BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE
=Art for Art’s Sake.= University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of
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=The Meaning of Pictures.= University Lectures at the Metropolitan
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=Nature for Its Own Sake.= First Studies in Natural Appearances. With
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=The Desert.= Further Studies in Natural Appearances. With
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=The Opal Sea.= Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances. With
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AMERICAN PAINTING
AND ITS TRADITION
AMERICAN PAINTING
AND ITS TRADITION
AS REPRESENTED BY INNESS, WYANT, MARTIN, HOMER,
LA FARGE, WHISTLER, CHASE, ALEXANDER,
SARGENT
BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
Author of “Art for Art’s Sake,” “The Meaning of Pictures,”
“What is Art?” etc.
With Twenty-four Illustrations
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1919
_Copyright, 1919, by Charles Scribner’s Sons_
_Published October, 1919_
[Illustration]
PREFACE
The painters about whom these chapters are written helped to make up
the period in American painting dating, generally, from about 1878 to,
say, 1915. That period has practically closed in the sense that a newer
generation with different aims and aspirations has come forward, and
the men who broke ground years ago in the Society of American Artists
have turned their furrow and had their day. Indeed, those I have chosen
to write about herein, with the exception of Sargent, have passed on
and passed out. Not only their period but their work has ended. We
are now beginning to see them in something like historic perspective.
Perhaps, then, the time is opportune for speaking of them as a group
and of their influence upon American art.
Not all of the one-time “new movement” originated and died with these
nine men. Dozens of painters became identified with American art just
after the Centennial, and many of those who came back from Munich and
Paris in the late seventies and the early eighties are still living and
producing. But while the nine were by no means the whole count they
were certainly representative of the movement, and their works speak
for almost every phase of it. The value of the movement to American art
can be rightly enough judged from them.
During their lives these nine did not lack for praise--some of it wise
and some of it otherwise. They were much exploited in print. I myself
joined in the chorus. I had more or less acquaintance with all of
them, lived through the period with them, and from 1880 on wrote much
about them. My opportunities for seeing and hearing were abundant, and
perhaps such value as this book may possess comes from my having been
a looker-on in Vienna during those years. To personal impressions I am
now adding certain conclusions as to what the men on my list, taken
as a body, have established. They wrought during a period of great
material development--wrought in a common spirit, making an epoch in
art history and leaving a tradition. The pathfinders in any period
deserve well of their countrymen. And their trail is worth following,
for eventually it may become a broad national highway.
J. C. V. D.
Rutgers College,
1919.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE ART TRADITION IN AMERICA 1
II. GEORGE INNESS 19
III. ALEXANDER H. WYANT 43
IV. HOMER MARTIN 65
V. WINSLOW HOMER 89
VI. JOHN LA FARGE 115
VII. JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER 147
VIII. WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE 185
IX. JOHN W. ALEXANDER 217
X. JOHN S. SARGENT 243
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
GEORGE INNESS, “Evening at Medfield” 32
GEORGE INNESS, “Sunset at Montclair” 34
Reproduced by the courtesy of F. F. Sherman, publisher of
“George Inness,” by Elliott Daingerfield
GEORGE INNESS, “Hackensack Meadows” 38
ALEXANDER H. WYANT, “Mohawk Valley” 52
ALEXANDER H. WYANT, “Broad, Silent Valley” 58
HOMER D. MARTIN, “View on the Seine” 78
HOMER D. MARTIN, “Westchester Hills” 84
Reproduced by the courtesy of F. F. Sherman, publisher of
“Homer Martin,”
by Frank Jewett Mather
WINSLOW HOMER, “Undertow” 102
WINSLOW HOMER, “Marine” 104
WINSLOW HOMER, “Fox and Crows” 108
JOHN LA FARGE, “Paradise Valley” 130
JOHN LA FARGE, “The Muse” 134
JOHN LA FARGE, “The Three Kings” 138
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “Nocturne. Gray and
Silver. Chelsea Embankment” 158
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “The Princesse du Pays de
la Porcelaine” 162
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “The Yellow Buskin” 168
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “The Woman with the White
Shawl” 202
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “Afternoon at Peconic” 204
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “Child Dancing” 212
JOHN W. ALEXANDER, “The Ring” 230
JOHN W. ALEXANDER, “Walt Whitman” 236
JOHN S. SARGENT, “Mrs. Pulitzer” 256
JOHN S. SARGENT, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose” 260
JOHN S. SARGENT, “Carmencita” 262
I
THE ART TRADITION IN AMERICA
During the Revolutionary Period, and immediately thereafter, art
in America was something of sporadic growth, something not quite
indigenous but rather transplanted from England. Painting was little
more than portraiture, and the work was done after the English formula.
America had no formula of its own. There was no native school of art,
no tradition of the craft, no body of art knowledge handed down from
one generation to another. West and Copley started out practically
without predecessors. They were the beginners.
