of that degree and quality which passes for intimacy in the polite
society of to-day--a conformability to certain types of manner and
feeling, with interesting little accents of individuality, that shall
distinguish without too keenly differentiating; traits of style rather
than of personality. Sometimes there is even less than this. The
subject would seem to have got upon the artist’s nerves, interfering
with the usual poise of his study, so that he seems to have allowed
himself to be sidetracked on to some loopline of the temperament.
Occasionally he touches a deeper level of intimacy, as in the portraits
of Henschel, Mr. Penrose, and Mr. Marquand, and oftentimes in children’s
portraits, notably in that of Homer St. Gaudens. But for the most part,
I believe, it is not the personality of the sitter that attracts us so
much as that of the artist, which he has seized upon the occasion to
present to us; a personality of inexhaustible facets and of a variety of
expression that, for the time being at least, creates an illusion of
being all-sufficient.
What a contrast he presents to Whistler, with whom he shares the honour
of being among the very few distinctly notable painters of the present
day! Sargent with his grip upon the actual, Whistler in his search for
the supersensitive significance, are the direct antipodes in motive.
Each started with a justifiable consciousness of superiority to the
average taste of his times; but while Whistler, on one side of his
character a man of the world, has in his art withdrawn himself into a
secluded region of poetry, Sargent, almost a recluse, has delighted his
imagination with the seemings and shows of things and with their
material significance.
Is the reason for this merely that success claimed him early and that he
has not been able to extricate himself from the golden entanglement, or
that deeper one, noticeable in many artists, that their artistic
personality is the direct antithesis of that personality by which they
are commonly known to the world? Otherwise, this man with his gift of
seeing pictures, with his power of a brush that seems loaded with light
rather than with pigment, with his smiting force or tender
suggestiveness of expression--what might he not have done had he
followed the bent of his mind, a mind stored with culture, serene and
reflective? Something, doubtless, less dazzling than his portraits, but
more poetical, more mysteriously suggestive, more distinctly creative.
As it is, some little studies of Venice, such as “Venetian Bead
Stringers,” come nearer probably to the true spirit of Sargent; to that
exquisiteness of fancy which he developed more completely in the study
of children lighting lanterns in a garden, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose.”
The refined originality of this embroidery of light and shadow, the
lights so brilliant, the shadows penetrated with mystery, the
affectionate tenderness with which the children and flowers are
represented, the lovely imaginativeness of the whole conception, bespoke
qualities which have appeared only partially in the portraits, and are
altogether of a rarer significance than their vivid actuality. This
picture is perhaps even more acceptable than his elaborate decorations
in the Boston Public Library, because it represents more unreservedly an
artist’s vision and one of such delicate apprehensiveness. The
decorations involve a more laboured, conscious effort to produce
something noble, and the literary allusion encroaches somewhat upon the
æsthetic. Yet to enjoy them we are not bound to thread our way through
the maze of mythological suggestion. The panels are full of dignity and
beauty, considered purely as decoration; finely rhythmical in the
frieze, stern with tensity of form and deliberate harshness of colour in
the lunette, a labyrinth of tapestried ornament in the soffit of the
arch.
Their significance, both as decoration and allusion, is progressive,
passing from the serene simplicity and tempered realism of the prophets,
through the mingling of human tragedy and symbolism in the misery of the
apostate Jews, up to the bewilderment of beauty and horror in the
representation of the tangle of false faiths. Moreover, this graduation
of motive bears a very skilfully adjusted relation to the architectural
function of the several spaces embellished. Unfortunately the room
itself has very little architectural reasonableness, and is unworthy of
the decorations, which will not establish their full dignity of effect
until the remaining spaces are filled. So it is scarcely fair to compare
them with Puvis de Chavannes’s in the same building, which involve a
completed scheme, for which, too, the architects made due provision.
Further, the motives of the two artists are so radically different:
Puvis, content to shadow forth a vague conception in abstract terms;
Sargent, seeking to embody the facts of men’s mental and moral life in
their direct and actual significance. It was a more daring problem, and
one that perhaps is more closely knitted to the feeling of our times.
The solution is a most notable attempt to bring the intellectual
faculties into harmonious accord with the æsthetic.
It is along the line of these decorations and of “Carnation Lily, Lily
Rose” that one believes the true Sargent may be discerned. In them he is
giving utterance to himself; in his portraits responding with a certain
_hauteur_ to the allurements of his day.
V
WINSLOW HOMER
In the American section at the recent Paris Exposition, no painter made
a more distinct mark than Winslow Homer. The foreign critics seemed to
be conscious of a fresh note in his pictures: one not traceable to
European influences, still less suggestive of Parisian technique; a note
of unmistakable force and independence. Could it be considered
representatively American?
