Inness. After a period of following the Hudson River panorama of
nature undefiled by man, he gave it up. While in Rome he produced
some semiclassic landscapes, but he gave them up, too. Not so with the
Fontainebleau-Barbizon landscape. Rousseau and his band had broken
with the classic and were producing the _paysage intime_ to which
Hobbema (not Constable, of whom they knew nothing) had called their
attention through his pictures in the Louvre. They had done in France
just what Inness had sought to do in America: they had abandoned
the grandiloquent and put in its place the familiar. Inness was in
sympathy with them almost from the moment he first saw their work. Had
he been born in France, no doubt he would have been a member of the
Rousseau-Dupré group.
Again it is worth noticing in passing that all of the so-called “men
of 1830” were really provincial in what they produced. Corot painted
Ville d’Avray, Rousseau, Dupré, and Diaz the Fontainebleau forest,
Daubigny the Seine and the Marne. None of their work represents the
south or the east of France, and none of it carries beyond France.
It is localized about Paris. Just so with the work of Inness. It is
emphatically American, but limited to the North Atlantic States. The
appearances which he portrayed are peculiar to the region lying east of
the Alleghanies. In his pictures the light and coloring, the forms and
drift of clouds, the mists and hazes, the trees and hills, the swamps
and meadows may be recognized as belonging to New Jersey or New York
or New England, but none of them belongs to Minnesota or Louisiana or
California. He pictured the American landscape perhaps more completely
than any other painter before or since his time; but his “civilized
landscape” was nevertheless limited as regards its geographical range.
Nor would we have it otherwise. All the masters of art have been
provincial so far as subject goes. Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt
never cared to go beyond their own bailiwicks for material. And
Inness--though he may not rank with those just mentioned--found all the
material he needed within fifty miles of New York. It was the discovery
of this material, his point of view regarding it, what he did with it,
and what he made us see in it, that perhaps gives him his high rank in
American art.
The man and his impulsive nature never changed, though he kept shifting
his methods and his point of view from year to year. He went his own
pace and was always something of a recluse. The art movements about him
interested him in only a slight way. The Academy of Design honored him
with membership, but he cared little about it. The Society of American
Artists elected him a member also, but he cared even less for the
brilliant painting of the young men than for the weak performances of
the academicians. He kept very much to himself and painted on in his
own absorbed, impulsive fashion. His studio was only a bare barn of
a room with a few crazy chairs in it. Wall-hangings, stuffs, screens,
brass pots, shields, spears--the artistic plunder which one usually
finds in a painter’s apartment--he regarded as so much trumpery. In
his later days he came and went to his studio from Montclair, seeing
landscapes out of the car-window, and in his mind’s eye seeing them
upon his canvases. His art swayed him completely.
[Illustration: “Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.]
He had no pupils, though he corrected, advised, and instructed many
young painters after his own method. It was a decidedly arbitrary
teaching. Elliott Daingerfield tells a story of one of his own
landscapes in which a rail fence was running down into the foreground.
When Inness was asked in to criticise the canvas, he objected to the
fence and said it should be taken out.
“Why can’t I have the fence there if I want it?” Daingerfield
protested. To which Inness replied:
“You can if you want to be an idiot.”
His criticism of older painters and pictures was just as unqualified.
And in matters outside of art, where he spoke with no peculiar
authority, his vehemence was no less. Crossing on the _Arizona_ in
1887, he talked every one out of the smoking-room on the Single Tax
question, so a friend informs me. In 1894, when I happened to be
crossing with him, he was as positive as ever about his religious,
socialistic, and political convictions. His interest and enthusiasm
were in no degree abated. In the mornings he sat on deck wrapped up in
rugs under the lee of a life-boat, and amused himself doing examples
in vulgar fractions out of an ordinary school arithmetic; but in the
afternoon he liked to talk, and I was a willing listener, though I had
heard him discourse many times.
Every one remembers his caustic criticism of Turner’s “Slave Ship.”