With Cole, Durand, and, later on, Kensett, that is about 1825, another
kind of painting sprang up on American soil. It was the painting of
landscape--landscape of the Hudson River variety--and, whatever its
technical shortcomings, at least it had the merit of being original.
Apparently nothing of artistic faith or of accumulated knowledge or art
usage was handed down to the Hudson River men by the portrait-painters
who had preceded them. The leaders worked from nature with little or no
instruction. They were self-taught, and if any inkling of how work was
carried on in the painting-rooms of Copley, Stuart, or Vanderlyn was
given them, they turned a deaf ear to it or found it inapplicable to
their landscape-work. If they knew of a tradition they ignored it.
This matter of tradition--the accumulated point of view and teaching
of the craft--is of some importance in our inquiry. It has gone to the
making of all the great art of the past. There were several hundred
years of sculptors in Greece, with a continuous story, before Scopas
and Praxiteles brought their art to final maturity; for centuries
painters, with their craftsman-making guilds, had preceded Raphael,
Leonardo, and Titian; countless “primitives” and “early men” went to
the shades unsung before Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Holbein came
to power. In America the Copley-Stuart contingent caught at, and in
large measure grasped, the foreign teaching handed down by Reynolds and
his school. Perhaps that accounts in some measure for their success.
A generation later Cole and Durand started out to paint landscape
without any teaching whatever. Does that account in any degree for
their failure? They failed to produce any fine quality of art, but
they had pupils and followers in whom the Hudson River school finally
culminated. It became a school because Cole and Durand established with
themselves a teaching, such as it was, and handed down to their pupils
a point of view and a body of tradition. Perhaps again that explains,
to some extent, the varied successes of such followers of the school as
Inness, Wyant, Martin, Swain Gifford, Whittredge, McEntee.
But not entirely. Some of these last-named were influenced by European
art, outgrew the teaching of their forerunners, and in middle life
rather forsook their early love and faith. Yet it would be idle to
contend that they had not received an inclination, even an inspiration,
from contact with the older men. Short-lived though it was, and
shallow as were its teachings, the Hudson River school, nevertheless,
had weight with its followers. Even error is often helpful in
establishing truth, and a feeble precedent is perhaps better than none
at all. Some of the pupils--F. E. Church and Sandford Gifford, for
examples--never outgrew their basic teaching. To the end they carried
on the Cole-Durand tradition, improving and bettering it. They bettered
it because they could add to their own view-point the observation and
teaching of their masters. Three generations at least are supposed to
be necessary to the making of the thorough gentleman. Is it possible to
make the thorough artist in one?
But the Hudson River school was too frail inherently to carry great
weight. Men like Inness, Wyant, and Martin soon began to see its
weaknesses. Even before they went to Europe they had doubted and
after their return to America they were openly heretical. They held
allegiance only in the matter of the Catskill-Adirondack subject, and
even that became modified to a virtual disappearance toward the end of
their careers. Both aim and method changed with them. They saw deeper
and painted freer, until finally they were wholly out of sympathy not
only with the thin technique of the school but with its panoramic
conception of nature.
So it was that in 1876 when the United States held its first national
art exhibition--the Centennial, at Philadelphia--the painting of
the country was in something of an anomalous condition. The Hudson
River school was practically at the end of its rope. The older
portrait-painters had been succeeded by Harding, Alexander, Neagle,
Elliott, Inman, Page, Healy--each of them more or less going his own
way. The German Leutze had been here and had blazed a brimstone trail
of Düsseldorf method, along which some painters followed. Hicks and
Hunt at Boston had introduced the French art of Couture and Millet,
and they also had a following. Quite apart from all of them stood some
independent personalities like La Farge and Winslow Homer, who seemed
to say, “a plague on all your houses.” And they, too, went their own
ways. There was no school unity.
No wonder then with these conflicting individualities, and with all
traditions obsolete or unknown, there was no such thing as an American
school of painting at the Centennial Exhibition. The visitor in
Memorial Hall wandered hither and yon among the pictures and vainly
strove to grasp a consensus of art opinion or even an art tendency. The
exhibition was more or less of a hodgepodge. As a result both painter
and public went away in a somewhat bemuddled condition. Perhaps the
only thing about the exhibition that impressed one strongly was the
general incompetence and inconsequence of it.
Just at this time there entered upon the scene another generation,
a younger group of American painters. Many of them had seen the
exhibition at the Centennial and had, perhaps, been unwarrantably
influenced by it. They brought away from it a longing to paint; but
they realized that such art as that at Philadelphia was not what they
wished to produce, and if American teaching was responsible for it, so
much the worse for the teaching. They would have none of it. Once more
there was a sharp break with everything that might resemble a school
view or a school method. The younger group left the country and sought
instruction in European studios believing that nothing of good could
come out of the Nazareth of America.
