awarded the gold medal, by the vote of exhibitors, at the exhibition of
the American Art Association in 1887. The scene is a stable interior,
with drab walls, in which a woman in a blue gown is milking a black and
white cow, whose calf is standing near. The light enters by a window on
the right, and percolates through the dim recesses of the stable. At
first one is conscious of the quiet beast standing across the picture,
turning its mild head toward us, and of the woman in half shadow, a
strong-bodied form in the easy attitude of a habitual occupation; but by
degrees the eye penetrates the surrounding gloom, and discovers another
figure and other objects in the background. In this gradual evolving of
the subject, art has followed nature, and one feels also the evidence of
a dignified reserve, as of a man who does not wear his heart upon his
sleeve or admit you hurriedly into the privacy of his thought, but
assures himself first of your sympathy and then bit by bit unfolds to
you his purpose. Another characteristic of this picture is its
grandiose passivity, its suggestion of a liberal acquiescence in
nature’s plan. We shall find this same large outlook, under various
guises, in a great number of Walker’s pictures. Represented most
differently, one meets with it in “Morning,” in which a flock of sheep
have just emerged from a shed and are beginning to nose about the
meadow, which stretches behind them, glistening with dew and bounded by
a coppice of delicately branched trees, through which the morning sky,
just quickening with light, is visible.
Here again is a suggestion of the routine in nature’s scheme: the
awakening of day, the following on of the beasts to play their appointed
part. And I think we shall be conscious also, for this is a later
picture, penetrated with subtlety of manner and meaning, of an
extraordinary suggestion of the remoteness of nature at this silent,
undisturbed hour. It is a repetition of an occurrence as old as any time
we wot of, and it links this modern scene in our imagination with
Virgil’s “Eclogues,” with Homer’s “Odyssey” and the Hebrew Laban’s
flocks, forming a link in the endless chain of pastoral recollection, at
once the most enduring and most lovable of all our impressions of
nature. Nor let us omit to notice the remarkable technical skill
involved in the painting of this stretch of meadow, the exquisite
gradations of tone in the silvered greens as they recede from the eye,
the delicate stir of animation in the grass, and also in the painting of
the sky, which is kept so surely behind the trees, while its gathering
volume of light steals gently through them. So complete is the unity of
the picture, so musical its vibration, that from the whole scene there
seems to exhale a delicate sigh that floats through the fragrant
soundlessness of awakening nature.
Such technical accomplishment is the outcome of Walker’s penetrating
earnestness. Like most of the best landscape painters of every country,
he is entirely self-taught. The appeal of nature, to one who is a true
lover of it, is so personal that no other man’s method will avail to
express what he feels. He is compelled to discover his own way of
utterance, conforming in its individuality to the particular quality of
his sincerity. With Walker the sincerity is characterized not only by a
determination to reach the truth, but by an instinct for the larger
kinds of truth, those which need no enforcing, but make their own
significance slowly and surely recognized. Nothing is more conspicuous
in his best work than the reserve with which everything is stated. He
puts forth his strength with calculated orderliness, gradually letting
one into the heart of his meaning, continually stimulating and rewarding
by further study, and leaving one at last with the consciousness that he
has held back part of what he had in mind. He leads one, indeed, to the
dim border land where one says good-by to facts and yields only to the
imagination. In this respect he is nearer to Israels than to Millet in
his attitude toward peasant life. The peasant of Gruchy was so
profoundly impressed with the pitifulness of the peasant’s life that his
story of labour with all its force is a restricted one. He missed its
nobler aspect in relation to the universal scheme, and feels only its
heavy fatalism. Israels has a wider sympathy, which can discover beauty
in the monotonous routine, the beauty of little observances well and
faithfully done, and the quiet intervals of rest and homely joy that
intervene. But while Walker is akin to the Dutch artist in the embracing
tenderness of his vision, he excels him in breadth and force. Israels
continually invites you to look in; Walker, to look in also, but to look
around as well.
In this respect he reminds one of Troyon, whose magnificent landscapes
and grand cattle are big with nature’s fecundity and strength. There is
not a little of these two men in Walker; of Israels’ tenderness and
Troyon’s breadth. Even in so stirring a subject as the large “Ploughing
in Acadia,” painted about 1887, there is this infusion of tenderness.
