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[Illustration:
From the collection of Mrs. Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS.
BY JOHN S. SARGENT.]
AMERICAN MASTERS OF
PAINTING
BEING
BRIEF APPRECIATIONS OF SOME
AMERICAN PAINTERS
ILLUSTRATED WITH EXAMPLES OF
THEIR WORK
BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1901, 1902, BY
THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
Thanks are especially due to Colonel Frank J. Hecker and Mr. Charles L.
Freer of Detroit; to Mr. George A. Hearn, Mrs. Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
Mr. Samuel Untermeyer, Mr. William T. Evans, Mr. Daniel Guggenheim, Mr.
Louis Marshall, Miss Henrietta E. Failing, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, Mr. James
W. Ellsworth, Mr. J. J. Albright, Mr. N. E. Montross, the Carnegie
Institute, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,--whose assistance has
made possible the inclusion of the reproductions in this illustrated
edition.
_Published by the courtesy of The New York Sun._
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. George Inness 3
II. John La Farge 19
III. James A. McNeill Whistler 37
IV. John Singer Sargent 55
V. Winslow Homer 71
VI. Edwin A. Abbey 83
VII. George Fuller 101
VIII. Homer D. Martin 115
IX. George de Forest Brush 129
X. Alexander H. Wyant 143
XI. Dwight W. Tryon 155
XII. Horatio Walker 171
XIII. Gilbert Stuart 185
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS. BY JOHN S. SARGENT _Frontispiece_
THE BERKSHIRE HILLS. BY GEORGE INNESS 4
SUNSHINE AND CLOUDS. BY GEORGE INNESS 5
MIDSUMMER. BY GEORGE INNESS 14
ATHENS. BY JOHN LA FARGE 22
Decorative painting in the Walker Art Gallery, Bowdoin College.
ALTAR PIECE. BY JOHN LA FARGE 23
Church of the Ascension, New York.
THE ANGEL OF THE SUN. BY JOHN LA FARGE 32
Decoration in the Church of the Paulist Fathers, New York.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER. BY JAMES A.
MCNEILL WHISTLER 42
THE MUSIC ROOM. BY JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER 43
NOCTURNE--BOGNOR. BY JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER 46
THE BALCONY. BY JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER 47
CARMENCITA. BY JOHN S. SARGENT 56
PORTRAIT OF MR. MARQUAND. BY JOHN S. SARGENT 57
THE LOOKOUT--“ALL’S WELL.” BY WINSLOW HOMER 72
THE WEST WIND. BY WINSLOW HOMER 73
THE MAINE COAST. BY WINSLOW HOMER 78
THE PENANCE OF ELEANOR, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.
BY EDWIN A. ABBEY 86
PAVANE. BY EDWIN A. ABBEY 87
Painted in 1895 to occupy a special place in the room where
it now is.
THE SIMPLE GATHERER. BY GEORGE FULLER 106
WESTCHESTER HILLS. BY HOMER D. MARTIN 120
THE SUN WORSHIPPERS. BY HOMER D. MARTIN 121
OLD CHURCH IN NORMANDY. BY HOMER D. MARTIN 124
THE SCULPTOR AND THE KING. BY GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH 136
MOTHER AND CHILD. BY GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH 137
THE MOHAWK VALLEY. BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT 146
THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY. BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT 147
MOONLIGHT AND FROST. BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT 150
SPRING BLOSSOMS. BY DWIGHT W. TRYON 160
EARLY SPRING, NEW ENGLAND. BY DWIGHT W. TRYON 161
EVENING--AUTUMN. BY DWIGHT W. TRYON 166
A STY. BY HORATIO WALKER 174
PLOUGHING IN ACADIA. BY HORATIO WALKER 175
I
GEORGE INNESS
In the record of American art three names stand out distinctly as those
of innovators: Whistler, La Farge, and George Inness. While Whistler’s
influence has been felt throughout the whole art world, and La Farge (to
quote from the Report of the International Jury of the Exhibition of
1889) “has created in all its details an art unknown before,” Inness was
a pathfinder, only within the domain of American art, and was led by
instinct into ways already trodden by the great men of other countries.
But this does not make him less an innovator. Nor does the fact that he
was certainly influenced by “the men of 1830,” when he came to know
their works. The point is that throughout his life his evolution was
from within.
His father, a retired New York grocer, would have had him enter
business, and even opened a small store for him in Newark, N.J., whither
the family had moved from Newburg. But the son’s mind was set on art.
Like Durand, Kensett, and Casilear, he was apprenticed for a short time
to an engraver, and subsequently studied painting for a little while
with Regis Gignoux, a pupil of Delaroche. For the rest he was
self-taught. His contemporary, Frederick E. Church, younger than himself
by a year, was seeking instruction from Thomas Cole, the founder of the
“Hudson River School,” whose grand topographical landscapes the pupil
was to follow in his studies of the Andes, of Niagara, and of other
impressive regions. The young Inness, meanwhile, was independently
studying the individual forms of nature. That he should be insensible to
the influence of Cole was out of the question, and so late as 1865, when
he was forty years old, and had returned from his first visit to Europe
deeply impressed with the work of the Barbizon painters, we can detect
in at least two pictures, “Delaware Valley” and the large “Peace and
Plenty” of the Metropolitan Museum, that fondness for grandeur of
distance and extent so characteristic of Cole. But we can also detect
the expression of a fuller intimacy with the scene than Cole could give.