He always had a kick for Turner, though at heart he admired him, and
in many respects his own methods were very like that master. They
both worked from visual memory, Turner putting in what pleased him in
architecture, people, and boats; and Inness putting in cows or bridges
or wagons, as pleased him. Neither painter resorted to the model or
to a sketch for these accessories. They painted them out of their
heads, and sometimes they were vague in drawing or false in lighting.
The only difference was that Turner took more liberties with his text
than Inness, and often lost truth of tone. This gave Inness his chance
to say that Turner was a painter of claptrap--his detail was spotty,
he could paint figures in a boat, but he couldn’t paint a boat with
figures.
For Gainsborough he had some admiration, and in his early days rather
followed him, but he outgrew the brown-fiddle tone of Gainsborough’s
foliage and came to think his work lacking in color. Constable,
too, he admired, perhaps because he painted the greens of foliage
very frankly; but his light and color were cold. Turner’s heat and
Constable’s cold he did not believe could both come out of England,
except through subjective distortion. The pictures of Watts, he
insisted, looked as though dipped in a sewer, so unhealthy and morbid
were they in color. This referred to the later pictures of Watts which
Inness had seen in a loan collection exhibited at the Metropolitan
Museum. He was fond of brilliant color himself, and evidently he had
never studied the earlier and middle-period pictures of Watts. Wilson
he liked, though recognizing that he was merely a reviser of the old
classic formula of landscape. But Wilson knew how to handle his sky and
could tie things together with atmosphere.
Corot was a very pretty painter--and by “pretty,” Inness meant clever.
He wagged his head in saying it and smiled as though the statement were
incontestable. The sentiment of light and air with Corot was something
that Inness thoroughly understood. And he greatly fancied Corot’s
composition. At one time he painted pictures that have a Corotesque
arrangement--notably the “Wood Gatherers,” formerly in the Clarke
Collection. What he did not understand was Corot’s monotony of color,
or, as other painters expressed it, Corot’s refinement of color. Millet
was wonderful, especially in his landscape-work, which had attracted
so little attention. Delacroix was one of the great gods for his
wonderful gamut of color, if nothing else. And so on.
The steamer trip in 1894 was the last one that Inness made. He died
that summer at the Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His funeral was held
in the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Swedenborgian
minister who officiated, in the course of his eulogy, said: “Those of
you who knew George Inness knew how intense a man he was.” “Intense”
is exactly descriptive of the man. He was keyed up all his life and
worked with feverish intensity. But the word does not describe his art,
for that has no feeling of stress or strain about it. Sometimes one is
conscious of its vagueness, as though the painter were groping a way
out toward the light--a vagueness that holds the mystery of things half
seen, a beautiful glimpse of half-revealed impressions. But usually his
pictures are serene, hushed, and yet radiant with the glow of eternal
sun-fires from sky or cloud.
They were lofty and poetic impressions, and the loftier they were
the more intense the painter’s effort to reveal them. The heights of
Parnassus are very calm, but they are not reached without a struggle.
The great ones--those who scale the upper peaks--are perhaps the most
intensive strugglers of all. Inness was one of them.
III
ALEXANDER H. WYANT
It was Corot who declared that in art Rousseau was an eagle and he
himself was merely a lark singing a song from the meadow-grasses. The
contrast and the comparison are not inapplicable to two of our own
painters. Wyant never possessed the wide range or the far-seeing eye of
Inness, but he had something about him of Corot’s mood and charm. He,
too, was a lark, or should we say a wood-thrush singing along the edge
of an American forest? He had only a few mellow notes, yet we would
not be without them. They still charm us. And it is not certain that
in the long account of time the direct and simple utterances of Corot
and Wyant may not outlive the wide truth of Rousseau and the vision
splendid of Inness. More than once in æsthetic story the songs of a
Burns have been held more precious than the tumults of a Milton.