The three horses straining abreast are full of vigour; they tug with a
sustained effort in which the continuity of the movement is finely
expressed; the high gear above their saddles, covered with sheepskin,
tosses in the air over their shaggy arched necks; the old man at the
plough tail is stocky and hale; lusty green weeds have their roots in
the strong earth, and the sky is full of bracing weather. Through and
through it is a sturdy picture; but note, also, the affectionateness
with which the head of the nearest horse is rendered. He is of the
Normandy breed, the most willing of servants, the most intelligent of
animal companions. His eye is bright, the nostril inflated; he is
rejoicing in his strength; and later on, when labour is over, he will
nose into his master’s jacket and both will feel like friends to one
another. This is the wholesome, natural view of the peasant’s labour,
when it is really close to the soil and uncorrupted by a cheap press;
man and the animals going about their appointed task until the day is
done, and finding companionship with one another and with nature; and it
is not without a quiet happiness of its own.
This ploughing scene reminds me of a later one, painted a few years ago,
of two oxen coming up the furrow with their massive, leisurely
movement, while behind them the light is mounting up in floods of
crimson, that overflow upon the broad backs of the beasts and lap the
cool, glistening earth. It represents the first moments in nature’s
daily awakening to life and in man’s daily routine of labour. Both in
the sky and on the earth there is the steady gathering of force; not a
burst of energy, but that massing of energy that will not readily expend
itself. I have heard it remarked that the oxen look tired already, and
the men likewise; but perhaps it is rather a passivity of feeling that
is conveyed, that slow, unquestioning resignation, that is at once so
pathetic and heroic in the true peasant.
And in another way many of these canvases of Walker’s involve this
heroic suggestion. While close studies of pastoral and agricultural life
in a portion of this continent to-day, they have a more universal
significance and set one’s imagination back in the Old World that we
call Homeric; times of spaciousness and simplicity, when we fancy that
man’s strength was in closest affinity with nature’s; times of
wholesomeness and poise of mind and body, when man lived by nature’s
rule, and labour was loving.
This universal suggestion is the product of the force, united with
persuasiveness, that one marked at the outset as characteristic of
Walker and his work. It comes of the large seriousness with which he
thinks and works, of the true perspective through which he views his
subject, wherein facts and sentiment take their due place not only in
the foreground, but in their relation to a distant horizon. These
risings and settings of the sun, that he loves so much, have run their
course through ages; not a little of his love for them no doubt is due
to their suggestion of infinity in relation to the life of man; and that
life, too, he prefers to view as itself a heritage of the ages.
For many of us life is now a complicated affair, with much whirring of
human machinery within ourselves and around us; yet it still has
elemental facts and emotions. The painter who can express these with
their personal, local significance, and show, as well, their relation to
the universal, is one whose work will be likely to endure.
XIII
GILBERT STUART
“Another King arose which knew not Joseph,” and so it goes still. Most
American children are familiar with the so-called “Athenæum Portrait of
George Washington,” yet probably very few, even of their parents, know
the name of the artist, Gilbert Stuart. We have got into the habit of
dating the growth of modern American painting from 1875, and with some
reasonableness, for that was the period at which students began to
arrive home from Munich and Paris in sufficient numbers to make their
arrival felt. Yet twenty-five years earlier, about the time that George
Inness was starting for Europe, William M. Hunt had returned, bringing
with him pictures of the Barbizon painters and introducing their
principles of nature study. We are apt to dismiss the painting of the
previous half-century as representing only the draggled ends of the
English influence rudely severed by the Revolution; forgetting that the
period is linked on to the Augustan age of English painting, to
Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the somewhat later Constable. For Gilbert
Stuart was a contemporary of all three, and to some extent a rival of
Reynolds, even in London, and was born also within the lifetime of the
first of the great Englishmen, William Hogarth. Stuart, moreover, was
not a follower of others, but a distinct and forceful individuality that
played a leading rôle in the stirring drama of his times. He was, with
little doubt, the first of American masters of painting.
There is a romance in every life, however gray and level, but in
Stuart’s the romance foamed upon the surface. Perhaps he had inherited
it; for his father, a native of Perth, in Scotland, reached this country
shortly after the battle of Culloden Moor, that shattered the prospects
of the Pretender; and there is more than a suspicion that his espousal
of a lost cause had made it well to put the ocean between himself and
his past. However that may be, he built himself a little mill with a
gambrel roof, at the head of the Petaquamscott Pond, in Narragansett
county, R.I., and settled down to the quiet occupation of grinding
snuff. He had married, and in 1755, after several other children, came a
boy, who received the name of his father, and was duly entered in the
baptismal registry as “son of the snuff grinder.” But in time the mill
proved unprofitable, and the family migrated to Newport, where the
mother superintended the boy’s education, the Rev. Mr. Bissert
instructing him in Latin. He seems to have been quick at learning but
averse to study, being of a frolicsome disposition and addicted also to
drawing. None remains of Stuart’s early sketches, but one day some of
them were seen by Dr. William Hunter, as he was paying a professional
visit to the family. The kind and discriminating physician invited the
boy to call upon him, and when he came presented to him a box of paints
and brushes,--a day of days in the child’s life, to be marked with red,
and to be looked back upon in the after years with thanksgiving.
