productivity had not been interrupted by those fifteen years upon the
farm; but when he emerged from them it was with a style of painting very
different from his early one. That had been hard in outline, minute and
careful in finish; now it was immersed in atmosphere, tenderly elusive,
quietly luminous, a revery of colour, reticently harmonious. It was no
longer the work of an observation intent upon the outer world, but the
outpouring of his innermost spirit, mellowed, chastened, become
contemplative by time. One may believe that the outer world had become
more and more identified with the necessities of his life, from which he
sought a refuge within himself in his own dreams of spiritual beauty.
For the names of his pictures count as little as the subjects. In all
his best, notably in the “Winifred Dysart,” “Nydia,” “The Quadroon,” and
in “The Romany Girl,” especially that example of the latter owned by J.
J. Enneking, he is not concerned with portraying the individual but a
type, and in giving to it especially a significance of spirit, investing
it in each case with phases of what he had learned to realize as the
spiritual quality of rarest, subtlest beauty. How could the essential
fragrance and indefinable loveliness of maiden innocence as it appealed
to the matured sympathies of his advanced years be expressed otherwise
than he had felt it,--veiled in the romance of shadowed light, a thing
too rarely delicate for sharp, decisive handling? And yet beneath this
tender suggestiveness of method, what strong brush work is discernible!
Not clever, truly, or facile and masterful; rather plodding, ay,
tentative, as of compressed emotion striving patiently for expression.
One has seen a dreamy, tender treatment of the female form, which had no
such staunch underlying structure to support it, work which attracts by
what we hastily style subtlety, and later find to be but an exquisite
veneer to an unstable conception; the artistic affectation of men whose
coarseness of character belies the exquisiteness, and, as one studies
their pictures longer, leaves us unconvinced of their sincerity. But in
the purity of Fuller’s conceptions the man himself and his deliberate,
habitual conviction are embodied.
It is a remarkable feature of Fuller’s development that whereas in age
he belonged to the earlier generation of American painters, he should
have emerged from his fifteen years’ retreat and unaided communing with
himself more truly modern in feeling than the younger men who were then
returning from Paris. By very different ways he had reached an ideal not
dissimilar to Whistler’s; not, to be sure, expressed with the latter’s
inimitable, because so personal, _finesse_, but alike in its devotion to
the abstract and in realization of the correspondence between painting
and music, and not so unlike in its method of expression, so reticent
and mysterious. Fuller also anticipated the motives of the still younger
man, such as Le Sidaner and Duhem, to whom the inherent spirituality of
the landscape or figure is the absorbing search, which they seek to
embody in terms as intangible as possible. Wrapt from all contact with
the distractions of the art world, he had with the prescience of
sincerity put forth his hand toward the most interesting phase of the
latest movements. I mean the search for the significance of things, as
of higher and more abiding value than the things themselves.
Fuller’s life was a romance of more than usual human import,
characterized by a singular unity of purpose. He is not to be
considered, on the one hand as a man, and on the other as an artist,
with qualities, as is not unusual, respectively dissimilar and
conflicting. His art was of himself, truly an ingredient, nourished,
disciplined, chastened, always sweetly wholesome, modest and noble, like
his life. He lived the latter well, and in this high ideal of manhood
realized the ideal of his art.
VIII
HOMER D. MARTIN
Homer D. Martin has been called the first of American
impressionists--doubtless not with reference to his manner of painting,
but to the way in which he formulated his conception of the landscape.
He was not concerned so much with its obvious phenomena as with the
impression that it aroused in his own imagination.
The distinction is a very general one. Everywhere there are those to
whom the obvious appeals with undisturbed frankness; they have an
instinct for facts, and for confronting them singly and directly;
always, too, there are others to whom the facts are but a basis of
suggestion. A lamppost on the sidewalk implies another one beyond, still
others farther on, and on and on; and, by inference, the endless
footsteps in both directions, passing and repassing.
