illustrations to “Selections from the Hesperides” and “Noble Numbers” of
Robert Herrick; to the “Old Songs” and “She Stoops to Conquer”; a spot
wherein there must have been so much akin to his own moods of
imagination. What wonder that his drawings have the fragrance of apple
blossom and new-mown hay, the sweet musicalness of rippling brooks, the
delicate atmosphere of the quiet life, and the savour of the old-time
spirit! Within the limits of their particular intention, I doubt if any
drawings are more perfect. Nor do I forget those drawings of the country
by Alfred Parsons, made about the same time and around the same spots;
drawings which show such apprehension of the subtle qualities of rural
beauty, such an eye for lovely fragments, such a sensitive artistry in
picturing them. But the difference in the work of these two close
friends throws a clear light on the special quality of Abbey’s mind.
Parsons pictured what he saw, interpreting the bit of nature in
daintiest terms of art; while Abbey has the power of calling up a
picture in his imagination. Yet in these drawings, at least, there is
not an act of pure imagination; for the text of the poem or play
supplies the idea. His skill is shown in the vivid recreation of the
borrowed theme; in a delicate tact of choice, in his way of representing
it and of illuminating it with a few choice details, and in his manner
of setting the figures and objects in an atmosphere of their own. And I
am not thinking now of that technical accomplishment which surrounds the
figures with an envelope of lighted air, but of that more poetical gift
which enables him to recreate the impression of the old-time feeling. As
he says himself, a picture of bygone manners should be treated as an
artist of its own period might have treated it. It is undoubtedly
Abbey’s faculty of borrowing the habit of mind as well as of manners of
the past that gives a special distinction to these drawings.
But the recognition of this should not obscure the larger faculty of
which this is only a phase, of being able to illuminate the text; to
illustrate it in the true sense, for the term has fallen into discredit.
This is partly the fault of publishers who are apt to insist on the most
literal interpretation of the text, instead of allowing the artist to
reinform the essence of the text with the spirit of his independent art;
and partly, no doubt, to the inability of many draughtsmen to do more
than baldly literalize. Thus we have a perpetual crop of so-called
illustrations, either crowded with detail or almost flippantly negligent
of anything but a certain loose bravura of line and spacing, clever, if
you like, but tediously similar in general character. “She rose to greet
him”--can you not predicate with tolerable accuracy how such and such a
one among many illustrators would represent the incident? In Abbey’s
case you could not. The phrase would formulate in his mind a picture;
complete, daintily suggestive, full of the charming quality of
unexpectedness. But it is when an illustration tries to enforce the text
by picturing some incident of prime importance in the story, with its
play of passion, perhaps, and diverse possibility of appeal to different
minds, that the effort of the ordinary illustrator is so hopelessly
jejune. Such subjects are only partially acceptable when one like Abbey
essays them. Indeed, many of us may have felt that where, as in
Shakespeare, the scene is one of very full significance, affecting the
sensibility of different thoughtful readers as diversely as the same
passage of music will affect its auditors differently, one’s
intelligence and power of appreciation can hardly be satisfied with any
one man’s crystallizing of such fluidity and diversity of appeal into a
fixed presentment.
Abbey’s illustrations to Shakespeare, though I know they are considered
one of his greatest triumphs, have seemed to me to mark the beginning of
less perfection. Again, I am not speaking of the craftsmanship, but of
the spirit that animates the artist. So long as he confines himself to
fragments from the scenes and to subordinate persons, or to those whose
character is very simple and direct, his old charm remains; but when he
attempts a complex character, as that of Portia, he necessarily cannot
please all comers; and when he essays to build up scenes, the old
spontaneity of imagination seems to dwindle. It is as if the foliage of
a tree were beginning to lose its freshness and twinkle of artless
movement; as if by degrees the leaves were losing sap and falling; and
the naked boughs, the bare construction of the tree, were gradually
being revealed. And in Abbey’s case it seems to be a process that has
been going on more and more as he passed to the use of paint and to the
building up of important _mise en scènes_, such as “Hamlet,” “Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, and the Lady Anne,” or “The Penance of Eleanor,
Duchess of Gloucester.”