Inness’s own penetrating study of natural phenomena, indorsed for
himself, no doubt, by the corresponding aim of the Barbizon painters to
reach the inwardness of the landscape, had enabled him more thoroughly
to comprehend the vastness; to collate
[Illustration:
From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.
THE BERKSHIRE HILLS.
BY GEORGE INNESS.]
[Illustration:
From the collection of William T. Evans, Esq.
SUNSHINE AND CLOUDS.
BY GEORGE INNESS.]
the details and render them subordinate to a single powerful impression.
The conception and progress of each of those pictures is from the
general to the particular, and not contrariwise, as in the topographical
landscape; and this contrary has impressed upon them a distinct personal
feeling; the realization in each case of a mood of nature, powerfully
felt.
But in alluding to the topographical character of Cole’s landscapes, I
am very far from wishing to belittle the essential greatness of that
painter. While his means of expression were comparatively inadequate,
while he may even have mistaken the true province of landscape painting,
his conception of nature was unquestionably an exalted one, and likely
to be acceptable to a spirit so eagerly aspiring as Inness’s.
Moreover--and this is often overlooked--it was the natural result of the
time and environment. To a young people, with its growing consciousness
of free and independent nationality, surrounded by the vastness of
nature as yet scarcely altered by man, what could have been more
attractive than this sense of nature’s grandeur? In their attitude
toward the nature around them they may have been nearer to the truth
than we give them credit for. We must not forget that our estimate of
the functions of landscape painting comes to us from Holland, a country
of limited horizons, through France, whose soil is highly cultivated and
studded with the charming intimacy of rural life. Finding this _paysage
intime_ true to nature and intrinsically lovely, while the so-called
classic landscape was grandiloquently superficial, we have assumed that
the former is the true and only satisfactory representative of pictorial
landscape. Perhaps too rashly; for even as painting has been able to
compass the solemnities of religion, so a painter may arise who will
join to technical ability sufficient force of mind to compass the
solemnities of nature. Meanwhile, we should at least remember that Cole
drew his inspiration from American scenery, which the modern painter is
studying through spectacles borrowed from France and Holland.
Where Inness showed himself superior to the American painters of his
early life was in the comprehensive control which he exercised over his
view of nature; a control assisted by his close study of nature’s forms,
and of their relative significances. He was, in fact, the father of the
naturalistic movement in American landscape; for it seems clear that he
fully realized the trend of his studies before he had found them
indorsed by the Barbizon painters. And this separate and independent
offshoot of the naturalistic movement, appearing almost simultaneously
in the New World, is a very curious and interesting problem. In the case
of the Barbizon painters the logic of the movement can be readily
traced: in the general dissatisfaction with classicism; in the immediate
influence of Constable and the tradition of the Dutch; and, finally, in
a sort of compromise between the realism of Courbet and the poetic rage
of the Romanticists. But that, unprompted by outside suggestion, a
yearning for nature study and for a poetic interpretation of landscape
should have arisen at about the same time in a young man on the banks of
the American Hudson, points to that wider logic which thinkers have
detected in the evolution of man--that the identical phases of evolution
may appear sporadically, independent of transmitted causes, the
individual man or nation having reached a period of personal development
at which the next step becomes inevitable.
Inness was of religious temperament; highly imaginative and at the same
time questioning, argumentative, as befitted his Scotch origin. Applying
these qualities to his art, he was unremitting in the investigation of
truth, while regarding nature in a spirit of elevated poetry. For he
seems to have had always an alert consciousness of the simultaneous
claims of the spirit and of the senses. He found an interdependence
between the two. External beauty was the expression of an inward beauty
of spirit. In this way landscape painting to some orders of mind becomes
veritably a form of religious painting. It would seem to have been so to
Inness, as, in his way, it was to Corot. It was with the latter of all
the Barbizon painters that Inness appears to have had most sympathy,
though he was appreciative also of Rousseau and Daubigny.
A man may be gauged to some extent by the company he chooses, and
Inness’s predilection for these three may afford additional evidence of
his own personal feeling toward his art. Toward Rousseau he was
attracted, no doubt, by the master’s magnificent sincerity, the tireless
analysis that resulted in such a comprehension of nature’s forms, within
which he, too, felt the existence of a spirituality that led him in time
to nature-worship, into a sort of vague pantheism. This spiritual
“underlay” in Rousseau’s work must have been very fascinating to Inness,
while its concentrated intensity would strike a sympathetic chord in his
own ardent temperament. Not, however, so as to lead him in the direction
of Rousseau’s sternness. His sympathies were more akin to the tender
spirituality of Corot. He missed in the latter’s work the mastery of
tangible form and found his range of colour narrow, but was charmed
with the exquisite serenity, childlike freshness of soul, and
perpetually gracious _bonhommie_ of Corot’s manner,--all qualities that
one associates with the classic style, and that make the introduction of
nymphs into his naturalistic landscapes seem altogether reasonable.