Almost for the first time this question appeared to be asked with a real
interest in the answer. Foreigners had long been acquainted with
painters from America, who came over in increasing numbers, and showed a
remarkable faculty of quickly assimilating the teaching and influences
of Europe. But were there any distinctively American painters? Those
students who remained in Europe, though many of them were individual and
forceful men, merged themselves more or less completely in their new
environment. What, then, became of those who returned to America?
Presumably they carried back with them the Europeanisms they had
acquired. So far as could be judged from the showing made by American
painters at previous expositions, they were but reflecting the
influences of Paris or of German and English painting. Was there, in
fact, as distinguished from art in America, any American art? And with a
languid interest in a matter so far detached from their personal
knowledge, the foreigners had answered the question for themselves,
negatively. However, the Exposition of 1900 contained an American
section which revealed a great deal of motive and character that could
not be lightly dismissed as but a reflex of Europe. It might have been
made even more representative of the difference which the American
environment is steadily impressing upon the work of Americans who live
and paint at home; but notwithstanding its shortcomings in this respect,
the exhibition undoubtedly gave evidence that such difference already
existed. The evidence was largely of the circumstantial kind, to be
gathered not from any patent fact so much as from a collating of various
hints of motive and character, and from a comparison of them with those
exhibited in the pictures of other countries.
Then one gradually became conscious of more sobriety, earnestness, and
simplicity; in fact, of a more obvious conviction, in the American work
[Illustration:
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
THE LOOKOUT--“ALL’S WELL.”
BY WINSLOW HOMER.]
[Illustration:
From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.
THE WEST WIND.
BY WINSLOW HOMER.]
than in that of the French section as a whole. The Americans did not
seem to be painting in obedience to some vogue, still less with the
purpose of creating one; they were not thrashing around for motives
which should electrify, by shock or thrill, and prove a brief sensation;
nor, on the other hand, did they seem to be bent upon exhibiting the
particular advantages of this or that method of technique. Their work
for the most part was unassuming and straightforward, penetrated with
realism and often tempered with poetic feeling; not less suggestive of
the true painterlike way of conceiving the subject because it was
executed with so little desire to exploit the mere painterlike facility
of brush work, and yet showing a sound and advanced acquisition in
technique. Indeed, it was in this particular that the American work
showed superior to that of Norway, with the fresh, vigorous spirit of
which it otherwise had so much in common. These qualities of earnest
force, of directly independent vision and strong, straightforward
treatment, so conspicuous in Homer’s pictures, drew the foreign critics
to a conclusion that this virile personality might be really
representative of American art.
And so it is in the sense that it embodies the qualities and point of
view for which all our most individual painters are striving, though
its power and depth place him above any direct comparison with other
painters, unless it be with Homer Martin. Like the latter, his art has
grown out of and into the circumstances of his environment, the most
reasonable and fertile way of growth both in plant life and in the life
of man. As a boy at Cambridge, Mass., he led the true boy’s life,
interested in animals, fond of fishing, observant also of the character
and forms of nature, early recording his impressions on paper in a long
series of methodically careful drawings. So, from the start, he learned
to feel things and to see things for himself, and to express them as
they affected him. The accident of an advertisement in a local paper
landed him in a lithographer’s workshop, where for two years his habits
of methodical application were confirmed, leaving him at the end no less
earnest and enthusiastic as a student, but determined that henceforth he
would bow the neck to no one. After a brief sojourn in a Boston studio,
during which he contributed drawings to Harper and Brothers, he came up
to New York, refusing an offer to enter the art department of those
publishers, but accepting an appointment at the outbreak of the war to
represent them at the front. Meanwhile, he had been attending the night
school of the National Academy, and taking lessons in painting from
Frederic Rondel, a Frenchman, then in considerable repute as a painter.
His contributions to _Harper’s Weekly_, though somewhat tamely precise
in drawing, gave with much spirit the character as well as the episodes
of camp life. Subsequently, on his own behalf, he paid two more visits
to the Army of the Potomac, during which he put in practice what he had
learned of painting, finally producing “Prisoners from the Front.” This
picture, shown at the exhibition of the National Academy in 1864, made a
profound impression. Popular excitement was at fever heat, so the
picture fitted the hour; but it would not have enlisted such an
enthusiastic reception if it had not approximated in intensity to the
pitch of the people’s feeling. It has, in fact, the elements of a great
picture, quite apart from its association with the circumstances of the
time: a subject admirably adapted to pictorial representation,
explaining itself at once, offering abundant opportunity for
characterization, and in its treatment free from any triviality. On the
contrary, the painter has felt beyond the limits of the episode itself
the profound significance of the struggle in which this was but an eddy,
and in the generalization of his theme has imparted to it the character
of a type.