What a pretty picture it presents of those brave old colonial days, when
simplicity and culture went hand in hand. It is very sad, of course,
that the poor boy should have lived too early to enjoy the blessings of
a school system, based on the strictest principles of pedagogy, graded
to an average not inconveniently high, making much of words and
relegating ideas to the proper limbo of things that are unpractical and,
therefore, useless. How pathetic, too, the unique event of this paintbox
in view of the profusion of presents which our children now enjoy!
Truly, there is much room for complacent congratulation over improved
conditions. Yet it is a little disconcerting to notice how much the less
favoured children made of their meagre opportunities; and we may begin
to wonder whether education--the leading of the child step by step to a
fuller and fuller consciousness of the realities of life--and
instruction--the laying of brick upon brick to build an edifice of
character--may not be a thing outside of systems, and to be looked for
rather in the daily contact of the child’s expanding personality with
good wholesome personalities around it. Perhaps, after all, the quiet
spaciousness of those old colonial days was a fine nursery for men, just
as the western forests nurtured Lincoln and many a quiet home to-day is
fostering the goodness and greatness of the future.
Stuart’s earliest picture is said to be a portrait of Mr. Thomas R.
Hunter, of Newport, and we read that when he was thirteen years old he
received a commission to paint portraits of Mr. and Mrs. John Bannister.
Two years later a Scotch painter, Cosmo Alexander, arrived in Newport
and interested himself in the boy’s efforts, giving him instruction, and
when he returned to Scotland two years afterward, taking him with him.
One notes how readily the boy ingratiated himself into the hearts of
those with whom he came in contact, a trait that marks each stage of
his subsequent career. He had a quiet, self-contained demeanour, with a
store of spirit that could flash out enthusiastically upon occasion and
in a very tactful way; with humour, too, and satire as he grew older,
and with a growing brusqueness and even intolerance, toward his later
life. The urbanity, discreetness, and humour he would have inherited
from his Scotch father, drawing from his Welsh ancestry on the mother’s
side the ardour of his character and his love of music. For his
education had included the practice of music--he could play the organ
and was skilful on other instruments. He must have been, indeed, a
personality of rare graciousness.
The stay in Scotland was short, for Alexander died very soon after their
arrival. He had established his ward in the University of Glasgow, and,
dying, committed him to the care of Sir George Chambers, who himself
died shortly after. The youth pined for home, and managed to get passage
back to America on a collier. With a friend named Waterhouse he hired a
model to study from, “a strong-muscled blacksmith.” It was
characteristic of the bent of choice that reappears in his mature work:
a love of strength and resolution, delighting in the robust physical
qualities or in the strong evidences of mental and moral character which
time has impressed upon the face.
In 1775 he again set out for Great Britain, and this time reached
London. It was not until he had suffered much privation that he summoned
up courage to call upon his countryman, Benjamin West. The great man was
entertaining friends and not disposed to be interrupted; but the
gentleman who left the party to interview the caller, found him to be a
connection of friends of his in Philadelphia, and ushered him into the
assemblage. The young man’s demeanour pleased West, who invited him to
bring his work for inspection, admitted him as a pupil, and in 1777
installed him in his own household. By this time, besides painting under
West, with Trumbull among his fellow-students, he was attending the
discourses of Sir Joshua and studying anatomy in Dr. Cruikshank’s
classes at the Academy. His sojourn in West’s studio extended over eight
years, although during that time he was engaged on some independent
work; the Duke of Northumberland, for example, sending for him to Sion
House, on the Thames, to paint two portraits. From being the pupil he
became the assistant of his master, until the painter Dance advised him
to set up a studio of his own, which, with West’s approbation, he did in
1785.
His success was immediate; people of wit and fashion thronged his rooms;
he “tasked himself to six sitters a day,” then flung his work aside and
devoted himself to society, living in great splendour and spending
freely. During this period he painted Louis XVI, George III, and the
Prince of Wales, subsequently George IV; while among his other sitters
were John Kemble, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Benjamin West. He had married
Charlotte Coates, daughter of Dr. Coates of Berkshire, and with her
moved, in 1788, to Dublin, where he painted many eminent people and was
welcomed in society for his personal gifts. But he was eager to paint
George Washington.
It is memorable that Stuart, when once his position was assured,
indulged himself in the privilege of refusing many sitters.
Notwithstanding his enormous expenses and the embarrassments to which
they frequently led, he kept his artistic conscience intact from the
smudge of mere money-making, and confined himself to those sitters who
appealed to his particular temperament and afforded him the best
opportunity of making a good picture. So he was willing to throw up all
the golden opportunities which Europe presented, that he might have the
privilege and satisfaction of painting the one man whose heroic
qualities had most fascinated his imagination.
