evil, for what is this “art atmosphere,” when you search it closely? A
little, perhaps, like Scotland, as characterized by a Scotchman, “The
most beautiful country in the world to live out of.” So it is well to
know there are places where the art atmosphere abounds, that one may
visit for a time with pleasure and profit; yet it is remarkable how the
great painters, the men of force and character, whose minds push them on
continually, live either outside of it or within it behind closed doors.
The smallness inseparable from an art atmosphere, the mutual admiration
and amiable reciprocity of patting of backs, or worse, the “Bully, my
boy!” to his face, and the “How he’s missed it!” behind his back; the
petty rivalries of little cliques that clutter of themselves across a
café table, setting up little standards and gaining brief
conspicuousness by repeating one another’s efforts--this is not the sort
of atmosphere that strong painters need to breathe. They would be
stifled in it. They need, like Delacroix or Puvis de Chavannes, the
ample privacy of their own inner life, or, like the Barbizon men, the
large seclusion of nature. For such an atmosphere a painter of Brush’s
calibre would have no use.
He returned to this country; not to city life, but to the wide freedom
of the western territories, and found inspiration for his imagination
among the Indians. I know nothing of what impelled him; whether it were
a survival of a boy’s enthusiasm for the story of his country, or a
suggestion received from the archæological associations of Gérôme’s
studio, or some happy chance of idea, seized upon and followed out; but
the significant point is that, though fresh from Paris, or, shall we
say? because of it, he found motives that attracted him in America. The
older men had found them too, but many of the younger generation,
returning from Europe, were proclaiming, and many do so still, that the
conditions of America are unfavourable to pictorial motives. May it not
be that the barrenness is in themselves? I am not speaking of the
landscape painters, but the figure men. One of their laments is the lack
of picturesque costumes. This same word “picturesqueness” has been the
bane of painting for two hundred years, implying the necessity of
certain formulated qualities in a landscape or figure, rendering it
suitable for the purposes of a picture. Owing to this obsession, Corot
was fifty years old and had paid three visits to Italy before he, poet
though he was, could feel the suggestion of loveliness in the scenery of
his native country. So one must not be too hard on others who are deaf
to the calling of their environment. But let us give no quarter to
picturesqueness. It is a discredited, discreditable evasion of the
facts. The true painter sees pictures all around him or evokes them from
his imagination; the world of matter or of spirit continually presents
itself to him in pictorial fashion; it is only a journeyman who hunts
for picturesque jobs.
It may be said that possibly it was just this picturesque quality in the
Indians that attracted Brush. I cannot say; but had he penetrated no
further than the unusualness of their costumes and habits, as is the
case with others, so far as I know, who have painted them, there were
nothing to be said. But he has penetrated into the life and thought of
the Indian, and, more than that, has re-created in his pictures
something of the primeval world; its vast isolation, silence, mystery.
He has found in these modern redmen a clue to their past and has created
a series of picture-poems which have the lyric melody of Longfellow’s
“Hiawatha,” an equal individuality and appeal to the imagination and a
greater virility. Let me instance “Silence Broken”--a little glimpse of
river, banked with dense foliage, out of which a goose has burst above
an Indian in his canoe. It is a small picture, representing a contracted
spot, but it needs very little imagination to make one feel that this
fragment of seclusion is part of an immensity of solitariness. The man,
kneeling as he plies the paddle, looks up in no wise startled, but with
a grand composure that seems a part of the elemental suggestion of the
scene. It is a work of powerful imagination, projecting itself upon the
solemn spaciousness and mystery of the past.