Some of this later generation had gone abroad for study just before
1876. Shirlaw, Chase, and Duveneck were at Munich; Maynard, Minor,
and Millet at Antwerp; Blashfield, Bridgman, Beckwith, Thayer, Alden
Weir, Low, Wyatt Eaton at Paris. After 1876 the exodus was greater
and Paris was the goal. A few years later some of these students were
homeward bound, having finished a more or less advanced course of
instruction under competent masters. They immediately set up studios
in New York, and, with the enthusiasm and assurance of youth, began to
impart information to the effect that the only painting of importance
was that of Europe. As for the native American art, it was not worth
reckoning with. The Academy of Design was merely the abiding-place
of the ossified, and, of course, it would be surrendered on the
demand of the younger men. But the Academy, after a battle of words,
declined to give up the fort, and a little later declined even to hang
some of the pictures of the gifted. This was regarded as unspeakably
outrageous, and swift action followed. In 1877 there was a call for
the establishment of a new art body, and out of it came the Society of
American Artists, with twenty-two initial members.
The younger men had not invited the academicians as a body to join
them, but they had recognized the talent of certain men, who, though
members of the Academy, were not in full sympathy with it. In other
words, the aloof element of the Academy was elected to membership in
the Society. These men--La Farge, Inness, Martin, Moran, Tiffany,
Colman, Swain Gifford--joined the new without abandoning the old,
and the Society quickly got under way, with its declaration of
independence nailed to the masthead. In ten years the Society had grown
in membership to over a hundred, had held yearly exhibitions from 1878
on, and had achieved a substantial success--a success of technique, if
nothing more.
It is worth noting just here that this departure was a third violent
break in the American art tradition. The young men in the Society
practically proclaimed that they would start all over again and build
a more worthy mansion than their predecessors. Had they not gone to
Europe and received the best of technical training? Did they not know
how to draw and paint? For the first time in its history America might
congratulate itself upon possessing a body of painters that understood
the technique of their craft. American art would now begin.
Lest progressive craftsmanship should die out new students continued to
go abroad, and the Art Students League was started for those stopping
at home. This new institution was not bound by any conventionalities;
its existence was a protest against them. It had no century-old
precedents to live up to; it was free to stickle for good workmanship
alone. It was the training-school for no peculiar kind of art; it stood
ready and eager to adopt any new method or medium or material that was
offered. It was progressive to the last degree--progressive to the
extent of burning every bridge behind it and starting out _de novo_ to
produce technicians (and consequent art) worthy of the name.
Well, the men, and the institutions, and the movement have been under
way for forty years. Much paint has been spread on canvas in that
time and hundreds of hands have been busy producing pictures. The
“young men” have become old men and many of them have dropped out.
The movement itself no longer moves, though some of its best men are
still painting. But what is the net result of these forty years? Have
the European-trained, after all, succeeded in producing in their one
generation, _sans_ tradition, an American art? No one will question for
a moment that they have produced many exceptionally good works, even
masterpieces; that they are a competent, even learned, body of artists;
but has what they have said proclaimed American ideals and reflected
American life, or has it repeated the conventions and _atelier_ methods
of Europe? Has not the manner of saying with them been more in evidence
than the thing said? Is their foreign-based art entirely satisfactory
or representative of America?
From a Whistlerian point of view this matter of tradition is, of
course, great nonsense. Art just “happens” in _Ten O’Clock_, and the
artist is that one in the multitude whom the gods see fit to strike
with divine fire. He is called to service by inspiration as were the
prophets of old. All of which no doubt explains the anointing of
Whistler but does not account for the high-priesthood of Velasquez,
of Rembrandt, of Raphael, or of Rubens. To say that three centuries
of guild-teaching in the best way to grind color, or lay a gesso
ground, or draw a figure, or fill a given space, is not better than
the intuition of any one man of a period is equivalent to saying
that the accumulated knowledge of the world is worthless, and each
new generation should discard it and begin all over again. That is
substantially what Mr. Whistler advocated. And, further, that the
artist should stand aloof and create independently of time, place, or
people.
But out of nothing nothing comes, and psychology assures us that there
is no such thing as originality save by a combination of things already
known. The old is added to and makes the new. The old is the tradition
of the craft; the new is the revised point of view and method plus the
old. It was so with Whistler notwithstanding his pretty argument around
the clock. He was beholden to Gleyre, Ingres, Boucher, Velasquez,
Courbet, Albert Moore, Hokusai, and helped himself to them when, where,
and how he could. He would have been the last one to deny it. Had there
been more continuity and stability in his training, had he followed the
teaching of the craft more intently, he would not have been worried
all his life as to whether his people stood well upon their feet, and
he might have produced art with the calmness and poise of his great
Velasquez. His misfortune was that he had no thorough schooling,
inherited no body of taste, and practically stood alone in art. That
he succeeded was owing to exceptional genius. That he was never in the
class with Velasquez or Titian or Rembrandt was perhaps due to the fact
that they had the training and the tradition and he had not.
