’s life as we read them or hear them
told to-day seem in no way striking or startling. He has moved along
well-trodden paths, in a well-ordered career, responsive always to the
teaching of his youth, and reflective of his social and intellectual
surroundings. He did not wholly achieve art, for some of it was born
to him and some of it, perhaps, was thrust upon him. He came to it
early, grew up in its atmosphere, and was under its spell at an
impressionable age. Which is to say that he is not a self-made painter
in the Inness-Wyant sense, but something of a traditional painter in
the La Farge sense. Training started him aright, but his great success
is, of course, not wholly due to that. Genius alone can account for the
remarkable content of his work.
He was born in Florence in 1856. His parents were Americans residing
in Italy at the time of his birth. The father was from Gloucester,
Massachusetts, and had studied medicine in Philadelphia, afterward
remaining in the latter city to practise his profession. He had met
and married a Miss Singer of an old Philadelphia family, and later
they had gone to Florence to live. Legally, therefore, the painter is
an American, but the legal tie is about all that binds him to us. We
like to claim him because he is a celebrity, but in reality he is an
American only in a nominal way. He was not reared or educated here,
he has not lived here, he has not fought in our quarrels or failed in
our failures or succeeded in our successes. The greater part of his
life has been passed abroad amid other scenes and other peoples. As
a boy he travelled about Europe with his parents, speaking German as
his first acquired language, if I report him aright, and gaining the
bulk of his schooling in Italy and Germany. At eighteen he went to
Paris and entered the _atelier_ of Carolus Duran--at that time perhaps
the most famous of the French portrait-painters. It was not until
1876, when Sargent was twenty years old, that he saw the shores of the
United States. That was his first visit. He did not stay for any length
of time, and what were his impressions of the land and the people
we do not know. Several times since then he has been here for short
periods, but one or another of the large European capitals has been
his residence. Since 1884 his permanent abiding-place has been London,
though he lived for a time in Paris, and just now (1918) he is again
here in America.
It would seem then that however much pride we may take in Sargent’s
achievements we can hardly be proud because he is peculiarly our own.
He is not American in the sense of knowing the land and the people and
reflecting our life and civilization. Just as little has his birth in
Italy made him Italian or his residence in France and England made him
French or English. No country can claim him, no people can appropriate
him, for in reality he is a citizen of the world at large--the
manner of man we sometimes call a cosmopolite. If there is one place
above another that he can be traced to and said to emanate from it
is Paris; and Paris is no longer merely the first city of France.
It, too, has become cosmopolitan--the centre of modern life and the
gathering-place of the world’s knowledge, intelligence, and fashion.
Sargent reflects its taste and its skill, but not anything else that
is peculiarly French, not anything that smacks of the French soil. The
accomplishments of Paris are his, but without the sentiment or the
feeling that is French.
It is questionable if a man who is equally at home in London, Paris,
Florence, and New York will or can have a very strong sentiment about
any one of those places. He can hardly spend a winter in the United
States and become vitally interested in democracy, and the next winter
go to England and fall deeply in love with aristocracy. Nor can he
live for a few months in Spain or Germany and penetrate to the quick
the life and character of its people. The cosmopolite who moves hither
and yon about the globe hardly ever takes to heart the affairs and
interests of those with whom he is temporarily sojourning. On the
contrary, it is rather his attitude of mind that nothing is to be taken
too seriously. To ruffle one’s composure with an emotion or to worry
one’s self about a sentiment is the very thing he seeks to avoid.
He accepts the facts as facts, concerns himself with the appearance
of things, is a stickler for the refinements, and a great student
of manners, methods, and styles. He quickly absorbs whatsoever is
artistic or intelligent or learned, his perceptions are very acute, his
knowledge and manner are polished to the last degree; but the strong
feeling that, after all, lies at the bottom of great endeavor finds no
utterance in his work, and the national beliefs that are really the
insistent and persistent things in both literature and art are not the
mainspring of his action.