It is at this point that the true artist parts company with the mere
practitioner, however accomplished. His work is more than of local and
temporary interest; it has a savour, at least, of the universal, which
keeps its significance from perishing. The savour need not necessarily
be serious; it may be, as in Watteau’s case, a distillation of the
elegance of life; but with Homer its seriousness was inevitable, his
temperament seeming to require a ground-bass of motive, grand and
solemn. So when he occupies himself with character pictures, drawn from
country life, they are comparatively trivial. He cannot, like Millet or
Israels, discover the fundamental note of humanity beneath the
individual. That note may be solemn enough, but it is not big enough in
a forceful way to awake his imagination. His pictures of this genre are
shrewdly studied and reasonably good in characterization; but, being
detached from any background of big intention, their interest is merely
local, and they are not done with that ease and style which might secure
them technical distinction. But while waiting for the fountain of his
motive to be again moved, how commendable it is that he did not set to
work to repeat his success of the “Prisoners from the Front,” as a
smaller man would have been tempted to do!
At length, however, he finds again the fundamental motive which he
needs, this time in the inspiration of the ocean. Off and on for many
years he has led the life of a recluse on a spit of land near Scarboro,
Maine, whose brown rocks piled in diagonal strata have from time
immemorial withstood the onset of the Atlantic combers; an atom of
impregnable stability in presence of vastness, solitude, and the
perpetual flux of elemental forces. Grounded on his own stalwart
individuality, he has kept himself aloof from the truck and scrimage of
conventional life and filled his soul with the vastness of nature. How
instances of this isolation from the world multiply in the story of art:
Watteau retreating into the impenetrability of his own soul; Delacroix
and Puvis de Chavannes into their barred studios; Rousseau, Millet, and
the rest of their brotherhood into the recesses of the forest. Such
isolation seems to be the road to greatness; partly, perhaps, because
the man himself must have the elements of greatness in him to wish to do
without the constant reinforcement of the world, where men and women
prop their shoulders together and make believe that they are standing
independently.
Henceforth, then, the ocean supplies the ground-bass of motive in
Homer’s art, and the magnitude of its influence begins to inform his
work. Deepening in significance, it becomes simpler in expression, and
the simplicity is revealed in a fuller synthesis of manner; it grows in
comprehension, in force and directness, gaining breadth and freedom of
execution, greater purity and subtlety of colour. But he does not at
once realize the full significance of the ocean itself. For a time he
sees only its secondary significance in relation to the life of the
fisherfolk, to whom it is, at once, the means of existence and a
perpetual threat of danger. He paints such grandly dramatic pictures as
“The Life Line,” “Eight Bells,” “Danger,” “All’s Well,” “Undertow,”
“Watching the Tempest,” and “Perils of the Sea”; a series of dramas to
which the ocean is the background. How original they are: the subject
seen so individually and carving itself out in the artist’s imagination
with such incisive force! Moreover, what wholesome breadth in his
sympathy! He does not, like Cottet, the eminent painter of the
fisherfolk of Brittany, picture the lives of his people as darkened by
the pall of an irremediable fatality. He paints them as strong men and
women, fronting with strength the vicissitudes of their existence; a
point of view entirely akin to his own strong force of character. For
here one reaches the tap root of his
[Illustration:
From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.
THE MAINE COAST.
BY WINSLOW HOMER.]
power. It is character: a personal strength; not of the complex kind
that diffuses itself over many issues, but self-centred and direct. It
is the actuality of things which perpetually seizes his imagination and
on which he concentrates for the time being all his energy. And, surely,
it is because this is so essentially the quality of present American
civilization that he is preëminently the most representative of American
painters. He is a product of his time, has sucked nourishment from it,
and translated its nobler quality into terms of art.
But it is in his marines that he seems to reach the ripest maturity of
his genius; and most completely, perhaps, in the “Maine Coast.” The
human import of the ocean has spoken home to him at last, in its least
local significance. This picture involves a drama; but the players are
the elements; the text, of universal language; the theme, as old as
time. With the enlargement of purpose has come a corresponding grandeur
of style; they realize, as no other marines with which I am acquainted,
the majesty, isolation, immensity, ponderous movement and mystery of the
ocean,
“boundless, endless, and sublime--
The image of Eternity--the throne
Of the Invisible.”
--They seem to be the spontaneous utterance of a soul full to
overflowing with the magnitude of its thoughts.
A word must be said of Homer’s skill in water colours. They have the
quality of improvisation; snatches of impression, flung upon the paper
in the ardour of the moment; tuneful bits of movement and colour,
gladsome as the light and quick with the spirit of the occasion; and,
being so close to their author’s intention, they have a vigour and
directness all his own.