The Whistler type is not infrequently met in American life--the type
that seeks to scale Olympus without the preliminary of antecedent
preparation. In art he usually has half a dozen strings to his bow,
and paints, lectures, writes, speaks, carries on a business in Wall
Street or elsewhere. He is glib in many things, has great facility, is
astonishingly clever; but somehow he never gets beyond the superficial.
He has not depth or poise or great seriousness. There is no hard
training or long tradition or intellectual heritage behind him. He is
not to the manner born.
Every writer in America knows that present-day American literature,
with some precious exceptions, does not reach up to contemporary
English literature; that poetry or romance or criticism with us has
not the form, the substance, or the technical accomplishment of the
same work in France. Every architect in America must realize that
with all the get-learned-quick of his foreign study, with all his
appropriations from the Gothic or the Renaissance or the Georgian,
with all his cleverness in solving business needs and doing building
stunts under peculiar circumstances, there is something lacking in
his productions; that they are not so monumental as he could wish
for; that they are not firm set in the ground and do not belong to
the soil and remain a part of the land and the people in the sense of
contemporary French or even English architecture. Every musician with
us must have a similar feeling about our music. As with architecture
and painting, there have been some remarkable compositions put forth by
our composers. Europe compliments us by playing them and nods approval
at the endeavor, but again they do not reach up to corresponding work
in Paris or Berlin or Munich. Why not? Have we not as good brains and
fiddles in New York as in Vienna? What is it we lack?
Surely we are not wanting in energy, in resource, in materials. Is it
perhaps the restraint of these that we need? Time and patience are
very necessary factors in all of the arts. Attitude of mind, a sense
of proportion--a style, in short--cannot be attained in a few years
of schooling. To the training of a lifetime must be added a something
that has been more or less inherited. That something handed down from
father to son, from master to pupil, from generation to generation,
is what I have called tradition. It is not technique alone, but a
mental outlook, added to the body of belief and experience of those
who have gone before. The skilled hand of a Kreisler, a Sargent, a
MacMonnies is perhaps possible of attainment in a decade, but the
mental attitude--its poise and its restraint--is that something which
is inherited as taste, and many decades may go to its formation. In
this latter respect, perhaps, Kreisler has had the advantage of both
Sargent and MacMonnies.
Coming back, therefore, to the men of the Society of American Artists,
we cannot say that they failed in skill or were wanting in endeavor, or
had no intelligence. They had all of these, but, unfortunately, they
were not of artistic descent, and inherited no patrimony of style.
Instead they tried to adopt in a few years the long story of French
style, and attained only that part of it relating to technique. They
were of the third generation in American art, but each one of these
generations had denied and forsworn its predecessor, had flung its
mess of pottage, such as it was, out of the window, and had left the
ancestral roof never to return. The third generation then had nothing
by descent, not even a pictorial or a plastic mind that could see the
world in images. It went forth empty-handed into the highways and
byways of Europe, became proficient in craftsmanship, and relied upon
that for success.
This is not merely figure of speech, but statement of fact. None of
the American painters spoken of in these pages, with the exception
of La Farge, came from what might be called an artistic family, or
had æsthetic antecedents. They were boys on a farm or grew up in
the atmosphere of trade or profession, and came to art at twenty or
thereabouts. They then learned the technique of painting quickly, and
with much facility, but their mental attitude toward art was untrained
and remained undetermined. Long after they knew _how_ to paint they
knew not _what_ to paint or how to think. Their point of view was
superficial or commonplace, or otherwise negligible. I have excepted
La Farge, for, as we shall see hereafter, he did have an æsthetic
legend behind him. Is that why he is now placed as the one Olympian of
the period? I would also partly except Inness, Wyant, and Martin, who
did know and follow at one time the rather feeble Hudson River school
tradition. I ask again is that why they remain, even to this day, the
best of our rather long line of landscape-painters?
Is tradition then synonymous with the academic? Not entirely; though
the academies are usually the custodians and conservers of it.
Unfortunately, their practice tends to perpetuate a manner that soon
becomes a mannerism, and finally the mannerism usurps the place of
style. The academic in France or Germany or Italy has of recent years
become a term of reproach. All the rebels in art have been opposed to
it. When they rebelled, their rebellion was called by them, or their
biographers, “the break with tradition.” Rather was it a break with an
indurated method or the tyranny of a hanging committee. For tradition
has to do more with the spirit and style of art, while the academic is
recognized in a method or a formula which, endlessly repeated, finally
becomes trite and even banal.