He reached New York in 1792, and two years later proceeded to
Philadelphia, where Congress was in session. Establishing his studio on
the southeast corner of Fifth and Chestnut streets, he painted three
portraits of Washington from life. The first, which showed the right
side of the face, was destroyed by the artist as not being satisfactory,
and only three, or perhaps four, copies are known to exist. Then
followed the full-length portrait, painted for Lord Lansdowne, which
shows the left side of the face and is now in London. The third, against
Washington’s own desire, was executed at the earnest solicitation of his
wife and was left intentionally unfinished. This picture, which shows
the _left_ side of the face, was purchased from Stuart’s widow and
presented to the Boston Athenæum. Known as the “Athenæum” head, it now
hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and over fifty copies of it by
Stuart’s hands have been traced.
Unlike Charles Willson Peale, who made, in all, fourteen portraits from
life of Washington, and painted him in the prime of his vigour, Stuart
depicts the late autumn of his life, when the fruitage of his activity
had been gathered in; a face on which the lines of character are
softened; the energy of expression mellowed; a face chastened by
responsibilities; infinitely sweet and with a tender melancholy of
exalted seriousness. It is the face of one who has conquered himself as
well as others; it has the yearning solicitude of a father for his
children; it represents him as indeed the Father of his people. The
painter Leslie is quoted as having said that it was fortunate that an
artist existed in the time of Washington who could hand him down to
posterity looking like a gentleman; and, while the remark seems at first
sound a trifle flippant, there is much in it, after all. For it is
indeed the gentle qualities, those evidences in word and deed of high
breeding and elevated mind, the prevailing graciousness and lofty
seriousness of the true gentleman,--that _rara avis_ among the
indiscriminate flock of so-called gentlemen--that must have been
preëminently distinguishable in Washington. One feels that, I think, so
sensibly in visiting Mount Vernon to-day.
Set upon that fine bluff overlooking the Potomac, it has the dignity of
elevation; a certain aloofness above the level, self-centred within its
own appanage of outbuildings, gardens and grounds, and yet such a modest
dignity, suggesting the sweet amenities, the little graces and quiet
refinement of cultured country life. Certainly it is the most completely
interesting memorial home of a great man anywhere to be seen, inasmuch
as it is pervaded by the flavour of the old times and by the spirit of
its former occupant. And the whole association of the place is of the
choicest kind of gentle living. Assuredly it was a good thing that there
should be an artist of the period who could record these qualities.
Stuart brought to the task a keenly comprehending mind, and a large
experience in the acquaintanceship with men of affairs, of wit and
learning, and brilliant, varied accomplishments. Himself a man of
brilliant parts, he had ceased to be dazzled by brilliance; could look
at the individual example of manhood that he was studying in its own
separate perspective; could take in the complexities of his character
and give a complete, instead of a fragmentary, record. Neither in his
whirl of success, we may believe, had he lost touch entirely with the
gentle associations that surrounded his early life. There was much in
the riot of those times to hurt a sensitive susceptibility, and Stuart
so often refused a sitter, or threw up a commission partly executed,
that it is not unreasonable to assume that such acts were due in some
measure, at least, to a certain preciosity in his own feelings.
Certainly no other man of his time could have presented this fine side
of Washington. West would have given a grandiloquent rendering of the
hero; if not bombastic, probably theatrical; whereas it is the reticence
of Stuart’s portraits that is so admirable. “I copy the works of God,”
he said, “and leave clothes to tailors and mantua makers.” Without
admitting the general desirableness of such a painter theory, we may
acknowledge its value when tested on such a subject as Washington. We
are glad to be free of the curtains and columns and all the other stock
paraphernalia of the painter of the period, and to be left in
uninterrupted possession of the man and nothing but the man.
Such reserve on Stuart’s part is the measure of his ranking as an
artist. He worked, as he said himself, to express sentiment, grace, and
character. In Washington he found all three; with many of his sitters he
was less fortunate. Consequently, he is not a painter of great pictures,
but of some great portraits. Yet the limitation is in a way an evidence
of greatness. It was the fashion of his time to try and paint great
pictures. From this he had the hardihood to separate himself, reaching
with a true originality of feeling after what really interested him, the
big essentials in the subjects that he studied. Thus he put himself in
line with the great painters, shaking himself free of the fads and
nostrums of his time, and betaking himself straight to nature. In the
story of American art he holds a unique and dignified position.
[Illustration: colophon]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
End of Project Gutenberg's American Masters of Painting, by Charles H. Caffin