His passage to paint was but a question of time; not only because to all
artists it seems to offer the largest scope, but because, as a
draughtsman, he has always had the feeling of a colourist. He has
avoided hardness of contours, softening them with light and atmosphere,
and merging the figures in the ensemble. The latter are not merely set
against a background, they are always in and part of the picture.
Further, he sees them as masses. You will scarcely find in his drawings
authority of line, or fascination in the direction and quality of the
line as line; instead, an infinity of little lines, not without feeling,
doubtless, but without a separateness of æsthetic value. It is in the
mass that they count; so that a woman’s gown will not afford a sweep of
movement, but a delightful tissue of lights and shadows. And when he
proceeds to colour it is again the mass that captivates him--masses,
especially of black, of crimson and white. But with this very marked
love for colour, he is not a colourist in the sense of weaving
harmonies of colour. His pictures are still a balancing of masses rather
than an effect of orchestration; and in the voluminous draperies that he
introduces, while there is much influence of the amplitude of Venetian
painting, there is little of its love of light or bigness of
architectonic use of colour. In his treatment of coloured masses he is
nearer to the manner of Holbein or Van Eyck. He does not seem to have an
antecedent realization of the structure of his colour scheme, but builds
it bit by bit, and the units more or less retain their separateness.
Yet, while there is a lack of breadth in the picture as a whole, the
parts are broadly treated, and often with a fine freedom of stroke. In
his earlier paintings, such as the “Pavane,” belonging to Mr. Whitelaw
Reid, he was still drawing with his brush, but in his later ones the
manner has become a painter’s.
But no less natural than this progress of his technical evolution has
been that of his mental one. In the course of this how could he well
escape the Shakespeare cycle; not only because he had begun by
interpreting old English poems and plays, and it was only a question of
time as to when he would feel the influence of the poet-dramatist, but
also because his imagination is of the dramatic kind. He would have made
an ideal stage manager of the highest type. As I have said, it is less
by any originality of conception that his imagination is distinguished
than by an aptitude for grasping the thought of another, reclothing it
with actuality, setting it in its appropriate environment, and making it
breathe again with the spirit of its time. But such a gift, on the stage
at least, is rarely, if ever, accompanied by personal histrionic
ability. It is a gift, of selecting, assembling, and combining, rather
than of absorption of self in a given line of motive. The stage manager
gives the appearance of life to a scene, the actor makes it live, and I
wonder whether it be not true that in these Shakespearian canvases of
Abbey’s and in his mural decorations of the Holy Grail in the Boston
Public Library there is a marshalling of the scene without the dramatic
force. Do they carry us away and fill us with the emotion that we should
receive in presence of the play well acted on the stage or in the
reading of the legend intelligently? We find ourselves, I believe,
rather studying the parts of those elaborate productions, the accuracy
and beauty of detail, admiring the manipulative ability that has
collected and coördinated, and waiting, meanwhile, for the drama to
begin.
And if this is true, may it not be the result of choosing for pictorial
representation a subject of such complex emotions as the player’s scene
in “Hamlet,” or one of such almost inexplicable subtlety as Richard’s
love advances to Anne as she follows in the funeral procession of her
dead husband, or even one of comparatively directer significance as that
of “The Penance of Eleanor”? In his last picture, the “Trial of Queen
Katherine,” he has not attempted to portray the climax of the scene, but
the first pathetic pleading of the “most poor woman.” Surely he did well
to seize for representation this intermediate movement in the scene. He
has gained thereby our human sympathy for a subject which might easily
have been too complicated with highly strung emotions to be immediately
intelligible. And it is one of the merits of this picture that its
appeal is not only impressive but immediate. He has exhibited a tactful
modesty, and I use the word with a thought of its real meaning, which is
something choicer than moderation. He might have attempted a more heroic
note, pitched it to the extreme possibility of the scene. But he avoids
a _tour de force_; and draws us as much by persuasion as by strength; by
the strength, in fact, of what he holds in reserve.