The art of old Japan ran on for centuries and was excellent art
notwithstanding it was academic and based in tradition. It did not run
into formalism and never became trite until recent years. Its ruin lies
straight ahead of it if it shall abandon its traditions and continue to
coquette with Occidental art. But the bulk of painting by the young men
of the Society of American Artists became commonplace within a dozen
years after their return because they had learned abroad only a manner
and reproduced it here in America with the persistence of a mannerism.
They never knew the academic in its larger significance; they never
felt the spirit and style of the traditional.
That is not to proclaim their work worthless or their movement
inconsequent. On the contrary, almost everything that one generation
in art could do was done. And well done. They established a foundation
in sound technique. It remains to be seen if those who come after
will build upon it or cast it down. Moreover, as an expression of
the individual quite apart from the time, place, or people, as a
representation of cosmopolitan belief about art, it must be accorded a
very high place. Whistler and Sargent happen just now to be the most
talked about exponents of the cosmopolitan, but dozens of painters
here in America since 1876 belong in the same class and have the
same belief. It is all along of a new departure in art, and how it
shall work out no one can say, but that it does not entirely satisfy
contemporary needs is already manifest. In spite of present practice,
and quite apart from _Ten O’Clock_ and other painter extravagances, art
is still believed to be in some way an expression of a time, a place,
and a people. The world has not yet grown so small that it does not
continue to exhibit race characteristics in its art manifestations.
That the all-the-world-as-one idea may be farther-reaching, more
universal in its scope, and therefore loftier in its art expression
than any national or race expression is very possible; nay, probable.
Still, even then, with cosmopolitanism in the saddle, there will be the
need and the use of tradition--the consensus of opinion and body of
belief as to what constitutes style in art.
II
GEORGE INNESS
1825-1894
II
GEORGE INNESS
1825-1894
A plain man of the business world, knowing nothing of the peculiar
manifestations of the artistic mind, would be very apt to wonder over
the mental make-up of a George Inness. An artist’s way of looking at
things is never quite sensible to the man in the street. It is too
temperamental, too impulsive; and Inness was supertemperamental even
for an artist. When he expressed himself in paint he was very sane;
but when he argued, his auditors thought him erratic. And not without
reason. He was easily stirred by controversy, and in the heat of
discussion he often discoursed like a mad rhapsodist. His thin hands
and cheeks, his black eyes, ragged beard, and long dark hair, the
dramatic action of his slight figure as he walked and talked, seemed to
complete the picture of the perfervid visionary.
He was always somewhat hectic. As a boy he was delicate, suffered from
epilepsy, and was mentally overwrought. His physician had nothing
to recommend but fresh air. As a man, one of his hearers over the
dinner-table, after listening to his exposition of the feminine element
in landscape, or some allied theme, said: “Mr. Inness, what you need is
fresh air.” Inness used to tell this story about himself with a little
smile, as though conscious of having appeared extravagant. As for fresh
air in the sense of out-of-doors, he knew more about it than all his
business acquaintances put together; but in the sense of its clearing
the vision so that he could see things in a matter-of-fact light, it
was wholly unavailing. He was born with the nervous organization of the
enthusiast. That is not the best temperament imaginable for a practical
business man.
And yet Inness certainly thought that his views about life, faith,
government, and ethics were sound and applicable to all humanity. Art
was only a part of the universal plan. In his theory of the unities
everything in the scheme entire dropped into its appointed place. He
could show this, to his own satisfaction at least, by the symbolism
of numbers, just as he could prove immortality by the argument for
continuity. All his life he was devoted to mystical speculations. He
had his faith in divination, astrology, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism.
And he was greatly stirred by social questions. During the Rebellion
he volunteered to fight for the freedom of the slave but was rejected
as physically unfit; and later he became interested in labor problems,
believed in Henry George and the Single Tax, and had views about a
socialistic republic. He never changed. In his seventieth year he was
still discoursing on Swedenborg, on love, on truth, on the unities,
with unabated enthusiasm. To expect such a man to be “practical” would
be little less than an absurdity, and to expect a practical man to
understand him would be almost as futile.
But the fever of intensity that burned in Inness and his visionary way
of looking at things were the very features that made possible his
greatness as an artist. There is something in the abnormal view--one
hardly knows what--that makes for art. Certainly the “practical” work
of the camera gives only a statement of fact where the less accurate
drawing of a Millet gives something that we call “artistic.” The lens
of the camera records mechanically and coldly, which may account for
the prosaic quality of photography; but the retina of the artist’s eye
records an impression enhanced by the imagination, which may account
for the poetry of art. Whichever way we put it, it is the human element
that makes the art. The painter does not record the facts like a
machine; he gives his impression of the facts. Inness, with his exalted
way of seeing, was full of impressions and was always insisting upon
their vital importance.
“The true purpose of the painter,” Mr. Sheldon reports him as saying,
“is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene
has made upon him. A work of art is not to instruct, not to edify, but
to awaken an emotion. Its real greatness consists in the quality and
force of this emotion.”