So much may be said in a general way about the painter we are
considering; and so much without a thought of either praise
or blame. Mr. Sargent’s life has been the result of peculiar
circumstances--fortunate circumstances some may think, or perhaps
unfortunate, as others may hold. At least they have been instrumental
in bringing forth an accomplished painter whose art no one can fail
to admire. That his work may be admired understandingly it is quite
necessary to comprehend the personality of the artist--to understand
his education, his associations, his artistic and social environments.
For if the man himself is cosmopolitan his art is not less so. It is
the perfection of world-style, the finality of method. It is learned to
an extraordinary degree, accurate, scientific, almost faultless; but it
belongs to no country, reflects no people, discloses no sentiment, and
causes no emotion. It is calmly intellectual and begets enthusiasm only
for its absolute truthfulness to appearance and the brilliant facility
of its achievement.
To behold and to accomplish--that is to see and to paint--seem to have
been Sargent’s ambition from the start. What gave his original impetus
toward art is not disclosed, but his mother was a clever person with
water-colors, and she may have prompted his interest in painting. At
any rate, he early became proficient in drawing. As a boy, sketching
in the Tyrol, Leighton saw his work and remarked its skill. Later on
he was entered as a pupil in the schools of the Florence Academy.
Travelling at vacation times with his parents he saw many pictures and
doubtless studied the old masters from many angles. Everywhere among
the Renaissance painters he must have remarked the skilled craftsman,
and perhaps his early aspirations were to excel as they had excelled.
Certainly it was with no little knowledge of drawing that he presented
himself at the Paris _atelier_ of Carolus Duran in 1874, aged eighteen.
Carroll Beckwith, one of the earliest and best-loved of the pupils in
the _atelier_ and a life-long friend of Sargent, has often told me the
story of Sargent’s arrival. He came with his father, and when Beckwith
opened the door he found a refined-looking gentleman and a tall, thin
son standing there. Beckwith, as the _massier_ of the class, presented
the pair to the master. The portfolio of sketches, which Sargent had
under his arm, was presently examined, with the class forming an
admiring half-circle at the back. It is reported that Carolus observed
that the _nouveau_ had much to unlearn, but Beckwith says the class was
astonished at the pencil-drawings and the facility of the water-colors.
The _nouveau_ was accepted by the master and was a marked success from
the start.
Carolus was a good teacher after his kind and impressed his method
upon Sargent, who accepted and bettered it. The method in brief did
not start with the carefully prepared sketch of Ingres or even a
charcoal-drawing upon the canvas, but a full brush of color laid on in
mass. Pupils were to draw, model, paint at one and the same time. In
blocking in a figure the paint might be thick and the edges at first
sharp, but the values, the tone, the properly constructed body were
to be absolute. Underlying structure was a necessity. Sargent learned
that early in his career and never forgot it. His brush-work has been
thought his greatest technical feature, but that of itself would
be for nothing holden did it not by its certainty produce absolute
drawing. He has always been a consummate draftsman.
Yet it was Carolus who taught facility and ease with the brush and
preached Velasquez to his pupils. No doubt the master saw great
qualities in the Spaniard where his pupils saw only great dexterity,
but at any rate their attention was called to the fact that a picture
may be made interesting in its surface and be the better therefor.
Sargent was a quick convert to this idea, and he very soon developed
a breadth and truth of brush-work that astonished his master and set
Paris talking. All his life it has been one of the pronounced features
of his technique, and yet not a feature by which his art stands or
falls. One of his latest portraits--that of Henry James--does not
noticeably show it. The surface is almost smooth so inconspicuous is
the brushing, and yet there are few who will not count the James as one
of the best considered, cleanest cut, and most profound of Sargent’s
portraits.
He remained under Carolus for several years, assisted the master in
some of his decorations, and soon began to produce noteworthy work of
his own. One of his earliest portraits was that of Carolus himself,
which at once became talked about, not only as a likeness of the famous
master but as the work of a remarkable pupil. In 1878 he painted
_En route pour la pêche_, a figure composition which attracted much
attention in the Salon. The next year he went to Spain, and from
that journey came “El Jaleo,” now in the Boston Museum, and a number
of other Spanish pictures. These theme pictures, much as they were
praised, did not, could not, determine the painter’s bent. Like other
young men, he probably had determined nothing, and eventually let
circumstances settle the matter of subject. He did not have to wait
long. In 1881 he put out a full-length portrait called a “Lady with
Rose” that had so much vitality about it, as well as charm, that it far
outran all his earlier performances. The success of it, followed by the
“Hall of the Four Children,” in which four of the Beit children were
shown, and then the portrait of “Madame G----,” seemed automatically to
place him among the portraitists.