Recall, too, another small canvas of big significance, “Mourning her
Brave.” Standing by her dead in the snow, high up on a mountain ledge,
the woman utters her dirge to a leaden sky. What emptiness and
desolation of world without and spirit within! A breath of the ceaseless
mystery of sorrow throbbing out of the void of time! Then a tenderer
feeling pervades “The Sculptor and the King.” Stroke by stroke the
sculptor has compelled the marble to respond to his thought, or wooed
it, for he has a gentle, dreamy face; a youth only dimly conscious of
his desires, and he waits for the king’s verdict, tremulously eager, and
withal so glad in his heart at what his hands have found the skill to
do; a poetic embodiment not only of the primitive man’s yearning after
expression, but of the springtime of every artist’s soul. Then note the
king, standing with folded arms, wrapping his doubt of the desirability
of such things and, yet, his wonder and admiration of them in the
convenient impenetrability of silence. There is a touch of humour in
this figure, as of the critic non-plussed and unwilling to commit
himself, but much more of serious reference to the early dawnings of a
comprehension of the beautiful, as “a thing to be desired to make one
wise.”
Those Indian subjects are of a high order of imaginative work. They have
a great power of suggestion, stirring directly and forcibly one’s own
imagination; and they are informed with an elevation of thought, a
deeply penetrating earnestness
[Illustration:
From the collection of Miss Henrietta E. Failing.
THE SCULPTOR AND THE KING.
BY GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH.]
[Illustration:
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright, 1897, by Foster Brothers.
MOTHER AND CHILD.
BY GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH.]
and a largeness of conception that has been able to grasp the big
significances and to feel them in their relation to perennial truth. For
they not only suggest the life and environment of the early redman,
picturing both with a fulness of comprehension that brings them vividly
to our consciousness, but they involve allusions to our own experience.
There are periods of sorrow when the world seems very empty and desolate
to-day; there still are yearnings after higher things, the flutterings
of doubt and hope that precede the beginning of growth of something
better; and still a grandeur in the solitude of nature and maybe in that
of a man’s own communings with himself. We may or may not have
experienced those things, but, at least, we have an intuition of their
possibility; and if a picture can recall the past and show it as part of
the eternal relation of spirit and matter, we are justified in honouring
its author. So these pictures of Brush’s seem to me great,
notwithstanding a certain smallness--I will not call it pettiness--in
their execution. As I recall the “Mourning her Brave,” it has
considerable breadth of method, and, no doubt, others of the Indian
series show increase of manual accomplishment. But the painting in
“Silence Broken,” still influenced by Gérôme’s, is hard and shiny; and
the drawing in “The Sculptor and the King” has a quality of timorous
and laboured exactness. It is not in consequence of style, but despite
it, that they are impressive.
With the artist’s personal development has come maturity of
craftsmanship. His latest series of “Mother and Child” are marked by
fluency of composition both in the lines and masses and in the colour
schemes. But with the ripening of his powers has scarcely followed
increase of individuality. He has freed himself from the hard, evenly
lighted, rather tight character of Gérôme’s manner only to yield himself
to the fascination of the old Italian style. It is a little surprising
that one whose imagination is so individual should have failed to
discover a really personal language of expression. It would seem as if
the lack of facility was beyond his power to remedy, and that, feeling
the need of broadening his method, and conscious that breadth with him
would mean chiefly a larger kind of precision, he had found in the
example of some of the Italian masters just that union of qualities.
Then, too, if he were searching for precedents it is to the dignity and
quietude of the Florentines that such a temperament as his would turn.
And in these later pictures one is conscious of these qualities. They
have an air of noble sweetness, serenity, and high and earnest purpose,
creating, wherever they appear, an atmosphere of their own, pure and
elevating as that of the upper air. Yet, as creative work, I think many
will rank them lower than the promise of his early days. Their motive is
a borrowed one--borrowed with their technique. True, it is one of
beautiful human significance, but its representation, especially to one
who is a husband and a father, makes a comparatively small demand upon
the imaginative faculties. So that, if we feel the evidence of these
faculties in painting to be the rare and superlative thing, the artist’s
persistence upon a somewhat lower plane of endeavour must seem
regretful. It is rather a merging of the artistic prepossession in the
human.