Martin’s earliest study, as a young man at Albany, was with William
Hart, a literalist of very engaging qualities. Hart was faithful to the
forms of nature, as every true landscapist is, and dwelt upon the
details of the scene with a lingering appreciation that did not,
however, prevent him from coördinating them into a very charming
_ensemble_. But his joy in the latter was of the obvious kind, such as
any intelligent lover of the country shares; a joy in the pleasantness
of generous pastures, dotted with cattle, and pervaded with a quiet
prosperity; in the smiling sunshine and grateful shade, in cosey
woodland retreats, that a man might seek in order to bury himself in the
attractions of a book. Always it was the domestic happiness of the
country side that won him, much, indeed, as it won Daubigny; for such
choice of subject is not a consequence of a painter’s particular way of
painting, but of his temperament. The much or little of suggestion that
he receives from the landscape, the quality of personal feeling that he
puts into his pictures, depend upon his character as a man; and the
loyalty with which he follows his own true bias determines very largely
the value of his work. Certainly this is a truism, and yet how often it
is ignored; painters and amateurs establishing, each for himself, some
particular basis of appreciation.
For example, to look for poetic quality in a landscape picture has
become with many an axiom of standard, and they find its expression
chiefly in the manner of tone. So they have no eyes for one of Monet’s
naturalistic studies; its subtle fidelity to a phase of nature does not
interest them. He has found the truth of nature to be enough for his own
enjoyment, and as he has striven to make nature speak direct through his
picture without any promptings to sentiment on his own part, they miss
the suggestion of some special sentiment such as another painter will
enforce, and find Monet unintelligible; much the same, presumably, as
nature itself would be to them a sealed book. The text to them is
unsuggestive; they need a commentator. And how scarce good commentators
are! The vogue of poetic landscape has called into activity many whose
sentiment is merest sentimentality; minor poets of the brush with a
pretty knack of tone and tenderness that passes for poeticalness. It is
necessary to clear the air of any such mild pretence of poetry before
venturing to speak of Homer Martin as essentially the most poetic of all
American landscape painters.
It has been said that there is a Homeric quality in his landscapes.
Clearly this is no attempt to place him in relation to other painters,
as we regard Homer among other poets; but is a reference to the big
significance of his work, to those elemental qualities which we
habitually associate with the poetry of Homer. The bigness of Martin
was principally that of a big intellect. It had its inner shrine, where
he kept to himself the sacredness of his deepest artistic inspiration;
an outer court, wherein he mingled with other men of intellect, and its
sunny entrance steps, where, beyond the shadow of what was to him most
real, he could prove himself to be “a fellow of infinite jest,” a
brilliant _raconteur_, one that all who knew him loved. And the love for
Martin one finds to have been greatest among those who knew him best,
and were most aware of the deeper qualities that underlay his wit and
jollity.
There is, indeed, a rare attractiveness in this combination of depth and
brilliant surface. It is so easy to take life seriously or hilariously,
if one is formed that way; but to be big with seriousness in season, and
big with sportiveness betimes, is the quality of an extra large-souled
man. Of a man, indeed; for the quality is essentially a masculine one,
and rare even among men, particularly in art, so large a portion of
which is feminine in significance. I suppose most of us feel this in
comparing, for example, Tennyson with Browning; and, consciously or
unconsciously, have had a feeling of it in the presence of many
pictures, even by acknowledged masters. Not improbably it is the latent
reason of so much indifference toward pictures in this country by
persons otherwise cultivated. Our past history, as well as the immediate
present, has demanded qualities essentially masculine, and so many
people instinctively suspect the superabundance of the feminine in
painting, or have regarded it merely as a pastime on the part of the
painter, and as suitable chiefly for decorating the walls of a
drawing-room. The one class has ignored the claims of painting; the
other committed itself unreservedly to that kind of picture, which is
least of all the product of intellect, or likely to make any demand upon
the intelligence. They have found it difficult to take a painter and his
work seriously, or would be, perhaps, surprised to find that such an
attitude toward art could ever be expected of them. They would find
incomprehensible the suggestion that a man may be found who puts into a
picture as much mind and force of mind as another man puts into the
upbuilding of a great business; that the qualities of mind expended in
each case may be similar in degree, and not altogether different in
kind; power to forecast the issue, and to labour strenuously for it,
with a capacity for organization, for selecting, rejecting, and
coördinating; a gift of distinguishing between essentials and
non-essentials, and of converting sources of weakness into strength, so
that the issue becomes in each case a monument to the intellect of its
creator. And when one finds, as with Martin, that these big qualities of
mind have been directed to the expression of what is grand in nature,
least transitory, most fundamental, one begins to have that respect for
his art which must precede all true appreciation, and to discover that
it has a close relation to what is noble and most endearing in life--a
deep, abiding reality. During his lifetime comparatively few appreciated
the significance of his work, but it is of the kind that time is
justifying.