The wonder of Wyant’s success is greater than that of Inness, for
his boyhood surroundings, if anything, were less stimulating and his
pictorial education far more restricted. Besides, Inness lived on to
seventy years, but Wyant died at fifty-six, having endured ill-health,
and for the last ten years of his life--his best working years--been
paralyzed in his right arm and hand. Living much to himself, something
of a hermit in his mountain home, weighed down by misfortunes and
disappointments, the wonder grows that he not only kept up and improved
his technique to the end, but that he preserved his serenity of mood
and purity of outlook through it all. He must have been a man with
fortitude of soul beyond the average. It is not every painter that can
turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.
Wyant was the typical barefoot boy of the near West in the days before
the Civil War. He was born in 1836 at Evans Creek, Tuscarawas County,
Ohio, and his boyhood and early youth were far removed from anything
like the madding crowd. His parents were Americans of the soil, his
father being a farmer and carpenter of Pennsylvania extraction, and his
mother of Dutch-Irish descent. They were nomadic, after the manner of
border people, and soon left Evans Creek to live in or near Defiance,
where Wyant learned his three R’s in the village school. There were
less than one thousand people in the town at that time, and what Wyant
got out of it by way of enlightenment or encouragement must have been
meagre. As a boy he, no doubt, roamed the woods, fished the streams,
and trailed along the Ohio hilltops; and at this time, unconsciously
perhaps, he was storing up visual memories of appearances that were to
be of service to him later on.
That he had an eye and was an observer from the start comes to us
in the tales told of his boyish sketches on the floor made with
charcoal from the wood-fire. At least they showed an inclination that
was afterward to develop into a passion. But the inclination found
no immediate outlet. After leaving school the youth served as an
apprentice in a harness-shop, but he did not care for harness-making.
He preferred to paint photographs, cards, signs--almost anything that
could be done with a brush. At twenty-one he went to Cincinnati and
for the first time saw some paintings in oil. Before that his ideas of
art had been bounded by book illustration and the omnipresent chromo.
It is said that among the pictures he saw at Cincinnati was something
by Inness. The young man was impressed by it, or by the reports about
Inness, for he took the train to New York to consult that master about
art as a vocation.
He found Inness at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy. How long he stopped
there and what was said we do not know, but the master was encouraging,
and the young man went back to Cincinnati determined to be a painter.
He had a right instinct about art at that early time or he never would
have chosen Inness for a counsellor. The famous landscape-painters then
were Kensett and Church. Inness was the most progressive, the most
ultra-modern of the time, and had not yet won universal applause. He
did not paint enough in detail for the man in the street, and evidently
he must have given Wyant his argument for breadth of view over detail,
for, as we shall presently see, Wyant had it almost from the start. But
perhaps the most and the best that he got from Inness was inspiration.
Back in Cincinnati and painting pictures after his own formula, Wyant
found a purchaser and a patron in Nicholas Longworth. It became
possible for him shortly thereafter to move to New York. There, in
1863, he saw a large exhibition of Düsseldorf pictures that probably
stirred his imagination. Pictures in America at that time were rather
scarce, and any exhibition of foreign work would be more impressive
then than now. The next year he exhibited at the National Academy
of Design for the first time, and in 1865 he went to Europe on a
Düsseldorf pilgrimage, impelled thereto by a mountain-and-waterfall
landscape of Gude which he had seen in New York.
He went straight to Gude at Carlsruhe and put himself under his
tutelage. Gude was a Norwegian painter, influenced by Dahl, and
imbued with the Düsseldorf method and point of view. The grand
landscape--panoramic in extent and mountainous in height, with a hot
sun in the heavens--was then in vogue, and Achenbach was its prophet.
From Wyant’s short stay with Gude it seems that his enthusiasm was
soon chilled down to zero. In after-life he often referred to the
great kindness of Gude and his wife, but he seemed to think that his
instruction in art had been fundamentally wrong. His pupil, Bruce
Crane, says that he spoke of his art environment there as being “a
miserable one,” and Wyant believed that “environment played the greater
part in the making of a painter for good or bad.”