For the peculiar qualities of his strength are quietness and depth. One
may find it in “The Jongleur,” where coming from the castle gate,
flanked on each side by a sheltering range of roof, cheerless outside,
but suggesting cheer within, across the waste of snow the man in
motley’s solitary figure is seen, wincing as he faces the cold and
touching a strain on his mandolin to keep up his spirits. It is a
beautiful picture, full of significant suggestion, not only of the
immediate incident, but of the pathos of the life which lives to amuse
others and of the emptiness of the world for one whose spirit is apart
from it. It is a picture that compares in spontaneousness of expression
with the earlier drawings, and has the fuller import of a maturer mind.
Surely it is along lines such as this of purer imagination that Abbey
will find his truest self.
To his decorations at the Boston Public Library much of what one has
said of the Shakespeare paintings is applicable. They are not dramatic;
their impressiveness is of a quiet and tempered sort. As one becomes
familiar with these pictures, their power to make one feel the
reasonableness and the beauty of the old thought; to feel it, too, not
as something entirely strange, but as of present interest, grows and
grows upon one. The intellect that has conceived them is not of the kind
that leaps to an inspired result. Its quality is choiceness and delicacy
of imaginativeness that wins us by persuasion.
In these pictures, as generally in his others, it is the women that he
introduces who are the most captivating features of the conception. How
beautiful they are! The alluring purity of expression, for example, in
the faces of the Virtues is irresistible. Their heads, fragrantly pure,
sway like a row of lilies in a gentle wind. Their motionless bodies are
arrayed in costumes of delicate richness, each one of which is
differently exquisite; the expression is mostly signified by movement of
the hands and head; along the line there is a simultaneous act of
unveiling, diversified by separate traits of modesty. Perhaps the most
captivating of all the figures is that of the one who holds the young
knight’s left hand. She draws back and yields at the same moment, with a
gesture in which there is a most subtle mingling of confidence and
hesitation. The touch of man is so new to her, yet who may doubt this
youth?
One of the gems of the whole series is the representation of
Blanchefleur, sitting in her dove-gray wedding gown; rose-wreathed and
holding roses in her lap; gazing before her with a look of surrender, so
infinitely spiritual. In her as in the Virtues the painter has made
purity adorable; neither ascetic nor ecstatic, not at variance with the
humanity of womanhood, but represented as its choicest flowering.
Again, in his rendering of the angels he helps us to realize that they
are creatures of the imagination; especially in the last picture, where
their form is vague and they are felt rather as presences. And to this
detachment from mere humanity spiritualized corresponds the expression
of their faces; the rapt adoration of beings raised above the stir of
human passion, in an atmosphere of calm where passivity is action.
However, judged as a series of decorations, following around the frieze
of a room, these pictures are less satisfactory. They count as units,
rather than in progression. One fails to find a rhythmic continuity or
periodic emphasis of movement and colour, they vary conspicuously in
size and colour and in character of composition and motive, and make
their impression separately, instead of being in consecutive accord.
But if from a decorative standpoint these canvases are open to adverse
criticism, let it not divert attention from their essential merit. Such
big and serious effort is none too usual in painting--the opportunity
for it, one must add in fairness, too infrequently occurs--so that, when
one meets it, one’s heart goes out in appreciative acknowledgment.
Within the scope of Abbey’s primary intention of commemorating a great
theme in a series of noble pictures and of reinvesting old truth with
present force, he has achieved a triumph that will win the admiration of
all to whom seriously imaginative work appeals.
VII
GEORGE FULLER
When Fortune is apportioning qualities to the artistic temperament, she
does not always include character. I mean that unflinching rectitude of
purpose which at once answers “Adsum!” to the call of duty, and is not
of the kind that says, “‘I go, sir,’ and went not.” Sacrifice to the
call of art is by comparison a slenderer quality. It is not so difficult
to suffer for the sake of an ideal, especially when a man is young, or
even when he is old, if he keeps his heart young within him, a faculty
which is often rather an incident of the artistic temperament than a
matter of personal effort. But sacrifice to the call of duty, a duty
outside of the art ideals, represents a much higher quality, demanding
the exercise of personal force and the maintenance of a quite unusual
endurance; the quality, in fact, which one sums up as character.
