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.NDSCAPE& FIGURE M
INTERS OF AMERICA W
LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE
PAINTERS OF AMERICA
BY
FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN
NEW YORK
PRIVATELY PRINTED
MCMXVII
Copyright, 1917
by
Frederic Fairchild Sherman
TO MY WIFE
JULIA MUNSON SHERMAN
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Landscape of Homer Dodge Martin .... 3
Robert Loftin Newman: An American Colorist . 13
Blakelock's Smaller Landscapes and Figure-Pieces 23
Some Paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder ... 33
An American Painter of the Nude ...... 43
Elliott Daingerfield 51
Landscape Painting
Nature and Art 61
Paint and Personality 64
The Real and the Unreal 67
ILLUSTRATIONS
HOMER DODGE MARTIN
Normandy Trees Frontispiece
PAGE
The Lily Pond 4
The Lone Tree 4
The Sun Worshippers 6
ROBERT LOFTIN NEWMAN
The Wandering Mind . . 14
Mother and Child 16
Magdalen 18
Girl Blowing Bubbles 20
RALPH ALBERT BLAKELOCK
Indian Madonna 24
Going to the Spring 24
Moonrise 26
On the Plains 28
The Woodland Road 28
ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER
The Sheepfold 34
The Forest of Arden 34
Noli Me Tangere 36
Pegasus 38
LILLIAN M. GENTH
PAGE
The Fount of Life 44
The Mountain Stream 46
The Sun Maiden 46
Sunlit Dell 46
ELLIOTT DAINGERFIELD
An Arcadian Huntress 52
The Waters of Oblivion 54
The City that Never Was 56
Sunset — Mists and Shadows 56
WINSLOW HOMER
Blown Away 62
ALEXANDER H. WYANT
Sketch 64
DWIGHT W. TRYON
Dawn 66
J. FRANCIS MURPHY
Indian Summer 68
THE LANDSCAPE OF HOMER
DODGE MARTIN
LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE
PAINTERS OF AMERICA
THE LANDSCAPE OF HOMER
DODGE MARTIN
THE work of no American painter of landscape
more certainly requires an intimate acquaint-
ance for its full enjoyment or more fully repays one
for a painstaking study of its various manifestations
than that of Homer Dodge Martin. Inness, who
was unquestionably a greater master, in all the wide
range of his product never but once or twice touches
one so nearly. Wyant, who was more closely akin
temperamentally, touches one oftener though never
so nearly nor so deeply. His was also a poetic in-
terpretation of nature notable for its refinement in
the same sense as Martin's; his vision, however, was
much more limited than either Martin's or Inness's
and he was obviously incapable of developing the
larger aspects of a theme as they did.
Wyant and Martin were both poets in landscape;
Wyant is lyrical, Martin epic in his product. One
may prefer the one or the other, but of relative value
3
of the work of the two there can be no reasonable
difference of opinion. Inness and Wyant, the
former in a large and the latter in a smaller way,
are both emotional painters. Martin is consciously
intellectual. He selected his subjects with so com-
prehensive a knowledge of their adaptability to his
needs and with so delicate an appreciation of their
possibilities for the expression of his moods that
one of his closest friends once said that his finest
canvases looked as if no one but God and he had
ever seen the places pictured. Wyant and Inness
painted more nearly whatever happened to excite
their emotion. That the emotions of the latter
were of many kinds and those of the former of but
few explains the variety in the product of the one
that is lacking in that of the other. Wyant's paint-
ings are full of sentiment of a very exquisite sort,
tender but too serious ever to even approach sen-
timentality. Inness's are charged with much
stronger feeling but seldom so finely felt if invaria-
bly more ably expressed. Indeed, both Wyant and
Martin express more successfully the rarer as-
pects of nature and Inness's pre-eminence rests upon
the variety of his achievement and the high average
of its excellence rather than upon any superior
ability in the matter of expression. Inness is too
fully engrossed in the reproduction of the actual
appearances of things to bother with their spiritual
4
Homer D. Martin: The Lily Fond
Collection of Frederic Fairchild Sherman
■-*~*****., -
Homer D. Martin: The Lone Tree
Montclair Museum of Art
significance, so that, however masterly his pictures
of peace or of storm, the full meaning of the scene
is seldom felt in his rendering of it. Martin on the
other hand never fails to make one keenly conscious
of the loneliness and utter desolation of certain
places nor Wyant of the pensive charm of others.
In Inness we admire a wonderful faculty for the
presentation, in a large way and with unsurpassed
truth, of nature in her many moods, while in Mar-
tin and Wyant it is the expression of these varying
moods through their interpretations of nature, a
much more delicate and difficult accomplishment,
that impresses us most forcibly.
That you will find the figure in many of Inness's
finest canvases, admirably placed and beautifully
suggested, while it practically never appears in the
pictures of Martin or Wyant, signifies nothing if
not that Inness felt the need of it as they never did
in the rendering of pure landscape. Wyant often
introduced cattle and sheep in his compositions, but
Martin practically never did and in the best of him
one will find no living thing to divert howsoever
slightly one's attention from whatever mood is ex-
pressed or to detract in the least from the feelings
it is sure to arouse.