And he practised this preaching. Such nervous manifestations as
enthusiasm, emotion, and imagination working together and producing
an impression were the means wherewith he constructed pictures in
his mind. They made up his point of view, and without them we should
perhaps have heard little of George Inness as a painter.
It was no mean or stinted equipment. In fact, Inness had too many
impressions, had too much imagination. His diversity of view opposed
singleness of aim. While he was trying to record one impression upon
the canvas, half a dozen others would rush in. Cleveland Cox, who
knew him well, said that he changed his mood and point of view with
the weather, and if he started a canvas with a storm piece in the
morning, it was likely to end in the evening with a glorious sunset,
if the weather corresponded. He was never satisfied with his work; he
was always altering it and amending it, painting pictures one on top
of another, until a single canvas sometimes held a dozen superimposed
landscapes.
The late William H. Fuller used to tell the story of buying a landscape
in Inness’s studio one afternoon and going to get the picture the next
day, only to find an entirely different picture on the canvas. To his
protests Inness replied:
“It is a good deal better picture than the other.”
“Yes, but I liked the other better.”
“Well, you needn’t take it--needn’t pay for it.”
“It isn’t a question of losing money. I have lost my picture. It is
buried under that new one.”
Even when not bothered by many impressions, Inness had great difficulty
in contenting himself with his work. It was never quite right. There
was a certain fine feeling or sentiment that he had about nature and he
wished to express it in his picture; but he found when the sentiment
was strong, the picture looked weak in the drawing, had little solidity
or substance; and when the solidity was put in with exact lines and
precise textures, then the sentiment fared badly. He knew very well
where the trouble lay.
“Details in the picture must be elaborated only enough fully to
reproduce the impression. When more is done the impression is weakened
and lost, and we see simply an array of external things which may be
very cleverly painted and may look very real, but which do not make an
artistic painting. The effort and the difficulty of an artist is to
combine the two; namely, to make the thought clear and to preserve the
unity of impression. Meissonier always makes his thought clear; he is
most painstaking with details, but he sometimes loses in sentiment.
Corot, on the contrary, is to some minds lacking in objective force. He
tried for years to get more objective force, but he found that what he
gained in that respect he lost in sentiment.”
This is Inness’s own statement of the case and it enables us to
understand why many of his later canvases were vague, indefinite,
often vapory. He was seeking to give a sentiment or feeling rather
than topographical facts. When the facts looked too weak, he tried to
strengthen them here and there by bringing out notes and tones a little
sharper with the result of making them look hard or too protruding.
After several passings back and forth from strength to weakness, from
sentiment to fact, the canvas began to show a kneaded and thumbed
appearance. Its freshness was gone and its surface looked tortured and
“bready.” He was hardly ever free from this attempt to balance between
two stools. It is a plague that bothers all painters, and no doubt many
of them would agree with Inness in saying:
“If a painter could unite Meissonier’s careful reproduction of details
with Corot’s inspirational power, he would be the very god of art.”
But Inness was much nearer to Corot than to Meissonier. He loved
sentiment more than clever technique, and perhaps as a result left
many “swampy” canvases behind him. His studio was filled with them.
He used to take them from the floor and work upon them, sometimes
half a dozen in a day. He never was “the perfect master of the brush”
that we have heard him called, though he was an acceptable, and often
a very powerful, technician. He usually began by basing a canvas in a
warm gray or a raw umber tint, afterward sketching in with charcoal or
pencil the general outline of forms and objects. His pigments at first
were thin, and his canvas in its general distribution of masses was
little more than stained. Upon that foundation he kept adding stronger
notes, glazing his shadows to keep them transparent and push them
back, and placing his opaque lights on top of the glaze. In this way
he gradually developed the picture, keying up first one part and then
another, until finally he drew the whole picture into unity and harmony.
It was most interesting to see Inness at work in this keying-up
process. He always painted standing, and would walk backward and
forward, putting on dabs here and rubs there with great expertness. He
was a painter in oils, seldom employing any other medium, and yet he
would use on his canvas almost anything that the impulse of the moment
told him might prove effective. One day I watched him for fifteen
minutes trying to deepen the shadows in a tree with a lead-pencil. The
canvas was dry at the time and he did not want to put any more wet
paint upon it. As he painted he talked, argued, declaimed, glared at
you over the top of his glasses with apparently little embarrassment to
himself or detriment to his canvas.