And I wonder whether this may not be the explanation. In early manhood,
while the impulse was from within, he sought the objective for it in the
world outside, characteristically choosing those scenes which would
least interfere with the seclusion of his own mind. In later years he
has found the seclusion in his own home, yielding to the natural
tendency, as the years grow upon one, to feel the world to be less and
less, and those closest to one more and more. And, it must be
remembered, the conditions of the world were never quite to his liking,
while his home is what he has made it and would have it. Yet this,
after all, represents the evolution of a man rather than of the
artist--a yielding to circumstances, inclinations, conveniences, rather
than a following of one’s star.
I write these words with hesitation, as it may be my own fault that I do
not detect in these later works as much evidence of elevated imagination
as in the Indian studies. If so, I would plead in extenuation my
enthusiasm for those earlier pictures.
X
ALEXANDER H. WYANT
There is a species of ivy in England--I do not know if it exists in this
country--that grows over old stone walls and towers. It is treelike in
character and size. Probably it was never planted deliberately against
the masonry, but reached its _habitat_ by one of those romances of
nature’s accidents. Finding the support that its young life needed, it
clung and mounted; gradually, however, gaining independent strength
until in the maturity of its growth it has its own boughs, so hardy that
a man may climb by them, and puts forth bunchy masses of leaves and
berries that disguise the original support in a luxuriance of
independent growth.
Such is often the story of an artist’s development, and is that of
Wyant’s. In the small town of Defiance, in Ohio, where he lived, there
was little to suggest to the boy what pictures meant, and yet he had the
picture-making faculty in himself: the observant eye and desire to
translate into line the forms of things. He drew incessantly: the forms
of stones, of banks, and tree roots, their stems and branches, and made
studies of the leaves, separately and minutely, as well as in masses. I
like to think of him as a child lying full length before the kitchen
fire with a bit of burnt wood taken from it, drawing on the floor; and
fancy that in that soft, suggestive medium of charcoal, and on the rough
surface of his improvised panel, he may have got his first dim
consciousness of the meaning of synthesis in landscape; the securing of
character and tone, and the fascination of working in masses rather than
in outline.
When he was old enough to be set to a trade, he was apprenticed to a
harness maker, working in his leisure hours at sign painting. But all
roads lead to Rome, and a youth might derive much skill in form, as well
as breadth of manner, in this humble department of the fine arts.
Somewhere about the fifties he found himself in Cincinnati, even then an
oasis in the desert of western indifference to, or ignorance of, art. It
was here, in a private collection, that he first discovered what painted
pictures were like, and, with a rare instinct for one so young, it was
Inness’s work that captured his imagination. A youth, passionate and
eager as Wyant was, must have his god or goddess; a being infinitely
above him, yet, perhaps, of infinite condescension, who will listen to
his devotion. Some of us may have offered our heart and future to ladies
nearly old enough to be our mothers; Wyant’s divinity was of the other
sex, an Apollo at whose oracle he would inquire. He found the means to
come to New York and lay his sketches before the master, and never
forgot the kindly criticism which bid him be of good courage and
persevere.
He was now about twenty years old, and nearly ten more years were to
elapse before his own independent growth was to establish itself.
Meanwhile its direction had been assured by the influence of Inness; its
manner of growth was to be partly affected by the Norwegian painter,
Hans Gude, who had graduated from Düsseldorf and was at this time
working in Carlsruhe. He had been the pupil of Achenbach, who, as Muther
says, had “taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and
realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour.”
He had felt the influence, also, of Schirmer, whose fondness for the
so-called Italian landscape had guided him to the “acquisition of a
certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his
pictures.” Such was Gude, to whom Wyant went for instruction. He spoke
in after years of the kindness with which he had been received as almost
one of the household by the painter and his good frau, and one may
imagine that the student took much profit from the master’s emphasizing
of form and construction, and also from the reposeful dignity, academic
though it was, of his compositions. But when the older man passed from
the teaching of principles to that of methods, and urged his pupil to
imitate his particular manner of presenting the truths, Wyant’s
independence rebelled. He had learned what could properly be taught, and
recognizing that for the rest he must depend upon himself, returned to
New York.