The last-named picture, a full-length in profile, now in the
Metropolitan Museum, set all Paris by the ears. The wonderful if
somewhat sharp drawing of the face and head, the equally fine
portraiture of the hands, arms, figure, and dress, commanded instant
attention. The subject was a great beauty, and the painter, painting
precisely what he saw, had dealt with her remorselessly. Even then
they began to discuss Sargent as a character reader, an anatomist,
a psychologist, a physiognomist--great nonsense to be sure, but
nevertheless suggestive of his remarkable truth of observation. It
was perhaps this very quality that soon brought him more commissions
for portraits than he could fill and possibly led to the virtual
abandonment for the time being of other themes.
In taking up portraiture as the field of his endeavor Sargent was
perhaps wise as well as fortunate, for it requires the keen, cool
observer, the man who can record the fact without romance, to make
a good portrait-painter; and Sargent has proved himself an observer
above all. He is not a poet in paint, nor does he indulge in sentiment,
feeling, or emotion. He records the fact. If I apprehend him rightly,
such theory of art as he possesses is founded in observation. One night
in Gibraltar some fifteen years ago I was dining with him at the old
Cecil Hotel. We had been on ship for a dozen days and were glad to
get ashore. That night, as a very unusual thing, Sargent talked about
painting--talked of his own volition. He suggested his theory of art in
a single sentence: “You see things that way” (pointing slightly to the
left) “and I see them this way” (pointing slightly to the right). He
seemed to think that would account for the variation or peculiarity of
eye and mind, and, with a manner of doing--a personal method--there was
little more to art. Such a theory would place him in measured agreement
with Henry James, whose definition of art has been quoted many times:
“Art is a point of view and genius a way of looking at things.” But
whether Sargent has followed James, or James followed Sargent, in that
definition, I am not able to record.
James, however, did not stop on that precise line. In 1887 in writing
about Sargent he said: “The highest result is attained when to the
element of quick perception a certain faculty of lingering reflection
is added,” and he continued, “I mean the quality in the light of
which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs
it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes
patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, elevates and
humanizes the technical problems.” James certainly meant by that
sympathy, deep human interest, if not sentiment, feeling, and emotion;
but Sargent never showed these qualities in his work and has more than
once repudiated them by word of mouth. It is a popular contention that
he does see “new things that were not on the surface,” that he is a
character reader; and that he is a bitter satirist in paint. Again the
painter has denied these alleged accomplishments, and with some warmth
into the bargain.
Frank Millet told me years ago that Sargent, painting at Broadway,
England, needed a white marble column in a picture he was then working
upon. There was none at hand, but, at Millet’s suggestion, he got a
carpenter to make a wooden column and had it painted a clean white.
This was set up and Sargent tried to paint it in the picture as a
marble column, but with the unexpected result that on the canvas it
looked not like marble but like a wooden column painted white. He could
not get below “the surface,” though he tried to do so. And Kenyon Cox
in a strikingly just estimate of Sargent[17] tells this story: “He
had painted a portrait in which he was thought to have brought out
the inner nature of his sitter, and to have ‘seen through the veil’
of the external man. When asked about it he is said to have expressed
some amazement at the idea, and to have remarked: ‘If there were a
veil I should paint the veil; I can paint only what I see.’” And Cox
adds: “Whether he said it or not, I am inclined to think that this
sentence expresses the truth.” It does; and also Sargent’s self-imposed
limitation. He does not want to see below the surface; he thinks the
surface in itself, if rightly handled, is sufficient. But there is an
explanation that may reconcile these different contentions.
[17] _Old Masters and New_, by Kenyon Cox, New York, 1905.