VI
EDWIN A. ABBEY
It was but yesterday, though in this country that is a long time ago,
that American painters with the zeal of the neophyte were declaiming
against the story-telling picture. Of course, we know that the objection
was well taken in regard to a large class of pictures, wherein the story
was the “thing,” the way of telling it merely incidental and generally
banal. But, like many other good principles pushed to excess, it
resulted in a bathos as complete as that from which it would have saved
us. Countless canvases have been painted, which possess no human
interest and very little artistic justification; the barren issue of a
mere negation. Slowly there is coming a reaction, and we are beginning
to realize that a painter is none the less an artist for having
something to say, may even ultimately depend for his ranking as an
artist upon the quality of what he has to say, provided always that he
says it in true painter fashion, with reliance, in fact, upon the
vocabulary of his own particular art.
Among those who have never allowed themselves to be troubled by the
art-for-art’s-sake grain of truth in a bushel of chaff is Edwin A.
Abbey. As an artist he must largely stand or fall upon his merit as a
teller of stories. Have his stories been intrinsically interesting? Is
his way of telling them artistic? That he has won his way from a stool
at the drawing table of Harper and Brothers to a seat in the Royal
Academy will not of itself convince a great many people, who are of the
opinion that the story-telling picture is just what attracts the English
and is the bane of their Academy. So, to reach an acceptable estimate of
Abbey’s rank as an artist, we must confine ourselves strictly to the
character of his work, both in pen and ink and in paint.
It was in 1871, when he was nineteen years old, that he passed from his
student days at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts into the
employment of the Harpers, becoming one of the firm’s band of
illustrators, including, among others, Charles S. Reinhart, Howard Pyle,
Joseph Pennel, and Alfred Parsons, who helped to draw attention in
Europe to the superiority of the chief American illustrated monthlies.
In 1878 came his first great opportunity, when he was commissioned to
illustrate some of the poems of Herrick, and, in search of material,
visited England, where, except for a few short visits to this country,
he has remained ever since. He betook himself to Stratford-on-Avon and
Bidford, and later to Broadway, in Worcestershire.
Probably every true artist has within him a little world of his own, an
island in the ocean of the world around him, a little spot of fact, on
which flourish the trees and flowers and personages of his imagination.
He is happy if circumstances permit him to work in it, and still more
happy if his world of fancy has some correspondence to the actual world
about him. Such was Abbey’s happiness in having his footsteps directed
through rural England. On the other hand, it could have been no accident
that put it in his way to illustrate an old-time poem. The whole tenor
of his subsequent work, since he has been at liberty to choose his own
subjects, proves that the bias of his temperament is toward the past: to
the days of picturesque costume, to a period remote enough to justify
his fancy in selecting what it would, and ignoring what it would not.
Nor do I overlook the fact that Abbey from the first has shown an
ability to create from within himself an environment for his
conceptions. Yet, even so, he could not have lighted on a place more
fertilizing to such a temperament than the English scenes among which he
has moved, with their old-time associations and simple rural
loveliness.
Broadway, for instance, is on the old post road that runs from London,
through Oxford, on to Worcester and the west; within easy reach of
Stratford and Kenilworth; its nearest station, Evesham, an old market
town where Simon de Montfort, who first stood up for Englishmen against
the Norman conquerors and for the rights of the common people, was slain
in battle. As you near the village the pleasant vale of Evesham narrows
into a horseshoe of hills, gentle slopes of verdure intersected with
hedges, and rimmed with coppices and woods. Millet’s house is at the
entrance; a little farther on, the village green; and a little farther
still a fine old gabled inn, where Cromwell, says the story, slept after
his victory at Worcester. The broad street, continually mounting, passes
between gabled farmhouses, buried in ivy, and cottages whose windows are
bright with pot geraniums and little gardens filled with the flowers and
herbs that Ophelia crooned of; past doorways that bear the date of that
first James, “the most learned fool in Christendom”; past the remantled
farmstead where Mary Anderson in her present _rôle_ of wife and mother
would fain forget that she has been a star; till it winds up in a thin
line of white between the green and
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1902, by Carnegie Institute.
THE PENANCE OF ELEANOR, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.
BY EDWIN A. ABBEY.]
[Illustration:
From the collection of Whitelaw Reid, Esq. Copyright, 1902, by Whitelaw Reid.
PAVANE.
BY EDWIN A. ABBEY.
(Painted in 1895 to occupy a special place in the room where it now
is.)]
brown, and vanishes at the top of the hill, where beyond the mounds and
hollows of a Roman encampment there is only the knowledge of a modern
world. But you have scarce seen Broadway until you have penetrated into
some of the cottage and kitchen interiors, with their wide-open hearths,
smoke-stained timbered ceilings, from which hang hams and flitches of
bacon and strings of onions; or passed to the backs of some of the
houses and explored the dairies and quaint inglenooks of architecture,
the trim vegetable gardens, the apple orchards and the barnyards, in
close companionship with which is always the vivid green of the pleasant
hills.