A very characteristic example is the “Westchester Hills,” because it is
at once so powerful and so free from any of the small and perfectly
legitimate devices to attract attention; a picture that in its sobriety
of mellow browns and whites (for such, very broadly speaking, is its
colour scheme) makes no bid for popularity; in a gallery might escape
the notice of a careless visitor, and grows upon one’s comprehension
only gradually. In the gathering gloom of twilight we are confronted
with a country road crossed by a thread of water and bounded on the
right by a rough stone wall. The road winds away from us, skirting the
ridge of hill, which slumbers like some vast recumbent beast against the
expanse of fading sky. The dim foreground and shadowed mass
[Illustration:
From the collection of Daniel Guggenheim, Esq.
WESTCHESTER HILLS.
BY HOMER D. MARTIN.]
[Illustration:
From the collection of Louis Marshall, Esq.
THE SUN WORSHIPPERS.
BY HOMER D. MARTIN.]
are grandly modelled; strength, solidity, and bulk, contrasted with the
tremulous throbbing of the light. This contrast of rude, tawny ground
with the vibration of a white sky recalls a favourite theme of the
French painter Pointelin; but one feels that a comparison of his
pictures with the “Westchester Hills” is all in favour of the latter.
Both painters have felt the solemn loneliness of nature folding her
strength in sleep, the mystery of darkening and of the lingering
spirituality above; but Martin is the grander draughtsman of the two,
suggesting with far more convincingness the solid structure of the
earth. So we are made to realize that the phenomenon is not merely one
that he has noted or that we might note, but one that through countless
ages has manifested itself as part of the order of the universe.
Its significance is elemental. We may attribute this to the better
drawing, or, with far more justice, to the superiority of intellect,
that could embrace this larger conception and find the means to express
it. And in studying the means let us not overlook the essential grandeur
of the colour; not of the brave or passionate kind, but sober with a
concentration of subtle meaning, that discovers infinite expression in
the minutest variations of the homely browns and yellows, which in the
shadow yield nothing but their strength and quietude. And, then, what a
wonder of suggestion in the sky! It is not only lighted, but quivering
with light; an elastic fluid that extends as far as one’s imagination
can travel, in height, and breadth, and depth. These limitless skies are
a characteristic of Martin’s pictures. He does not seem to have been
attracted so much by cloud forms or to have been given, as it were, to
building castles in the air; but his imagination loves to free itself in
the far stretches of ether, the circumambient medium through which the
waves of light travel. His skies are brushed in with firm assurance; it
is a pleasure to peer into the canvas and study the sweep and exultation
of the strokes, and then to step back until distance blends them into a
unity of ranging grandeur. And just as Corot said of himself, that he
was “like a lark pulsing forth its songs amid the gray clouds,” and his
skies have the vibrative quality of violin music, so there is music in
these skies of Martin’s, only it is that of the organ and the diapason
stop. True, the note is not always so full and sonorous; as, for
example, in the “View on the Seine” in the Metropolitan Museum, where
the splendid blue and white have a more silvery resonance, which,
however, is less suggestive of songfulness than of the sweep of music
travelling on and on. Indeed, in all his skies, there is less of local
significance than of the suggestion that the ether is a tidal ocean
connecting the fragment of circumstance with infinity.