A painter who has been looking at human heads for many years sees
more than the man who casually looks up to recognize an acquaintance
on the street. I do not mean that he sees more “character”--that is
more scholarship or conceit or pride of purse or firmness of will
or shrewdness of thought; but merely that he sees the physical
conformation more completely than we do. Well, every one sooner or
later moulds his own face. It becomes marked or set or shaped in
response to continued methods of thinking and acting. When that face
comes under the portrait-painter’s eye he does not see the scholar,
the banker, the senator, the captain of industry; but he does see,
perhaps, certain depressions of the cheek or lines about the eyes
or mouth or contractions of the lips or protrusions of the brow or
jaw that appeal to him strongly because they are cast in shadow or
thrown up sharply in relief of light. These surface features he paints
perhaps with more emphasis than they possess in the original because
they appeal to him emphatically, and presently the peculiar look that
indicates the character of the man appears. What the look may indicate,
or what kind or phase of character may be read in or out of the look,
the portrait-painter does not usually know or care. It is not his
business to know. He paints what he sees and has as little discernment
of a character as of a mind. He gives, perhaps without knowing their
meaning, certain protrusions and recessions of the surface before him
and lets the result tell what tale it may.
[Illustration: “Mrs. Pulitzer,” by John S. Sargent.]
In the production of the portrait accurate observation is more than
half the battle. If a painter sees and knows his subject thoroughly,
he will have little trouble in telling what he sees and knows; and
to say of Sargent that he observes rightly and records truly is to
state the case in a sentence. Nothing in the physical presence escapes
him. The slight inclination of a head, the shyness of a glance, the
mobility of a mouth, the uneasiness of a hand, the nervous strain of a
gesture are all turned to account in the ultimate result. Every tone
of color in itself and in its relation to the other tones, every light
in its relation to its shadow and to the other lights, every melting
contour in contrast with every accented contour, and every texture in
relation to every other texture--all are caught within the angle of the
painter’s focus.
His portraits are the complete demonstration of his observation. They
may not be all that could be wished for in soul, but they are not
lacking in physical life--in that which can be seen. You will not be
able to look into the eyes and seem to know the inner consciousness of
the sitter, as in a portrait by Rembrandt (the “soul” is Rembrandt’s,
not the sitter’s); but you will feel the bodily presence, the physical
fact, as you do in a portrait by Frans Hals. There is the Marquand
portrait at the Metropolitan Museum to which reference may be made.
How well he has emphasized the facts of the spare figure, the refined
if somewhat weary face! How very effective the placing of the figure
in the chair, the turn of the head, and that thin hand against which
the head rests. Every physical feature is just as it should be. Look
at the bone structure of the forehead, the setting of the eyes, the
protrusion of the lower lip, the modelling of the mouth and chin. Could
anything be more positive! The painter has given you only what he has
seen, but can you not get out of these physical features--even from
the thin, patrician hand--some indication of the man’s character? The
painter _does_ give the character of the sitter but not in the way the
populace supposes. The effort is not conscious. The character is merely
the result of accurately seeing and drawing the surface appearance.
All Sargent’s portraits of men are revelations of things seen and they
are all based on the physical presence. The “Speaker Reed” and the
“Mr. Chamberlain” are likenesses of men in the flesh, done apparently
without a thought of their being statesmen. There is nothing of the
official about them and you would not be able to say that they were
political leaders. They did not look the politician in life and the
painter would not go behind the facial report. Sometimes a knowledge
of what the man really was may have proved bothersome to him. He
told me in 1903 that he had done very little satisfactory work that
year with portraits of officials at Washington. He liked his head of
“General Leonard Wood” and was much interested in the type, but the
standing portrait of “President Roosevelt” he did not think any too
successful. The “President Wilson” done in 1917 is of a piece with the
Roosevelt portrait and probably both were handicapped by shortness of
time--insufficient time for complete observation. But aside from being
hurried, the thought that he was painting people high in office and
much was expected of him, must have had a deterrent effect upon his
brush. For he could no more paint the office than he could paint behind
the “veil” or get at the “soul.” John Hay, Edwin Booth, Richard M.