He left Gude and started back to America, but stopped on the way
in England and Ireland, where he studied pictures and painted some
of his own. The old masters in the National Gallery apparently did
not make a strong appeal to him. His work shows no sign of Claude,
Salvator, Poussin, Ruysdael, Hobbema, or Cuyp. Even Gainsborough and
the ascendant Turner seem to have left him cold. But Constable he
liked very much. Here at last was a man seeing things in a large way
and doing them with breadth of brush. Moreover, he was doing simple
transcripts of nature, not the panorama of blazing perspective. In
America Wyant had inherited something of the spectacular from his
Hudson River predecessors; Düsseldorf had aided the conception, and
Turner had abetted it; but Constable seemed to be against it. Wyant was
inclined to renounce it. Constable produced the broad realistic look,
and at that time Wyant had probably not arrived at any other conception
of art than as a large transcript of nature. Ruskin’s doctrine of
fidelity to fact was in the air, and the landscape as emotional
expression, or as a symphony, or even as a decorative pattern, was
little known either in the studios or the critic’s den. There was,
however, plenty of controversy going on. And yet fresh from varying
theories and impressions, Wyant went over to Ireland and painted
pictures that bore no earmark of any painter or any school.
In the Metropolitan Museum there is an Irish landscape by him done in
1866--“View in County Kerry, Ireland.” There are gray mountains at
the back, a green foreground with a pool of water, a gray-blue and
whitish sky, a gray atmosphere. At the right middle distance is a white
cottage. The rest is treeless upland running into mountain heights
that are lost in haze and cloud. The picture is not only remarkable
for its simplicity of composition but its absence of small objects or
distracting details. Though a mountain landscape, it is broadly seen,
largely and simply massed, and painted with a broad flat brush. It
may have been repainted in later years, but I am willing to believe
from the breadth of its composition that it was painted broadly to
correspond, and is to-day substantially as when originally done.
This picture is in somewhat violent contrast with another Wyant
landscape hanging in the same gallery and dated in the same year--1866.
I refer to the large “Mohawk Valley” landscape--an excellent picture,
though evidencing limitations perhaps peculiar to America. It is a
huge valley view with a gorge and stream in the foreground running
down to a fall from which mist is rising. The stream as a pool is seen
again emerging in the middle distance. A half-lighted sky with falling
rain at the left and warm grays of clouds and blues of distance make
up the background, while in the foreground a tall tree at the left is
balanced by a group of lesser trees at the right. The whole color-tone
is warm (probably from underbasing), especially in the foreground,
which shows in grays and browns. It is a symmetrical composition with
a central point of sight, and in its detailed elaboration gives no
hint of selection or sacrifice. The trees, the ledges of rock in the
foreground, the water, the clouds are all exactly drawn and realized to
the last item, each one having quite as much importance as its fellow.
As for the painting, it is thin, kept thin to allow the underbasing to
show through; but it is flatly painted, not stippled. In the latter
respect it is an advance on, say, Church’s panorama, “Heart of the
Andes,” in the same gallery, where the stippling with white paint
produces a glittering, bedizened surface, and the minute drawing of
leaves in the foreground runs into petty niggling.
Now, the “Mohawk Valley” was probably completed just before Wyant went
to Europe; at least in method it antedates the “County Kerry, Ireland,”
landscape of the same year.[1] It is a very important picture and
represents the culmination of Wyant’s early style--a beautiful picture
for any place or period or painter to have produced. It shows Wyant’s
original point of view, with some of the influences that must have come
to him from the Hudson River school, from Inness, from various unknown
American sources. But the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape shows
a departure, a widening, and a broadening of both brush and vision
which were to increase and expand thereafter into a second style--the
style of Wyant’s later and nobler canvases. To this style Wyant was
undoubtedly helped at first by what he saw abroad, especially by the
pictures of Constable.
[1] “In regard to the two pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, ‘View
in County Kerry, Ireland,’ and the ‘Mohawk Valley,’ I never could
reconcile myself to the idea that they were both painted in 1866.