This is one clew to the reading of George Fuller’s life as an artist;
that, at the call of what seemed to him to be his duty, he gave up the
single-aimed pursuit of the treasure where his heart lay; disregarded,
as the world would say, the chances of a lifetime for the dull monotony
of a life of arduous routine, and yet, despite the sacrifice, more
probably because of it, found his ideal after all. But there is another
clew. Fuller’s ideal and his craving after artistic expression were bone
of his bone, flesh of his flesh, an integral, inseparable part of
himself. They did not need stimulating any more than a healthy appetite,
were so normally a part of him as to preserve their natural functions
under any circumstances of life. This is not the way in which artistic
proclivities always reveal themselves. In some cases the art instinct is
not dissimilar to a taste in waistcoats; double-breasted to-day,
to-morrow, single; sprigged, plain, coloured, sober, to meet the
occasions of the moment; put off as easily as put on; a habit rather
than an instinct. This is the trivial, masquerading side of art, so
detestable in a solid world of facts; a conscienceless sniffing of the
air for change of fashion, that reminds one of the jackdaw with a few
peacock feathers in his tail, strutting around and trying to deceive us
into recognizing his superiority to fowls of ordinary degree. I doubt if
the true artist ever humbled himself to proclaim his worth, and nothing
more proclaims his worth than his beautiful humility. It was so, I am
sure we may believe, in Fuller’s case. He was not even conscious of his
power in the way that smaller men of less character are: only conscious
of something that he longed to do and would do in time, if life were
spared, notwithstanding the claims upon his attention of other and more
mundane matters. The beauty of such a process of evolution is all from
within: natural, like the bursting of the honeysuckle into fragrance and
blossom over waste, dry places; not to be judged by what it might have
been in other soil and climate, but fulfilling its special function of
beauty through the inherent mystery of its own independent force.
The product of good New England stock, George Fuller was born at
Deerfield, Mass., in 1822, his father being a farmer and his mother the
daughter of a lawyer. At thirteen years he was taken to Boston and put
first into a grocery and later into a shoe store, but only for a short
time, soon returning to the home farm and resuming his studies at the
country school. Already he had displayed a taste and aptitude for
drawing. When fifteen, he joined an expedition to Illinois that was
engaged in making surveys for the first railway in the state, and then
again, after two years, returned to school at Deerfield. It soon became
evident that the youth had more leanings toward art than business, and
he was allowed to accompany his half-brother Augustus, a deaf mute who
painted miniatures, in a ramble through the smaller towns of New York
State, executing portraits at fifteen dollars apiece. How much of simple
romance there was in these beginnings: the early influence of the hill
life, for Deerfield is a village among the hills; the wider freedom on
the western prairies; and the roaming from place to place with paint box
and wallet, light of heart and heel! All these influences tended toward
independence, self-reliance, and wholesomeness of mind, to the natural
and firm upbuilding of the individuality in himself, before he came in
contact with influences directly artistic. He was fortunate, also, in
his early friendship with artists of so fine a quality of mind and
beautiful personal character as the sculptors Henry Kirke Brown and
Thomas Ball. The former, eight years his senior, invited him to his
studio in Albany, where he studied drawing for nine months, until Brown
and his wife went to Europe. Then he spent the winters of 1842 and 1843
in Boston, returning to Deerfield each summer. In the latter year,
having been elected a member of the Boston Artists’ Association, he
wrote to Brown, who was then in Rome, “I have concluded to see nature
for myself, through the eye of no one else, and put my trust in God,
awaiting the result.” It is just such simple-souled, reliant men who can
possess their souls with patience and reach their end by waiting.
In these early days at Boston, during part of which he shared a studio
with Thomas Ball, he was painting portraits; but in 1846, the year after
his mother’s death, he sold his first imaginative picture, “A Nun at
Confession,” to a patron in Pittsfield, Mass., for six dollars! In the
following year he moved to New York at the solicitation of his friend
Brown, who had returned home, eager to devote the experience he had
gained abroad to the representation of American subjects in America.