This landscape also shows that his imagination was not wedded to the
solemn. It is brisk with the _joie de vivre_, and yet not in a merely
sprightly way. In the line of poplars on the right of the picture, each
spiring up into the sky, there is the sense of springing aspiration.
Again, in that beautiful “Adirondack Scenery,” with its waves of
brilliant foliage rolling between the brow, on which we feel ourselves
standing, and the distant cliffs of mountains, what exuberance of
spiritual joy! Spiritual, indeed, for the picture was painted far away
in the West, indoors, and under the affliction of failing health. But
who would guess it from the picture? Martin had so possessed himself of
the sweetness and majesty of the Adirondacks, that he could give out
from himself, drawing upon the treasures of his memory. It was his swan
song, and how characteristic of the essential nobility of the man, that
it breathes such ample serenity, such a boundless sense of beauty, pure,
spacious, and enduring! He never dwelt upon his troubles, as smaller men
do; and this last picture is a grand assertion of the supremacy of mind
over matter,--a poet’s triumphant proof that his dream of beauty was
strong within him to the last.
Martin’s work, like that of other great men, was uneven in quality. But
if it lacks at times perfect intelligibility of construction or of form,
it was not from want of knowledge or ability to draw, as is abundantly
proved by the superlative excellence of these very qualities in his
finest pictures. He had made countless studies, drawn with the greatest
care, revealing a thorough feeling for and comprehension of form. At
times, he may have found a difficulty in translating his knowledge into
paint. His use of the brush, used as he needed to use it to express what
he had in mind, had been necessarily self-acquired, and often it was
rather the subtlety of the effect he desired to express than any
fractiousness of the brush, which caused him to fumble, though, in the
majority of his work, never sufficiently to distress us or to divert
attention from the message that his picture conveys. For always, in his
best pictures, there is this distinction of a message; not a mere
friendly interchange of views between the painter and his friend, or
simple, easy platitude regarding nature’s beauty, but a deep, strong,
personal assertion of some specific truth of beauty, fundamentally and
enduringly true. It is the sort of message that appeals to the depth
and
[Illustration:
From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.
OLD CHURCH IN NORMANDY.
BY HOMER D. MARTIN.]
earnestness in ourselves; and with a comprehensiveness that permits each
of us to draw from it what particularly satisfies himself,--qualities
that are the unfailing distinction of the great works of imagination.
Some of his pictures, in which we shall find these qualities
conspicuous, are “Normandy Church” and “Normandy Farm,” painted during
the years that he lived at Villerville and Honfleur, “The Sun
Worshippers,” “Autumn on the Susquehanna,” “Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario,”
and “Headwaters of the Hudson.” Individual preferences count for very
little; but I cannot resist the pleasure of recording a particular
fondness for the “Normandy Church” and “Sand Dunes.” In the former it
will be remembered how the roof and tower of the church, embrowned with
centuries softened by moss and lichen, stand like an embodiment of
stability against the quiet movement of fleecy clouds that cross the
blue sky, like a token of faith and protection to the little cottage on
the left. It is an idyl of the permanence of hope and consolation in a
simple faith. Then what a full-lunged inspiration of rest and vastness
does one draw from the “Sand Dunes”! It is not the vastness of distance,
for the evening sky is wrapping with greenish gray the sand hillocks,
which are separated from us only by a belt of warm green-brown grass
and a strip of golden-brown scrub. But it is the character of the scene
that is vast in suggestion. We do not feel the sky to be a quilt of
softness, but an abyss of tenderness, assuaging the desolation of the
spot,--a desolation that has the feeling of primeval loneliness.
For, at the risk of repetition, I would dwell once more upon the
elemental quality that characterizes all the best work of Homer Martin.