Hunt were very distinguished characters, but Sargent had no recipe for
painting distinction and had to paint what was before him. The result
was that the Hay and the Hunt were in no way remarkable portraits,
whereas the Booth was exceptionally fine. It was not the characters
that Booth had played but his own gentle, refined nature that had left
its mark upon his face. Sargent saw it readily enough and had no need
to plough beneath the surface for it.
His method of procedure with women’s portraits is not different from
that of men. He seeks the personal presence, sees keenly every physical
peculiarity, and gives as truthfully as is consistent with pigments
the facts as he sees them. There is no romance of mood, no reflective
musing, no idealizing or prettifying of the likeness. All phases of
fashionable life have come to his studio and he has painted a host
of social celebrities, some of them more worthy of his brush than
others. Many times he has painted the grand lady in flashing jewels
and gorgeous robes and been accused of vulgarity in the doing of it.
But the accusation will not hold. The vulgarity has been in the sitter
and has been shown by the painter without feeling or perhaps quite
unconsciously. Many times the lady, the robes, and the jewels have been
given without a suspicion of vulgarity because there was none in the
model. That wondrous creation that appeared in the. Salon so many years
ago--the tall lady in the magenta gown--was something bordering on the
bizarre; it was flashing, glittering, noisy, but not unrefined in any
sense. The portrait of “Miss Terry as Lady Macbeth” is “stagey,” as
perhaps it should be, for again the staginess was before the painter;
but surely it is not wanting in taste. And for refinement, distinction,
sensitiveness, what could be better than the beautiful portrait of
“Lady Agnew”? Whatever may be the qualities or defects of the sitter,
Sargent may be trusted to record the facts before him exactly as they
are, and let the burden of their explanation fall on the friends or the
family, if it must.
[Illustration: “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose,” by John S. Sargent.
In the National Gallery of British Art, London.]
His successes in other fields of painting than portraiture are due to
the same keenness of observation and are perhaps merely manifestations
of the portrait instinct. The lovely “Carnation Lily Lily Rose” is
little more than the portrait of two little girls lighting Chinese
lanterns in a flower-garden. It is of course carefully arranged, and
told with great beauty of color and light; but the painting of the
lilies shows the same exactness of observation that characterizes the
faces. They are portraits of lilies. “Carmencita” is again a portrait
of a dancing-girl in costume, with powder on her face and rouge on her
lips. She has paused a moment from dancing and is breathing quickly and
Sargent chose that moment to paint her. His Venetian scenes, including
the later water-colors, are again portraits of places just as his
alligators lying in the mud, or his “St. Jerome” lying in the wood, or
his marble quarries lying in the sun are striking likenesses of the
objects themselves. They are all treated in the portrait spirit--that
is, from the point of view of an observer and a recorder rather than
a rhapsodist or a lover. Sargent does not rhapsodize, at least not in
his works. The decoration in the Boston Public Library is possibly an
exception. It evidently cost the painter much time and thought, but the
symbolism of it bewilders and its excellence lies less in meaning or
appropriateness than in masterful execution. It does not enthrall or
sway or charm; it astonishes by the brilliancy of its coloring and the
supreme excellence of its workmanship. It is something that one marvels
over but cannot fall in love with. And the most satisfactory part of it
is perhaps the panel of the prophets, which is essentially portraiture
again--that is, something painted from the model.
If I have not misstated the case it would seem as though Sargent’s
painting could be epitomized as nature plus an eye and a hand, external
nature at that. He has never pretended or suggested that he delves
beneath the surface, that he dreams or poetizes or evokes loveliness
out of his inner consciousness and infuses it into his canvases. It is
doubtful if he has even indulged to any great extent in that elevation
of the technical problem by long reflection which Henry James refers
to. From sheer truth of observation his children, as in the “Carnation
Lily Lily Rose” or the “Beatrice,” are childlike, and perhaps shy,
his young women graceful and possibly nervous or affected, his men
forceful, mentally alert, occasionally posing for posterity. He tells
the truth and knows not how to do otherwise. How radically different
in result are the portraits of Lady Ian Hamilton, Mrs. Pulitzer, Mrs.
Marquand, of Colonel Bruce, Mr. Chase, and Mr. Rockefeller! Yet who
that has known the originals will say that they are not true to the
originals!