And in this predilection for Corot there is interest, since we are
accustomed to hear Inness called “an impetuous and passionate painter.”
Yet in his work there is very little of stress and storm. We remember
him most affectionately, and seem to find him most characteristically
represented in works of such benign repose as “Winter Morning,
Montclair,” “The Wood Gatherers,” “The Clouded Sun,” and “Summer
Silence.” I do not forget that many of his earlier pictures could be
described as passionate; but their turbulence of emotion is seldom
associated with any disturbance in nature. The turbulence is in the
manner of feeling and painting rather than in the subject, in the
interpretation, for example, of a flaming sunset sky over an earth
sinking peacefully to slumber. The passion is in the painter himself;
and, as he matured, ardour yielded to intensity, to the white heat of
concentrated energy. The progress of his art was steadily in the
direction of serenity, that highest quality of calm which is the flux of
passion.
Here again becomes evident the essentially religious character of his
art and its point of contact with the religiosity of Rousseau and Corot;
Rousseau’s attained through suffering, Corot’s preserving to the end the
naïve, painless faith of the child. Inness would be drawn to one by
sympathy, to the other by wonder and love. Whence, then, his admiration
of Daubigny? The latter had little intensity and less spirituality; an
easy man, the lockers of whose houseboat contained good creature
comforts. He makes you realize the smile of the earth, and limits his
poetry to the quiet comfortableness of the inhabited and cultivated
banks of his beloved rivers. Partly it was the perennial boyishness of
Daubigny’s heart that, no doubt, captivated Inness. His own soul was
quick and eager to the end, undimmed or worsted up to close on seventy
years, and its sweet freshness was a triumph over the debilitating
effects of frail health, unremitting toil, and protracted struggle. So
the genial, simple lovableness of Daubigny’s character may well have
brought him encouragement and refreshment. But we may suspect another
link of fascination. While Rousseau and Corot were painters of nature,
Daubigny was the painter of the country, of the landscape in its
intimate relation to the life of man. It is not that he introduces
figures, for he seldom does, yet the spirit of mankind broods over
almost all his landscapes; and the normal progress of all of us in our
love of nature is apt to be from wonderland to the land of intimate
affection. A child will be attracted by a gorgeous sunset, and we most
of us begin by admiring nature’s grandeur, nor are disinclined to lose
ourselves in her infinity. But later comes the more seeing eye, which
finds infinite suggestion in little things and a suggestion, also, of
infinity, if the mind craves for it. And then comes, too, a craving to
be personally something in the midst of this infinity, to attach one’s
self to one’s surroundings and share in the common life; so more and
more we grow to value those aspects of nature which recall our intimate
relation to her, and the simple landscape of the countryside is found to
be most companionable. As soon as his circumstances permitted, Inness
established himself in a country home at Montclair, N.J., and
thenceforth the simple charms of his surroundings afford him all the
inspiration that he needs.
To us as well as to himself this is the most beautiful period of his
art, representing the maturity both of his method and ideal. Years of
study and experiment have given his hand assurance and facility. It
obeys the brain implicitly and with a readiness that does not put any
drag upon the full, free play of the imagination. Its ideography is
entirely personal, the brush work having been refined until in the most
succinct and pregnant way it expresses precisely its author’s point of
view. So personal is it that one may with equal certainty deduce the
point of view from the method or trace back the method to the point of
view. Ampleness and simplicity are the characteristics of each. The
ampleness, however, is no longer of space but of significance; the
vision, instead of being long-sighted, has become more penetrating and
embracing; the artist is more thoroughly possessed of his subject. So,
too, the simplicity involves no meagreness of thought, but a thought
fully realized and clarified of everything that might detract from or
confuse its meaning, having also a large suggestiveness, an expression
of the artist’s imagination which invites the exercise of ours. At least
such is the character of the brush work in his best pictures, for there
are others in which the expanses of slightly broken colour, enlivened
only by a few accents, are inclined to be a little uninteresting;
succinct, in fact, without being also pregnant of meaning. If, however,
they seem to be slight and sketchy, it is not because they were done
without heart or care, but because Inness was constantly experimenting
in the direction of more complete synthesis, wherein form for its own
sake is less and less insisted on, and the great motive aimed at is the
character of the scene, and the spirituality which it embodies--a
motive, in fact, of interpretive impressionism.