Painting he believed he had reduced to a scientific formula, but
he kept changing the formula. Rules of procedure, too, he had in
abundance, but they also kept shifting. At one time he insisted that
a picture should have three planes--the middle plane to contain the
centre of interest, the foreground to be a prologue, and the background
an epilogue to this central plane. At another time he would spread a
half-tone throughout the whole picture, keeping his sky low in key, and
upon this neutral ground he would place lights and darks, making them
brilliant and sparkling by contrast. Others before him--notably the
Fontainebleau-Barbizon men--had worked with similar rules in mind, but
Inness was quite original in his application. And he was always moving
on to something new and better. Ripley Hitchcock quotes from one of his
letters:
“I have changed from the time I commenced because I had never completed
my art; and as I do not care about being a cake, I shall remain dough,
subject to any impression which I am satisfied comes from the region of
truth.”
What Inness was at the time he commenced may be gathered from another
quotation from the same authority:
“My early and much of my later life was borne under the distress of
a fearful nervous disease which very much impaired my ability to bear
the painstaking in my studies which I could have wished. I began, of
course, as most boys do, but without any art surroundings whatever. A
boy now would be able to commence almost anywhere under better auspices
than I could have had then, even in a city. I was in the barefoot
stage, and, although my father was a well-to-do farmer, the boys
dressed very much in Joseph’s coat style as to color, the different
garments being equally variegated, while schooling consisted of the
three R’s, and a ruler, with a rattan by way of change.”
At fourteen Inness received some instruction in drawing from a man
named Barker, and at nineteen he was working as a map-engraver with
Sherman and Smith in New York. It is said that he engraved several
plates, but Inness himself evidently counted this apprenticeship of
little value, for he later said:
“When almost twenty I had a month with Regis Gignoux, my health not
permitting me to take advantage of study at the Academy in the evening,
and this is all the instruction I ever had from any artist.”
He was virtually self-taught as a youth, but his later work was
developed and somewhat influenced by the study of other painters at
home and abroad. At first he studied Cole and Durand, and his pictures
were rather panoramic in theme and hard in drawing. He worked much
over detail, and at this early time must have been acquired a knowledge
of form and a store of visual memories which were to serve him
thereafter. The brittle landscapes of Inness’s youth are seldom seen
to-day. What became of them no one knows. He sold them for any sum that
would temporarily keep the wolf from the door, and, passing into the
hands of unappreciative people, they have perhaps perished. I never
heard him so much as mention his very early work, though in his letter
to Ripley Hitchcock he speaks of some of his studies under Gignoux as
being “very elaborate.”
In 1850 he was married, and through the assistance of one of his
patrons, Mr. Ogden Haggerty, he went to Italy and spent fifteen months
there, returning through Paris, seeing the Salon, and the work of
Rousseau for the first time.
“Rousseau was just beginning to make a noise. A great many people were
grouped about a little picture of his which seemed to me metallic. Our
traditions were English; and French art, particularly in landscape, had
made but little impression upon us.”
Just when he made this statement is not apparent, but certainly it was
not his final estimate of Rousseau and French landscape. He was later
on much influenced by Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny; but with his first
long stay in Europe, chiefly near Rome, it was to be expected that
the romance and glamour of the place with such classical painters as
Salvator, Claude, and Poussin would sway him.
The second period of his development, dating from about 1853 to 1875,
is full of diverse influences. Succeeding trips to Europe and repeated
studies of European art rather disturbed his preconceived opinions, and
made him doubtful. At one time he would work in one vein; at another
time he would reverse himself and go back to his early affinities. It
was a period of struggle not only with his art but with the more purely
material affair of gaining a livelihood. He lived during this time for
four years at Medfield, Massachusetts, then at Eagleswood, New Jersey;
and in both places painted some notable canvases, though they were not
popular with the buying public.
The “Peace and Plenty,” now at the Metropolitan Museum, painted in
1865, is a huge affair, and the wonder is that it was not a huge
failure. It is a little too diversified in the lights, and a bit
spotty, perhaps, but it is rather broadly handled with a flat brush,
and, all told, a remarkable canvas for the time. It represents him
under Italian inspiration. The “Evening at Medfield,” also in the
Metropolitan, painted in 1875, suggests French influence, perhaps
Daubigny. It is broader, freer, thinner in handling, simpler in masses,
and has more unity. None of the pictures at this period are counted
his best output, but they are not the less works of decided merit.
It was after four continuous years in Europe (1871-1875) that Inness
came into a third style of work (the “Evening at Medfield” indicates
it), quite his own, quite American, and quite splendid. It was during
this stay abroad that he seemed finally to find himself. His brush
broadened, his light grew more subtle, his color became richer and
fuller. Corot had taught him how to sacrifice detail to the mass,
Rousseau had improved his use of the tree, Daubigny gave him many hints
about atmosphere; from Decamps he learned how to drive a light with
darks, and Delacroix opened to him a gamut of deep, rich color. He was
now in position to graft the French tradition of landscape upon the
American stock. And this he did, but in his own manner and with many
lapses, even failures, by the way.