[Illustration: “Carmencita,” by John S. Sargent.
In the Luxembourg, Paris.]
A limitation! Yes, but what artist has not limited his endeavors! It
is by not trying to do everything that occasionally one succeeds in
doing something. And if in painting one chooses to be a recorder of
facts rather than a concocter of fiction, why should we grieve! How
very little Sargent can concoct anything, even composition, is apparent
in his group-portraits of two or three people--the Misses Hunter,
for an example. The pattern bothered him, he could not “arrange” the
sitters satisfactorily, and, finally having crowded them into the
canvas, he painted them as he saw them, with the result that they look
crowded. The fresco at Boston is decorative, to be sure, by virtue of
its coloring and gilding, but as a composition it will hardly pass
muster. It is a curious gathering of jewel-like hues, but it can make
small pretense to a satisfactory mural composition. Sargent has never
demonstrated great ability in arrangement, and so far as the public
knows has never tried for historical composition.
The portrait of the single figure is his greatest success. Placing
it upon the canvas calls for no great imagination or change in the
model; and the opportunity for good drawing--his strongest technical
accomplishment perhaps--is present. How well he draws! His light is in
no way remarkable; it lacks subtlety, mystery, and all that cookery of
the brush whereby light and shade are distorted and made to suggest
the existence of things unseen; but his drawing is so profound that at
times it is almost uncanny. It is impossible to separate it from the
swift handling of the surface, for he gets the underlying structure and
the overlying texture with one and the same stroke. By a twist of the
brush he may give drawing, texture, value, hue, all at once. In this
respect--his wonderful facility with the brush--he is in the class with
Rubens.
It is this latter feature of his work that excites the greatest
admiration of his fellow artists. The final result of his handling
is to give one the impression of work done easily, in fact, rather
improvised than premeditated. But the impression is somewhat
misleading. Every stroke is calmly calculated, every touch is coolly
designed. If the effect looks labored, the palette-knife is used to
clean the canvas and the work is done over again. Infinite pains are
taken that infinite pains shall not appear. There is no excitement
or feverish haste, however swift the brush may seem to travel. The
nimble hand obeys a well-trained mind, and if the work is easily
and accurately done, it is not through any burst of inspiration or
preternatural facility of the moment, but through long and careful
training.
Least of all is there any trickery about it. The painting is just plain
painting with ordinary canvases, brushes, and pigments squeezed out
of lead tubes. It is the simplest and most direct kind of brushing.
Sargent has never been led astray by any of the technical phases or
crazes. His method of handling is perhaps Parisian though it harks
back to Hals, Velasquez, Goya, Tiepolo, without exactly resembling any
one of them. In its fluid quality perhaps it has more affinity with the
work of Rubens, though again there is no positive resemblance. It is
Sargent’s own way of expressing himself.
That there are defects attending this quality of expressiveness will
not be denied, but they are comparatively unimportant. In the simple
spreading of wet liquid paint certain results of depth or hue or
texture are likely to be sacrificed. Often a profound shadow depth is
produced by repeated glazings; thumbing and kneading of pigments on the
canvas frequently result in a quality of color that cannot be directly
spread with a brush; and, again, there are peculiar effects produced by
underbasing that are not obtainable by surface manipulation. Kenyon Cox
thinks that Sargent perhaps loses somewhat in textures by his direct
method and cites as illustration his flesh painting.
“The sweeps of opaque color laid on with a full brush are apt to give a
texture as of drapery, no matter how accurate the particular tints may
be; and if we are to have the pleasure of instantaneous execution, we
must generally accept it with some diminution of the pleasure derivable
from beautiful flesh painting.... Indeed, it may be said that the
highest beauty of coloring is always more or less incompatible with
too great frankness of procedure and demands a certain reticence and
mystery.”[18]
[18] _Ibid._
There may be, probably is, considerable truth in that statement though
I cannot for the moment get away from Rubens--one of the most direct
painters in all art and yet a great colorist and a splendid painter of
textures, especially the texture of flesh. Sargent is no such colorist
as Rubens, but the lack is perhaps inherent in the man rather than in
the method. At the same time Mr. Cox is right in degree. Perhaps the
most engaging quality of flesh coloring, to return to the illustration,
can be obtained only by additions and overlayings of paint which give
the feeling of the coloring coming up from below to the surface. The
direct method will not answer save in the hands of a Rubens.