There is no doubt about the ‘Mohawk Valley’ because its manner is so
much like the many canvases of that period which Wyant often showed me
and which Mrs. Wyant destroyed after his death. The ‘View in County
Kerry, Ireland,’ marks a new period in his art and the widely different
handling as well as view-point are too much to have been acquired
in one year. There is certainly some mistake in the date--I should
say a difference of ten years. At some time that picture has been
cleaned and the restorer accidentally destroying the date restored it
incorrectly.”--(_Bruce Crane in a letter to the writer, December 13,
1917._)
[Illustration: “Mohawk Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
This was a time of rapid production with Wyant and he was always
afire with his theme. The recognition of artists was coming to him
if not the large patronage of the public. His picture of a “View
on the Susquehanna” resulted in his being elected an associate of
the National Academy in 1868, and he was named a full academician in
1869. But ill-health was with him, and in the hope of improving his
physical condition and at the same time gathering material for his art,
he joined in 1873 a government expedition to New Mexico and Arizona.
There were many hardships on the trip, and Wyant’s never very robust
constitution broke down under the strain. He was put on the train and
sent back East. It is said that on the way East he passed his home town
of Defiance, but would not get off. Ill as he was, with few friends
and less money, he determined to go on to New York and fight it out.
The fine courage of all that becomes more marked when we understand
that the illness was so severe that it had resulted at Fort Wingate
in paralysis of his right hand and arm. He was never to paint with
his right hand again. It was a crippled painter coming back to New
York--crippled in a vital spot--but he had determined that his left
hand should be trained to service. And it was.
The West not only maimed him physically but apparently taught him
nothing artistically. The deserts that he crossed with their red
porphyry mountains, dull-yellow sands, and gas-blue air--the most
wonderful landscapes in the world in their definition of form and
their quality of color--seem to have made no impression whatever upon
him. This is understandable only by considering the inheritance of
tradition and environment. In Wyant’s time a handsome landscape meant
a mountain-valley with forests, rocks, waterfalls, and the variegated
foliage of summer or autumn. The desert was unknown and remained for
a later generation of painters to discover; the plains were unpainted
and thought unpaintable; even the marsh and the meadow, which Corot
loved, were considered too slight for art. The grand-view conception in
landscape-painting died hard. In Wyant’s time it was very much alive.
Naturally enough, he was impressed by it, and though in later life he
did many small intimate bits of nature, he never got away entirely from
the wide mountain-valley theme.
He was, in fact, always a mountain lover. After his return to New York
he spent much of his summer-time in the Adirondacks. He was then deeply
interested in the pictures of the Barbizon-Fontainebleau painters which
were coming into the United States. So outspoken was his admiration
for Rousseau that he sent a picture to the Academy with the title “In
the Spirit of Rousseau.” His own style was growing broader and simpler
each year, and, strange enough, the public was buying his pictures. He
became measurably prosperous, had a studio in the Y.M.C.A. Building
in Twenty-third Street, and received a number of pupils. One of his
pupils, a Miss Locke, he married in 1880.
After his marriage much time was spent in the Keene Valley, and in
1889 he moved to Arkville in the Catskills, where with a fine sweeping
outlook from his porch upon woods, valleys, and hills he found enough
material to last him the rest of his life. He saw little of the town
thereafter. He had never mingled freely with his fellow man. The
Society of American Artists had honored him with membership in 1878,
he was a founder of the American Water-Color Society, and a member
of the Century Association, but he always held somewhat aloof from
them. Friendly enough with painters and people who sought him, he was,
nevertheless, a little shy, which perhaps gave him the reputation of
being gruff. He seemed less fitted to the city street than the aisle of
the forest. It was in his mountain home on the forest edge that he died
in 1892, having suffered much physical pain before his going.[2]
[2] “I met Wyant in 1876; his right arm was then practically useless.
Later on his right side was affected, and the last six years he was
compelled to walk sideways. Yet through all these years of suffering he
worked day and night, and during the last six years, when his suffering
was the worst, he recorded on canvas some of the beautiful things that
survive him.”--(_Bruce Crane, ibid._)