Face to face with the problem of making a living, and hoping to gain
useful experience, he joined a government exploring expedition to the
West. But the party suffered terrible hardships, to which Wyant’s
physique succumbed. He was put upon the train to return East, and might
have stopped at his mother’s home to be nursed and cared for. And much
he needed tending, for he was helpless, stricken with paralysis; but the
mind in his poor body was still active; he argued that to be taken off
at a far western station was to become stranded, to lose all touch with
the painter’s life, on which his determination was still fixed. So he
let himself be carried past his home and reached New York. No words can
add to the pathetic heroism of this decision. But in our admiration of
the delicate poetry which belongs
[Illustration:
From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.
THE MOHAWK VALLEY.
BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT.]
[Illustration:
From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.
THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.
BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT.]
to the work of Wyant that we know best, let us not lose sight of the
force of will-power that was involved in the making of it. “Yes, he had
been in hell!” exclaims Carlyle of Dante; and while suffering may not be
the only road to highest effort, it is one of them, and the man who
passes along it like a man, even if he cannot tread it, but must be
carried, as in Wyant’s case, is very apt to produce something more than
ordinarily appealing to the hearts of other men. While Wyant recovered
the use of his body, though obliged ever after to paint with his left
hand, he was never really free from some bodily discomfort; and I wonder
whether this may not have had some influence upon his notable preference
for depicting nature at the hush and restfulness of twilight. To one
whose days were, more or less, days of weariness, constantly sensible of
the afflictions of the body, with what a benediction the evening would
come, full of spiritual refreshment! Out of the cool cisterns of the
night his spirit would drink repose.
For many years he made his summer home in the Adirondacks; then, fearing
that he was getting too much into a groove in his way of seeing nature,
he transferred his study to the Catskills. The move is characteristic of
his alert sensitiveness to nature’s impressions. His temperament was
like an Æolian harp, delicately attuned to nature’s breath, responsive
to its faintest sigh; but he dreaded lest the melody might become too
uniform, too much a merely passive expression. There was a similar
mingling of purpose and of surrender in his relations with his fellows.
To a few friends, among them always Inness, he gave a welcome, and no
little of his time and means in constant acts of kindness to those who
needed help; but from social or official functions he kept, as far as
possible, clear. He had so much that in his heart he longed to do, had
begun his life’s work comparatively so late, and knew the years left to
do it in were few. It was only by unremitting application that he could
realize his ideal.
This concentration of endeavour affected his ideal, limiting the range
of moods of nature that he strove to represent. Such versatility as
Inness’s and that painter’s alacrity of impression to constantly
differing phases of nature were impossible to his temperament and
circumstances. Drawn by both to isolate himself, he heard in the silence
of his own heart the still small voice of nature, listened for it
always, and strove to woo it. The echo of it is felt, I think, in all
his landscapes. We may recall some of his large woodland pictures, in
which sturdy trees are gripping the rocks with their roots. Strength and
stability and the evidences of time confront us, just as they would in
the forest itself; but like cathedral architecture when music is pulsing
through it, they are for the moment secondary to the spiritual
impression of the voice. Wyant heard it in the movement of the
tree-tops, and in the stir of weeds and ferns that nestled in the
hollows, and it whispered to him of peace, a quiescence that stirs the
soul to gentle activity, gladsome by turns or subdued in the alternate
sun and shadow, that inexhaustible mystery of nature’s peace that
passeth man’s understanding. We have all felt it and know how far it is
from our everyday lives, and we look to word-poets and to poet-painters
to create an illusion of it. Surely no American painter has done this
more irresistibly than Wyant. Nor is there wanting to the peace of his
pictures at times a more solemn suggestion. While so many of his
twilights breathe simply the ineffable loveliness of quiet, others are
astir with persuasion to spiritual reflection, with the gentle
admonition to sadness that itself is purifying, or with deeper, fuller
suggestion of the infinite mystery of nature’s recurring sleep that
swallows up the littleness of man in its immensity. I remember, too, a
little picture of darkened earth and rather turbulent dark sky in which
a large boulder alone glistens in the fading light--a rock of
illumination and strength in the surrounding uncertainty of gathering
night. Brimming over with the suggestion of an elevated melancholy
sustained by faith, and painted with an extraordinary earnestness of
simple and direct conviction, it seems like a symbol of Wyant’s own art
life.