In view of Inness’s impressionistic tendency that is a curious statement
which has been credited to him, “While pre-Raphaelism is like a measure
worm trying to compass the infinite circumference, impressionism is the
sloth enveloped in its own eternal dulness.” If the remark was really
made by him, it proves that he could be intolerant of others without
trying to understand their motives. Both movements are naturalistic, and
for that reason alone, if for no other, Inness might have tried to
understand them; pre-Raphaelism, moreover, added to its devotion to the
truth of form a profound spirituality, with which quality, at least, he
should have felt some sympathy. Its motive, moreover, was in a measure
humble. It certainly never tried to “compass the infinite
circumference”; on the contrary, it limited itself to fragments and
exaggerated their importance, pictorially speaking, in the general
scheme. Even more misjudged is the application of a sloth to the
analytical refinement and indefatigable study of the most eminent
impressionists. It could not have been their search for the fugitive
effects in nature or for the precise character of some phase of nature
at a certain time that annoyed Inness, perhaps hardly the secondary
place that they sometimes give to form. More likely it was their choice
of a subject without due reference to the accepted conventions of
pictorial composition and, I suspect, still more to their disregard of
that other pictorial convention, tone. I am using the word “tone” to
express the prevalence of some one colour in a picture to which all
other hues are subordinated, and not in that other use of the word which
involves the setting of all objects, lights, and colours in a picture in
due relation to one another, within an _enveloppe_ of atmosphere. We
have become inclined to regard “tonality” as a fetich, forgetting that
it is after all only one of many admirable pictorial conventions, which,
like other pictorial conventions, has no absolutely true counterpart in
nature. No one can affirm conclusively that any one convention has a
prescriptive superiority over all others. It is a matter to be adjusted
by the temperament of the individual. In the neighbourhood of the Hudson
we have days when the atmosphere is extraordinarily brilliant and the
light clear white. I cannot recall any adequate expression of this in
Inness’s pictures. He was drawn rather to early mornings, to evenings,
to quiet afternoons, or the golden glow of summer and autumn, when the
atmosphere is caressing.
[Illustration:
From the collection of James W. Ellsworth, Esq.
MIDSUMMER.
BY GEORGE INNESS.]
Such moods, perhaps, contributed to him more suggestion of spirituality
and were more in harmony with the mysticism of his mind.
Not only had he the faculty of seizing the character of a scene and of
portraying it in terms of eloquent suggestiveness, but he gave it the
impress of his own fine way of seeing it. We remember the effect
produced by viewing a large number of his pictures together, as at the
Clarke and Evans’s sales. What a remarkable distinction pervaded the
group! Not only was the manner that of a master, but of one whose
accomplished technique was at the services of a high order of mind,
evidencing, if one may say so, the gentleman’s way of approaching the
mistress of his heart. His sentiment in no instance that I can recall
sinks into sentimentality. It grew out of a devotion to nature which was
deep enough to merge the personal feeling in an intense and active
sensibility to the impression of the scene itself. So that, without any
posture of mind or even, perhaps, any set purpose, he is poetical. Had
his medium been words, he would have been nearer to Wordsworth than to
Tennyson; satisfied to interpret nature rather than to use her for the
setting of some thought of his own. In this way he was much nearer to
Rousseau and Daubigny than to Corot.
II
JOHN LA FARGE
John La Farge has given us two avenues of approach to his personality as
an artist: one through his pictures, drawings, and decorations, the
other through his writings. In the drama of his artistic doings the
writings serve as the chorus, which from its platform in front of the
actual stage interpolates a commentary on the main action, in language
always illuminative, though sometimes of rather complex meaning. For it
reflects, in fact, the complexity of its author’s personality, his
life-long habit of contemplation and the wide horizon over which his
study has roamed, embracing many objects of desire inside and outside
his art, to none of which he can tolerate a short cut, but the
interdependence of which and the relative interest of the paths thereto,
even the inevitable oppositions and compromises, he has always realized
and valued. As Paul Bourget happily says, La Farge’s “least words betray
the seeker of a kind like Fromentin, who thinks out his sensations--a
rare, a very rare power.”
He was a student of art long before he entered upon it as a profession.
It attracted him first as a form of culture, the practice coming later;
quite an inversion of the usual progress of the art student, who gets
manual facility and then culture--sometimes. Nor did art in his early
days present the only form of culture. He received a classical training
of the thorough sort that promotes an intimacy with classic thought and
expression. His father’s house in Washington Square, well stocked with
books and pictures, was the rendezvous of cultivated people, many of
them _émigrés_ of the French Revolution or refugees from St. Domingo.
When he visited Europe in 1856 he stayed in Paris at the home of his
relatives, the St. Victors, where lived his bedridden great-uncle,
author of many works, historical, critical, and artistic, who had known
friends and foes of the French Revolution, had been an _émigré_ in
Russia and still retained his interest in all things, even to the
theatres. Paul de St. Victor, writer and critic, was La Farge’s cousin,
and many remarkable and gifted people came to the house,--Russians,
members of the Institute, priests, art critics, and literary men, among
them Charles Blanc and Théophile Gautier.