But the end justifies the means with Sargent. Precision in drawing
immediately begins to evaporate when one starts to knead or overlay
the surface; and to weaken Sargent’s accuracy in drawing would be
to imperil his authority and dispel such a thing as conviction. One
cannot imagine it. If he should now deliberately try for subtlety or
depth of color or seek to obtain a mysterious or illusory or enamelled
surface, his friends in art would immediately declare him in decline
and roll their eyes heavenward in despair. But fortunately there is
no immediate prospect of such a thing. The painter’s inclination seems
well settled, and neither his eye nor his hand has lost its cunning.
On the contrary, since he practically abandoned portrait-painting
more than a dozen years ago and turned his attention to landscape and
effects of direct sunlight, he has been producing the most astonishing
pictures of his career. The things that he sees and draws would have
been thought as wild as cubist fancies thirty years ago. And yet they
are the most positive pronouncements of elemental truths that he has
yet put forth.
That does not mean that there is anything weird or queer about these
later doings. They are merely appearances of form, color, and light
presented with astonishing breadth, force, and simplicity. Sargent has
never evidenced any liking for things queer. He is too intelligent
for fads and fancies, too sane for mad movements in art. There is not
the slightest indication of impressionism, futurism, or cubism in his
work. The fashions have never interested him; but style--the best way
of presenting a thought or theme--has no doubt been in his thought
since boyhood. Perhaps it was his early acquaintance with the works of
painters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese that led him to
base his own style in largeness, simplicity, and directness. He could
not have built on a better foundation. Whatever gimcrack or scrollwork
bad taste may add at the top, there never yet has been any great art
that did not have a plain and firm foundation at the bottom.
And in these days, when all painting seems going to the dogs with
new and incomprehensible conventions put forth by first one group of
painters and then another, it is a pleasure and a relief to know that
there is a large body of the younger men who subscribe to Sargent’s
formulas and methods. So far as I know he has never done any teaching
nor had any pupils, and yet the influence of his works has been great
not only in England but in France and America. For many years his
method of handling has been held up for admiration in the schools and
every new work of his shown in an exhibition has had its chorus of
students to pay it homage. They could not follow a better master.
Sargent, Alexander, Chase, with many other painters who came to the
front with the founding of the Society of American Artists, have helped
form the new American tradition of the craft. As I have indicated many
times in the course of these pages, that tradition is not based in any
mere theory or fancy of art but primarily in the calm, cold practice of
good workmanship. In other words, the craftsman first; the great artist
afterward--if such thing may be. There could be no wiser teaching, no
more enduring tradition. With it the painter can rise to what eerie
heights he will; without it he forever moves on leaden wings.
It remains to be seen what the present generation will do in art.
So many strange idols are set up in art places from day to day that
one wonders if faith and purpose shall last. But whatever path the
new group may follow or movement it may pursue, it cannot complain
that its hands and eyes have not been trained; it cannot say that it
inherited no artistic patrimony, was given no schooling, was taught no
craftsmanship. The men of 1878 were perhaps handicapped by starting
late and having to get their technical education in foreign lands,
but the men of to-day have no such excuse. They can be technically
well educated on their own native heath; they are practically not
handicapped at all.
Will their success be the greater for that? Who can tell? There
is always a tearing-down process going on in art almost exactly
commensurate with the building-up process, and our country and its
art may be on the threshold of such an epoch. Again, who knows?
Many a generation has prepared and builded for its succeeding
generation--prepared and builded apparently in vain. But whether
the period is one of progress or recession it will not be the worse
for the presence of competent builders. The tradition of art is now
deep-rooted. It will continue to grow and assert itself even though
there be no historic sequence in its results. And so the thought is
perhaps worth reiterating that the men of 1878 really have builded and
prepared, with a will and in a way that will not soon be forgotten.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
Repetative chapter headings have been removed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN PAINTING AND ITS TRADITION ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