But almost everything that he painted is expressive of some phase, at
least, of himself. His work is more than ordinarily personal; perhaps,
for the reason already mentioned, that he so deliberately concentrated
his motives. And the quality of his poetry was lyrical. I have seen it
called idyllic, but that is to miss its higher and deeper qualities. The
idyl, Tennyson notwithstanding, is too much identified with the little
pastoral poem, that breathes the simple gladsomeness of the meadows; but
a more serious strain is interwoven with the gentleness and lovableness
of Wyant’s muse. He was passionately fond of music and, before his
illness, could play the violin, not learnedly, but with true feeling.
And the music of his painting is that of the violin; tenderly vibrating,
searching home to one’s heart, by turns lightsome, melancholy,
caressing, impetuous, but with a tenderness in all. He did not play on
many colours, but reaches a subtlety of tone, often as bewildering as it
is soothing. The bewilderment will be aroused as much by his shadowed
foregrounds as
[Illustration:
From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.
MOONLIGHT AND FROST.
BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT.]
by the faintly luminous sky. They defy analysis and are triumphs of
impressionism. Impressionism of the true kind, I mean, pregnant with
suggestion and divested of aught that would clog its directness;
exhibiting, not knowledge, but the fruit of knowledge, and especially
its tact of omission. To the careless and commonplace eye his landscapes
have “nothing to them”; approached with a little understanding they mean
so much, and the measure of their meaning is the technical knowledge
involved. If there were any doubt of this, it could be disposed of by an
examination of his earlier work, in which he lets one into the secret of
his love of form and construction. Admirably sure and full of character
is the drawing of the ground and its features, bit by bit receiving its
due share of individuality; so also with the trees and their anatomy of
trunk and branches, and with the structure of the sky. Everything has
been studied, so that later out of the abundance of his technical skill
he could be significantly spontaneous. Yet increase of facility did not
lessen the self-exacting conscientiousness of his work. Some of his most
impressionistic pictures were the result of trying to reach a fuller
exactness of expression; when, finding confusion growing, he would seize
another canvas and return to the simplicity of his original thought and
let it form itself. Few painters are better represented in their extant
works. The fumbled canvas, or the one that, however sketchily, did not
attain to his intention, never left the studio, and after his death,
Mrs. Wyant, with a fine regard for his memory and with honour to
herself, destroyed them. So the real Wyants--for I am told there are
sham ones on the market--are invariably worthy.
So truly did he retain the spirit of the student that it was not until a
little before his death that he allowed himself to feel that he had
mastered the grammar of his technique. Then, with the consciousness of
his end before him, he would exclaim, “Had I but five years more in
which to paint, even one year, I think I could do the thing that I long
to.” Brave, modest soul! What he might then have done we shall never
know; but what he did do we know to be very good. For another nature
poet of our race, of like simplicity and singleness of love for nature,
of as choice and elevated a spirit, and as lyrical in expression, we
must go back to Wordsworth, who also in his communings with nature found
her message--
“Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,
And melancholy fear subdued by faith,
Of blessed consolations in distress,
Of moral strength and intellectual power,
Of joy in widest commonalty spread.”
XI
DWIGHT W. TRYON
If we wished to introduce a foreigner to what is most distinctively
American in our painting, we should show him, I think, the work of some
of our marine and landscape painters. He would be least likely in these
to detect the influence of Europe. The point of view he would recognize,
no doubt, as the one common to all nature students since the Dutchmen of
the seventeenth century; but in regard to the technique he could not
attribute its character to the influence of this or the other master
abroad, for our landscape painters, like most other true students of
nature, have found, each for himself, their own necessary and inevitable
language of expression. Necessary because it originated in their own
peculiar need, and inevitable because it grew out of the particular
character of the portion of nature that they studied. And in most cases
it is some phase of the American landscape that has engaged the American
painter, which accounts in no slight degree for the individuality of his
work.