La Farge had been taught to draw in a precise, old-fashioned way by his
grandfather, Binsse de St. Victor, a miniature painter of some talent,
and during his visit to Europe he was advised by his father to study
painting under some master, partly as an accomplishment, partly as an
escape from a desultory interest in many things. He, therefore, entered
the studio of Couture, who, however, recommended him to postpone
painting and to study and copy the drawings of the old masters in the
Louvre. “With quite a comprehension of my inevitable failure,” he says,
“I made drawings from Correggio, Leonardo, and others; but my greatest
fascination was Rembrandt in his etchings.” Later he followed the
drawings of the old masters in Munich and Dresden, giving up an
invitation to accompany Paul de St. Victor and Charles Blanc in a tour
of northern Italy. “I have never known,” he writes, “whether I did well
or ill, for I cannot tell what the effect upon me might have been of the
inevitable impression of the great Italian paintings, seen in their own
light and their native place.” He means at that period of his
development, for he saw them later. Next he made a short stay in England
and became acquainted with the works of the pre-Raphaelites, who did not
seem disconnected from the charm of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, or from
the glories of Turner, “which yet offended by its contradiction of the
urbanity and sincerity of the great masters whom I cared for most.” But
the willingness of the pre-Raphaelites to meet many great problems of
colour attracted him and confirmed him in the direction of his own study
of colour. However, the most important European developments of that
time seemed to him to be represented by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and
Delacroix. On his return to New York he entered a lawyer’s office, for,
as he says, “no one has struggled more against his destiny than I; nor
did I for many years acquiesce in being a painter, though I learned the
methods and studied the problems of my art. I had hoped to find some
other mode of life, some other way of satisfying the desire for a
contemplation of truth, unbiassed, free, and detached.” His friendship
with William Hunt may have decided him in his career, or his marriage in
1860, which established him in Newport, R.I.
This brief summary represents quite a remarkable method of evolution for
an artist; one that could not be adopted with impunity by many young
men, its very leisureliness offering temptations, of which the least
evil result might be dilettanteism. But La Farge was freed from the
danger by the possession of moral and mental stamina, the breadth of his
sympathies even demanding this gradual development. Nor was it
unaccompanied with strenuousness of interest in
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1898, by John La Farge.
ATHENS.
Decorative painting in the Walker Art Gallery, Bowdoin College.
BY JOHN LA FARGE.]
[Illustration:
John La Farge.
ALTAR PIECE--Church of the Ascension, New York.
BY JOHN LA FARGE.]
the various phases of culture, of which art began by being one and grew
to be the most absorbing.
It was significant that this dreamer should be attracted especially by
the nature students among the living painters. That was indicative of
the depth and sincerity of his contemplations. But it is still more
significant that from the start he should have commenced a critical
study of the problems of colour; this proved the independence of his
sincerity. Another point of great significance, as affecting his
subsequent career, is that, although he afterward made a close study of
anatomy, in his apprentice days he seems to have drawn from drawings
rather than from the living model, studying, in fact, the abstract made
by others instead of the concrete directly studied by himself. Thus the
habit of his mind was directed toward the generalization and
significance of the figure rather than to its anatomical facts. This
made him very early an enthusiastic admirer of Japanese art, and has
proved at once the strength and weakness of his subsequent treatment of
the figure.
It is frequently asserted that his drawing is not always correct, and
from the point of view of the schools he would probably himself plead
guilty to the charge. But those who insist upon the point do not perhaps
quite comprehend his motive, which is less the actual structure of the
form than the inherent significance of the figure. Let us grant at once
that the two motives are not antagonistic, that Millet’s “Sower,” for
example, is as structurally correct as it is full of significance. But
that is to put La Farge to the test of one of the greatest masters of
drawing, by comparison with whom very few can stand. By far the greatest
number of draughtsmen, while approaching him in correctness, will be far
behind him in expression. On the other hand, in the case of La Farge,
the significance of a pose or gesture, the vital expression of a figure,
is generally admirable. I have in mind, for example, his drawing of
Bishop Hatto, pursued by rats. The distance from the thigh to the toes
would appear to be exaggerated; but how wonderfully the long drawn out,
tense arc of the figure stimulates the imagination to a realization of
the agony of the crisis. There is another point. The figure, as it is,
so exactly contributes to the decorative balance of the picture. It may
be that the instinct of the decorator determined the length of limb, and
perhaps also, not at all improbably, the influence of the Japanese. It
would not be difficult, for instance, to find in Outamaro’s lovely
prints of women just such an elongation to accentuate the _svelte_ grace
with which he wishes to invest them.