Not only is his theme elevated and serious, clothed moreover in
pictorial language of corresponding significance, but it shuns the
trivial and transitory and attaches itself to what is basic in nature’s
beauty and perennially true. In his masterpieces there is the evidence
of a great mind, for the time being unreservedly consecrated to great
ends, and expressing itself in an imagery of grandeur and enduring
suggestiveness. To recognize these qualities is to rank him highest of
all the poet-painters of American landscape.
IX
GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH
To many a young student, regretfully turning his back on the few bright
years of study in Paris, has come the question, “What must I do to be
saved?” Hoping all things, believing all things of his single
determination to succeed, he feels within him a capacity; but how shall
he apply it? I fancy there are two classes of such aspirants: those who
look around them for suggestion, and those who look within. Among the
latter seems to have belonged George de Forest Brush.
Knowing him in the light of his later work, we may feel it one of the
anomalies of art that his master in Paris should have been Gérôme. Yet
looking back over our own lives, we realize that it was the element of
character, the presence or lack of it in those with whom we came in
close contact, that determined their influence upon us. And this quality
of character was strong in Gérôme,--of all the more value to Brush
because it was of a kind in many respects so dissimilar to his own. He
is something of a rebel,--I use the word in its most respectable
sense--intellectually independent, prone to dissatisfaction with things
as they are, unconventional, perhaps a little impractical and visionary,
as rebels are apt to be,--qualities, all of them, that are facets of
character. Gérôme, however, a conservative, addicted to rote and rule,
with his scholarly devotion to semi-classicalism or, as some more
severely style it, pseudo-classicalism; a cold precisionist, who would
render the death of a Cæsar as accurately and dispassionately as a
surgeon dissects a corpus--such a character would be a wholesome
make-weight to a young romantic mind.
It would emphasize especially the need of knowledge and mastery of
facts, encouraging the formation of a stable basis on which romance, if
it were minded to push its head into the clouds, might at least have
sure foundation for its feet. Certainly, one accomplishment that Brush
brought back from Paris was a feeling for form, and another was a
faculty of seizing upon the reality of things and of keeping close to
facts. No doubt it is as a painter of ideas that he is significant; but
do not let us overlook the point that all his work, especially the
earlier examples, shows an appreciation of the actual. How much of this
he owes to the influence of Gérôme it would be hard to estimate; but
even if this realization of the mental and artistic value of the actual
is an element in his own character, the contact with this master must
have done much to give it fibre. For the sense of actuality is
communicable, while ideas are not only personal to their author, but
inalienable. And how distressingly elusive, tame, and profitless in
pictures are ideas unbased on actuality--the landscape, for example,
that makes for sentiment without support of drawing and construction. In
pictures of the human figure an inspired control of colour may fill us
with enthusiasm, but cannot wholly stifle our regret if the drawing is
inadequate; for the beauty of nature is the beauty of its forms and of
the coloured raiment that clothes the forms without disguising them,
while in the world of spiritual ideas the beauty depends upon their
association with or analogy to the world of matter.
So let us recognize the value of the master’s influence upon Brush.
There was much that he had to unlearn as he pursued his own evolution,
notably the sleek, hard, and dispassionate method of Gérôme’s painting.
But his brush work every painter of distinguished character must acquire
gradually for himself, just as a writer, if he is an honest craftsman,
will discover his own fashion of words, adjusting his method of
expression to what he is trying to express; the main thing, both for
painter and writer, being to have something to say: something which is a
part of the man’s self and convictions. The method will grow to it.
Leaving Gérôme’s studio, Brush, like other students, stood at the
dividing ways. He might have cast his eye around him, noted what seemed
to be the tendencies of the day in art, the “latest style,” as the
fashion-makers call it, and set to work to reproduce in New York the
impressions aroused in Paris. Then, in time, he would have been among
those who excuse their own lack of initiative with the lament that in
our city there is no “art atmosphere.”