During the ten years which followed of study and work in New York,
varied with visits to Philadelphia and the South, it is not difficult to
trace the effect of Brown’s influence upon his earnest friend. One
result of it was to prepare the latter for his own visit to Europe; to
open his understanding beforehand to the wonders that he was to see, and
at the same time to habituate him to an attitude of study, which would
enable him to receive the technical lessons of the various schools and
their stimulus to the imagination without being lost in the wealth of
impressions or unduly influenced by any one of them. The opportunity to
visit Europe came in 1859, when, at an interval of only a few months,
both his elder brother and father died, so that the duty of caring for
the farm and for those left dependent upon it fell to him. But before
settling down he made a tour of five months, visiting London,--where he
met Rossetti and Holman Hunt,--Paris, and the chief cities of Italy,
Germany, Belgium, and Holland; making sketches in the galleries, and
finding especial delight in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens,
Velasquez, Rembrandt, Correggio, and Murillo, apparently with a
particular admiration for the colourists.
An infinite pathos, we may feel, gathers over this visit, affording, as
it did, a view of the Promised Land to a pilgrim whose steps were so
peremptorily recalled to the hard routine of the far-off hill farm; a
first meeting with the lady of his imagination in her full glory at the
moment when he found himself compelled to forego entire allegiance; a
brief vision of the ideal before setting his hand to the prosaic reality
of life. Yet, perhaps, to feel this is to misread the nobility of
Fuller’s character. To him, we may believe, there was a fuller, more
rounded comprehension of beauty in life, manifested simply in the living
of it well with hands and back and brain as well as with the subtler
forces of the imagination; that in this big organic beauty, the beauty
of art might be a fly wheel, but still
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1899, by Curtis & Cameron.
THE SIMPLE GATHERER.
BY GEORGE FULLER.]
was only a part of the beautiful whole. So what seems to us such a
tremendous sacrifice, to him may have been assuaged by the satisfaction
of having the method in which his life should be lived so clearly set
before him; and in this reading of his mind one pays, perhaps, the most
honourable tribute to his character.
For fifteen years no picture by him was seen at the exhibitions, and
only a few intimate friends knew that he still painted in the intervals
of farm labour; at first in one of the rooms of his home, and later in
an old carriage house, converted into a studio. His subjects were
elaborations of the sketches made in Europe, small landscapes, and
portraits of his children, relatives, and friends; often never finished,
sometimes destroyed because they did not reach what he desired.
Meanwhile his work on the farm was successful; many improvements were
carried out, and tobacco culture was introduced with good results, until
the fall of prices in 1875. This forced him into bankruptcy and restored
him to art. During the ensuing winter he finished twelve canvases, which
were exhibited at Boston, meeting with hearty praise and a ready sale.
In 1878 appeared at the exhibition of the National Academy “By the
Wayside” and “The Turkey Pasture in Kentucky,” followed in succeeding
years by “The Romany Girl,” “And She was a Witch,” “The Quadroon,” and
“Winifred Dysart.” Being elected a member of the Society of American
Artists, he sent to its exhibitions “Evening--Lorette, Canada,”
“Priscilla Fauntleroy,” and “Nydia.” Among his other works, exclusive of
numerous portraits, especially of ladies and children, were “Psyche,”
“The Bird Catcher,” “Girl and Calf,” “Fedalma,” and “Arethusa,” the last
named being his single example of the nude. But this rich aftermath of
creative work was all too short, lasting only eight years, for George
Fuller died after a brief illness in March, 1884. He was buried at
Deerfield, and a few weeks later a memorial exhibition was held in
Boston comprising 175 paintings: an almost complete _résumé_ of what
existed of his art work, produced through forty years. Two years later
the house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published a sumptuous memorial
volume, containing appreciations by W. D. Howells, Frank D. Millet,
Thomas Ball, W. J. Stillman, and J. J. Enneking; a sonnet by Whittier,
and engravings by Closson, Kruell, and Cole.