I make this suggestion with more confidence, because one can trace in
the composition of this picture more than a little of the Japanese
arrangement of full and empty spaces; that irregular form of composition
which secures a balance by oppositions rather than by repetition of
similarities. It is, indeed, the method of the nature student, as true
of Velasquez and Rembrandt as of the Japanese. Not that La Farge with
his choice appreciation of the old masters could be insensible to the
influence of the Italians. His great altarpiece of the Ascension in the
Church of the Ascension in New York is reminiscent in its structure of
Raphael’s “Disputá.” The space is very similar in shape, and filled with
a broad band of figures across the base, a central figure in the upper
space, and flanking arcs of angels. Again the mural paintings of “Music”
and the “Drama” in the music room of Mr. Whitelaw Reid’s New York house
were evidently suggested by the pastoral scenes of the Venetian
painters. The latter, however, were themselves, no doubt, suggested by
the desire to emancipate painting from the rigidity of preconceived
formulas of composition, and it is just this attempt to discover a
compromise between the natural and the conventional which is so marked a
characteristic of La Farge’s treatment of mural painting.
It may have been an early feeling after this that at least helped to
draw him toward Rembrandt, especially toward his religious subjects. I
find more than a little of the latter’s influence in the mural paintings
in the churches of St. Thomas and of the Incarnation in New York,
particularly in the solemn, serious naturalism of the grouping; in the
humble devotion with which the spirit of the occasion has been
comprehended, and in the significance of gesture and expression, but
especially of gesture, through which this spirit has been embodied. A
boy’s freshness of faith, dignified by a man’s realization of its
import--a quality very rare at any period, and quite likely to be
overlooked in this one. It is the outcome of a religious temperament--a
thing very different from the religious habit--born of a capacity to
feel deeply the significance of things, and by instinct and culture
fitted to see the beauty inherent in the significance, whether it be the
significance of the spiritual or of the material life or of the subtle
analogy between the two. When the painter can comprehend this and set it
down on the threshold of every-day experience, in such a way as to make
it intimate without being commonplace, its human meaning neither
lessening, nor lost in, the splendour of its expression, we may
reasonably call him great.
And no one denies to La Farge a splendour of expression. He is that
_rara avis_ among artists, who not only sees the world as a pageant of
coloured light, but has found means to express his visions. His
inherited instinct for colour has been assiduously cultivated by
observation and scientific study, the researches of Professor Root of
Columbia University having been enthusiastically followed and adapted by
him to his practical requirements. When circumstances brought to him the
opportunity of executing windows, immediately came into play his
extensive memories, his dreams of possibilities, and, equally, his
independence of conventionalized methods. Finding that he could not
reach adequate results in the material available, and realizing the
weakness of existing methods, he experimented until he discovered the
adaptabilities of opaline glass, which has a suggestion of complementary
colours, “a mysterious quality of showing a golden yellow, associated
with violet, a pink flush on a ground of green.” Moreover, by the
infinite variety of modulations, which its making admits, it allows a
degree of light and shade in each piece of glass, which not only gives
modelling, but increases the depth of tone, sufficient at places to make
the darker parts melt softly into the harsh lead-line. This invention
by John La Farge of the applicability of opaline glass to the making of
coloured windows has put a wide range of means in the hands of the
artist, not only in the general richness and equally possible delicacy
of effect, but in the increased subtlety attainable through
complementary effects and effects of opposition; the material including
all kinds of variety in the texture, quality, thickness, and even
pattern of the glass, and also almost every variation of density and
transparence. It is a palette of extraordinary range, perilously
serviceable in the hands of an ambitious person of meagre knowledge and
feeling, quite susceptive of commonplace exploitation in those of the
ordinary designer. But in the hands of a true artist, who thinks in
colour, and has a store of gathered observations backed with scientific
assurance, it permits the fullest scope to his imagination, and the
opportunity of realizing the most diverse and complex schemes of colour,
allowing him to reproduce much of the mystery that time has wrought into
the mediæval stained glass, and to add to the latter’s chantlike
simplicity of colour and structure the complicated harmonies of modern
music. It is an art, indeed, that brings the decorator within measurable
distance of the musical composer.
The new intent of this glass and the subsequent developments which have
made of it a new fabric were so much the outcome of La Farge’s personal
need of expression that it is not surprising he has reached results
superior to those of others who employ the same medium. A reason which
also contributes to his superiority is that his conception from the
start formulates itself in colour, whereas the genesis of most windows
would appear to be in the lineal design, clothed in colour afterward. In
other words, like every true craftsman, La Farge thinks in his material.
The effect of this has been, at least, twofold. In the first place,
there has always been a reciprocity of influence between his imagination
and his material; while he has been big enough to anticipate the
possibilities, he has been big enough also to accept the limitations of
the medium. In the second place,--and this really follows from the
former,--he has preserved an independence in the character of the
design, neither attempting to reproduce that of the old cathedral
windows, nor dipping, except occasionally, into that universal cook-book
of the average designer, the ornament of the Renaissance. With a larger
sense of fitness he found, if anywhere, a prototype for his motives in
Eastern art, not only in the mosaics of Byzantium, but in the jewelled
inlays, lacquers, textiles, and _cloisonné_ of Japan. Particularly is
this true of the windows of pure decoration which he has executed for
private houses and again of those superb windows in the west end of
Trinity Church in Boston. In these a cultivated taste will be disposed
to feel that the splendour and mystery of the fabric are most abundantly
manifested. It is pure decoration of the most subtle and resplendent
kind.