All through this third period, and for that matter up to his death,
Inness was experimenting with landscape. Every canvas was a new
adventure in color, light, and air. In his last period he seemed to see
landscape in related masses of color rather than in linear extensions;
and so he painted it holding the color patches together with air and
illuminating the whole mass by a half-mysterious light. It was not
attenuated color--mauves, pinks, and sad grays--but strong reds,
blues, greens, and yellows keyed up oftentimes to a high pitch and
fire-hued by sunlight. Nor were they put on the canvas in little dots
and dabs, but rather shown in large masses brought together for massed
effect and made resonant by contrast.
[Illustration: “Evening at Medfield,” by George Inness.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Almost all of his later pictures will be found to hinge upon color,
light, and atmosphere. He was very fond of moisture-laden air, rain
effects, clouds, rainbows, mists, vapors, fogs, smokes, hazes--all
phases of the atmosphere. In the same way he fancied dawns, dusks,
twilights, moonlights, sunbursts, flying shadows, clouded lights--all
phases of illumination. And again, he loved sunset colors, cloud
colors, sky colors, autumn tints, winter blues, spring grays, summer
greens--all phases of color. And these not for themselves alone, but
rather for the impression or effect that they produced. If he painted
a moonlight, it was with a great spread of silvery radiance, a hushed
effect in the trees, a still air, and the mystery of things half seen;
when he painted an early spring morning, he gave the vapor rising from
the ground, with dampness in the air, voyaging clouds, and a warming
blue in the sky; with an Indian summer afternoon there was the drowsy
hum of nature lost in dreamland and the indefinable regret of things
passing away. His “Rainy Day--Montclair” has the bend and droop of
foliage heavy with rain, the sense of saturation in earth and air, the
suggestion of the very smell of rain. The “Delaware Water Gap” shows
the drive of a storm down the valley, with the sweep of the wind felt
in the clouds, the trees, and the water. The “Summer Silence” is well
named, for again it gives that feeling of the hushed woods in July, the
deep shadows, the dense foliage that seems to sleep and softly breathe.
Always the impression--the feeling which he himself felt in the
presence of nature and tried to give back in form and color upon
canvas. I remember very well standing beside him before his “Niagara”
and hearing him say what interested him in that scene. It was not
so much the thundering mass of the waters, the volume and power,
the sublimity of the cataract, as the impression of clouds of mist
and vapor boiling up from the great caldron and being struck into
color-splendor by the sunlight. Only an Inness in the presence of
Niagara could have thrown emphasis upon so ethereal a phase as its
mists and color. They made the impression and he responded to it.
Every feature of landscape had its peculiar sentiment to him. He said
so many times and with no uncertain voice:
“Rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky,
clouds--all things that we see--can convey sentiment if we are in
the love of God and the desire of truth. Some persons suppose that
landscape has no power of conveying human sentiment. But this is a
great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I
love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which
is savage and untamed. It is more significant.”
[Illustration: “Sunset at Montclair,” by George Inness.]
That last statement of his about the civilized landscape is well worth
noting, because that was the landscape he painted. His subjects are
related to human life, and some of our interest in his pictures is
due to the fact that he gives us thoughts, emotions, and sensations
that are comprehensible by all. He tells things that every one may
have thought but no one before him so well expressed. In other words,
he brings our own familiar landscape home to us with new truth and
beauty. This, it may be presumed, is the function of the poet and the
painter in any land. It was the quality that made Burns and Wordsworth
great and may account in measure for the fame of Rembrandt, Hobbema,
Constable--yes, and Inness.
When he was young there were traditions of the Hudson River school in
the air. The “mappy” landscape with its crude color and theatrical
composition held the place of honor. Inness was probably captivated
by it at first sight, but he soon discovered its emptiness. It had
no basis in nature; it was not the landscape we see and know. The
“Course of Empire” and the “Voyage of Youth” were only names for studio
fabrications. The truly poetic landscape lay nearer home. This was
what Inness called the “civilized landscape,” the familiar landscape,
the _paysage intime_, the one we all see and know because it has always
been before us--its very nearness perhaps blinding us to its beauty.
How hard it is to believe that the true poetry of the world lies close
about us! We keep fancying that romance is not in our native village,
but in Rome or Constantinople or Cairo; and that the poetic landscape
is not that of the wood-lot behind the house, but that of Arden Forest
or some Hesperidian garden far removed from us. Emerson has noted that
at sea every ship looks romantic but the one we sail in. Yet there
is plenty of romance in our ship if we have the eyes to see it; and
there is abundance of beauty in the wood-lot if we have the intentness
of purpose to study it out and understand it. Any one can admire the
“view” from a mountain-top, but it takes some imagination to see
beauty in the quiet meadow. And after you have seen it it requires a
great deal of labor and skill to tell what you have seen. Wordsworth
and Constable made more failures with it than successes. Just so with
Inness. He shot wide of the mark innumerable times, but when he hit, it
was with very decided effect.