On the other hand, as soon as the figure is introduced, particularly
when the figure must subserve a religious sentiment, a compromise has to
be effected between the abstract decoration and the concrete form,
between the conventional and the naturalistic. And the inevitable
antagonism between the two has become more difficult to reconcile in
these days, both for the artist and for ourselves who enjoy his work,
because we are no longer satisfied with the simple abstractions of the
human form, which sufficed for the childlike faith and narrower
experience of ancient peoples. In all his figure windows, therefore, it
is most interesting to study how he has eschewed the pictorial motive,
which unfortunately the immature taste of the public so persistently
demands, and to which, either on compulsion or because he knows no
better, the average designer inclines. La Farge, on the contrary, while
frankly admitting the claims or the necessity of naturalistic treatment,
endeavours, as far as possible, to find some modern form of abstraction
for the figure, and to offset it with a freer abstraction or
conventionalization in the rest of his composition; so that while the
significance of the figure, its form and sentiment, is not swamped,
there yet survives the impression that the window is not a picture in
glass, but an elevated decoration of transparent and translucent mosaic,
inlaid in a _cloisonné_ of ornamental lead-lines.
In a brief appreciation of this artist’s work it is natural to dwell
upon him in his capacity of a master decorator, for the whole trend of
his activities, at first, perhaps, unconsciously, later with a purpose
continually strengthened and expanded, has been in this direction. And
he has proved himself a master not only within the restricted field of
American art, but in comparison with the master decorators of Europe.
I have spoken of La Farge’s writings being a commentary upon his
artistic acts. Often it is in a man’s lighter moments that he makes
clear to us the workings of his mind, and La Farge has done so in the
journal which he wrote during a vacation in the South Sea Islands. It is
the spontaneous utterance of a scholar, at once a dreamer and an
analyst; of an artist, also, who sees pictures everywhere; and its
word-painting and many-faceted allusiveness to all kinds of memories,
derived from art and life and literature, render these impressions of
new scenes, which still retain some flavour of the antique world, unique
in their exquisite beauty and suggestiveness. Let me quote one passage:
“From the intricate tangle of green we saw the amethyst sea and the
white line of sounding surf, cutting through the sloping pillars of the
cocoanuts that made a mall along the shore; and over on the other side
of the narrow harbour the great high green wall of the mountain, warm in
the sun, its fringe of cocoanut groves and the few huts hidden within it
softened below by the haze blown up from the breakers. All made a
picture not too large to be taken in at a glance.” Nor yet too distant.
The harbour, observe, is narrow and bounded by a high green wall of
mountain. The picture was not shaping itself to him as it might have
done to the eyes of a pure landscapist, but in a comparatively flat
pattern, as of a wall or window decoration. He sees it with the instinct
of a decorator and with his own personal predilections; for he dwells
upon the combination of green and blue, which any student of his work
may feel to have particular fascination for him. He notes in one part
the tangle of green, its suggestive subtlety of pattern and tone; in
another, where the huts are half hidden, the welcome spot of density;
again,
[Illustration:
Copyright by John La Farge.
THE ANGEL OF THE SUN.
Decoration in the Church of the Paulist Fathers, New York.
BY JOHN LA FARGE.]
the value of mystery in the haze; and finally he correlates the beauties
of contrasted forms and spaces and the varying brilliance and softness
of the coloured light. As I said, it is a decorator’s vision, and the
same in their different degrees of sketchiness is revealed in the
water-colour drawings made at the same time. They are so many notes and
records of a mind perpetually intent on decorative problems.
Recently he wrote a short but exceedingly suggestive appreciation of
Puvis de Chavannes, suggestive most of all because of its conscious and
unconscious implication of his own experience and desires with those of
a brother master in decoration. In their moral and mental elevation
there is much affinity between the two men: Puvis, a Burgundian by
birth, by education a Lyonnais, simultaneously, therefore, romantic and
logical; La Farge, of French descent with romantic and adventurous
associations, yet influenced by the vital practicalness of American
environment. Both have sought to reconcile their respect for tradition
with their interest in the living present; and to recognize the
limitations imposed both by their medium and by their own individual
personality, disciplining themselves to accept the inevitable and to
carry their personal development to its farthest possibility. Its
manifestations in each case are widely different: the robust Puvis
detaching himself more and more from the material and tending to an
extreme of spiritual refinement; the frailer physique of La Farge
reaching out farther and farther toward the interpretation of spirit by
means of material splendour. The differences were personal and local;
but in the quality of their minds and their attitude toward art there is
an unquestionable affinity between these two preëminent master
decorators.
If I read La Farge’s art aright, it is the product of a wide and
penetrating vision, simplified by selection; the theme is then
comprehended in its vital significance, and all the force of his
imagination is assembled to embroider it with a web of elaborate
orchestration.
III
JAMES A. McNEILL WHISTLER
We are already far enough away from the middle of the last century to
gain a fair perspective of it. In matters of belief and feeling, it was
a period of little faith and less initiative. Men moved forward with
their faces turned backward,--in the religious world, seeking ideals in
mediævalism; in art, also, borrowing their motives from the past. It was
a time of rediscovery, of revivals; less of new birth or growth than of
new assimilations. Velasquez, for example, was found to exist; so, also,
Rembrandt; and Caucasian civilization became conscious of an Oriental
art from farther round the globe than the Levant or even India. Japan
was discovered. Today these three names represent potent influences in
art. A few years ago their significance was not appreciated beyond the
studios; still a few years farther back, and scarcely even there. It was
Whistler’s discernment that early recognized their worth; his genius
that utilized the significance so uniquely. How he did it is
characteristic of himself, but equally of the modernity of which he is
so consummate a representative.
And what of this modernity? Intrinsically it is not a new thing, though
taking on some special colour from its particular time of reappearance,
being indeed a culture of manners rather than of convictions. It is
analytical, for it is part of, or compelled by, the contemporary
scientific movement; it is intolerant of restraint, except such as it
chooses for itself; is callous when not personally interested, and finds
its interest in subtleties; its faith is self-found and felt to be
honoured by the discovery; in scope not so much broad and embracing as
diffused and discriminating; for depth, it substitutes a carefulness
about many things, and for sincerity a nice tactfulness. It is polished,
dainty in taste and manners, seeking the essence of life in its most
varified appeal to the senses, even sometimes in abnormal depravity. It
is, in fact, the very antithesis of brawn and muscle, of hard and
wholesome thinking, of the _bourgeoisie_ and Philistinism, through which
a comfortable world is provided for modernity to bask in, either as a
rarely delicate exotic or a upas tree.
While Whistler as a man, in his attitude toward the world, has been the
Beau Brummel of this nineteenth-century modernity, he has kept his art
in a beautiful isolation, selecting for it only the choicest
contributions of the spirit of the age and impressing upon them the fine
distinction of his unique personality. Thus, while some of his
contemporaries in the search for new sensations pushed their analysis
into the gutter, his work has been invariably fragrant and pure. He has
been a consistent apostle of beauty, of the sane and normal type of it.
I do not mean beauty as it is commonly understood, for he has had his
very personal ideas and his own modes of reaching them; but that the
source in which he has always looked for them has been sane and normal;
so that, amid the craving for new sensations and for new forms of
expression, by which, like others, he has been affected, and with a
taste also for notoriety and for shocking the vulgar, he has never in
his art deviated from the sweet and wholesome. Nor has he lived without
a strong faith. He has believed in himself without reservation, and just
as absolutely in his art as he has formulated it. There is one god, and
Whistler is its prophet; a creed narrow and intolerant, but abundantly
justified, if you accept his god, which, again, is Whistler--the
spiritual _ego_ within him to which all his life he has tried to give an
adequate expression.
For his faith at root is a very simple one: the love of beauty and the
expression of it; only beauty with him is one of essence and
significance, quite removed from any literary allusiveness, and as far
as possible expressed by means which are solely the products of brush or
etching needle, sensation and method approximating as much as may be to
the exclusively abstract ones of music. He cannot escape the concrete
altogether and must often use as vehicles of expression things to which
the dictionary assigns terms, and to which the association of memory and
ideas has given a verbal significance. But even in using these he feels
such significance extraneous, and subordinates it as far as possible to
the special æsthetic significance of the pictorial art. It is the
meaning that these things have for the artist’s peculiar vision that he
tries to keep free from other allusion--abstract. It is not the object
before him for the time being that is worth his consideration, but the
enjoyment of the purely æsthetic impression of it aroused in his own
mind, of which he seeks to express the essence in his picture. It is a
theory of art all but too subtle for human nature’s daily food; in a
world in which we are continually confusing cause and effect, the object
with the subject, the source of our enjoyment with the enjoyment itself;
a theory quite intolerable when exploited by a mediocre painter, or by a
facile painter of mediocre mind; only, perhaps, so acceptable in
Whistler’s case, because it is essentially a product of his own unique
originality.
It was his craving for abstract expression as well as for abstract
sensation that led to his symphonies; and the storm of abuse and
ridicule which they aroused gave him, no doubt, a keener relish for such
studies. It would be too much to say that any of them were done
deliberately to mystify the public; but that he found a sly relish in
the mystification is most probable, and one may believe that some of
these, to him only experiments in the record of impressions, were
exhibited with the Satanic purpose of infuriating a public, so enamoured
of the “finished picture.” Today, however, these studies are applauded,
and Whistler is probably as contemptuous of the undiscriminating
approval as of the indiscriminate abuse. For really their vogue is as
open to suspicion as would be a vogue of Bach. In their lack of any
graspable theme and in their delicately elaborated orchestration of tone
they can be appreciated, priced, that is to say, at their proper worth,
only by those whose sense of colour is very cultivated; nor even,
perhaps, by all of them, for these impressions are so personal to their
author that they must always mean more and otherwise to him than to
others.