To Homer Martin the look of the land with its
accompaniment of sky was sufficiently expressive
to make the addition of anything extraneous unnec-
5
essary to an adequate realization of the spirit of a
place and a full rendering of its suggestion either
of peace, loneliness, gladness, desolation or what-
ever motive its particular aspect might embody.
While it is true that he includes in some of his
most important canvases a deserted house, an ivy-
covered church, a light by the sea, it will be noted
that they are very much a part of the landscape
in every instance as well as expressive in them-
selves of the very moods embodied in the scenes of
which they are a part. Martin is at his best, how-
ever, in such works as The Sun Worshippers, On-
tario Sand Dunes, Westchester Hills, Adirondack
Scenery, and the others that are landscapes pure
and simple, in which is no visible evidence of man
or of man's work. There are no finer interpreta-
tions of the moods of nature in the whole of Ameri-
can landscape art and their sentiment is inescapable.
His range in the selection of subject is deliber-
ately restricted as his interest was confined entirely
to such themes as offered a satisfactory means for
the expression of those moods of nature which cor-
responded most nearly to his own, and of which
his intimate understanding made him a masterly
interpreter. He does not attempt difficult perfor-
mances in oil painting to convince one of his
mastery of the medium; in all his product nothing
may be found that approaches the dramatic in ac-
6
i
tion or intensity, but perhaps no landscape painter
has ever expressed such depth of feeling as is evident
in his finest works; and one will look far to find
anything finer in the way of mere painting than
certain pictures of his like The Harp of the Winds
or The Sun Worshippers.
One realizes in Martin's handling of a subject
an unerring instinct for the inevitable evidenced in
just such a proportionate sacrifice of unnecessary
detail and personal viewpoint as emphasizes prop-
erly its particular significance. In several of his
subjects, of which there are variations executed at
considerable intervals, such as the Sand Dunes,
Lake Sanford and the Adirondack Scenery, which
undoubtedly derives from the Headwaters of the
Hudson, this process of elimination and refinement,
the calculated cutting away of insistent trivialities
and insistence upon the primitive and elemental
meanings of the landscape, is patent.
I think one may find, without great effort, sug-
gestions in Martin's work of his predilection for
poetry and music and his reaction to the best of
both, for certainly if the Harp of the Winds is
not musical you will find no music in landscape
art any more than you will find poetry there if not
in the Old Manor House. His Andante: Fifth
Symphony, painted with the exquisite strain of that
air ringing in his ears, is a notable evidence of his
7
cultivated taste in music, the like of which is not to
be found elsewhere in landscape painting, and it is
surely not presumptuous to assume in other canvases
intimations of poetic origin; at any rate, it is im-
possible to look upon certain of his masterpieces
without a new understanding of that love for the
odes of Keats which led him sometimes to recite
them, so truly do we feel the haunting melancholy
of that immortal verse in his work.
Not many artists among his contemporaries were
equally cultivated, and it is interesting to note that
La Farge, who was the most distinguished of those
that were, was one of Martin's few friends. That
the small talk of the studios had no interest for him
is the only possible explanation of his lack of com-
rades in them, for he was a man whom men es-
pecially found lovable. I imagine much of the
time his fellow artists spent together in the dis-
cussion of the problems of oil painting Martin must
have spent steeping himself in thoughts that are too
deep for words, pondering the memories of half-
forgotten airs or "soaking in" the beauty of some
immortal verse, and this difference in the use to
which he put his idle moments is plainly to be seen,
I think, in the kind of thing one finds in his pic-
tures— not fine painting for its own sake, spectac-
ular scenery for the sake of effect, or dramatic skies;
not improvisations in color nor interesting studies
8
in chiaroscuro, but certain inescapable intimations
of the important fact that "the poetry of earth is
never dead."
9
ROBERT LOFTIN NEWMAN: AN
AMERICAN COLORIST
ROBERT LOFTIN NEWMAN: AN
AMERICAN COLORIST
ROBERT LOFTIN NEWMAN was born in
Richmond, Virginia, in 1827 an^ went with
his parents to Tennessee when he was eleven years
old. His family must have been reasonably well-
to-do people at the time, for it is recorded that as
a youth he read a great deal about art. He prob-
ably painted some, too, for when he was but twenty-
three he went to Europe with the intention of study-
ing at Diisseldorf. He stopped, however, in Paris
instead, and entered the atelier of Thomas Couture,
where he remained but a few months. This was all
the instruction in art he ever received. After re-
turning to his home in Tennessee he made a second
trip to Paris in 1854, and it was then that he made
the acquaintance of William M. Hunt, who in turn
introduced the young artist to Millet.
To Newman belongs the credit of having been
one of the earliest to appreciate as well as one of
the first to purchase Millet's work. He bought
Le Vanneur and several other canvases, which he
later sold, through necessity, certainly not from
13
choice, as they must have been the most prized of
his possessions, as one will infer from even a slight
familiarity with Newman's own work, in which
not a little of the sentiment as well as the best of
the color reveals a remarkable sympathy with that
which is inevitably associated with the art of the
great Frenchman. This does not imply that New-
man's painting is anything other than individual
and delightful in its own way, which it certainly
is, but in a measure it helps to indicate what ten-
dencies determined the development of his art,
what his ideals really were and how nearly he
eventually succeeded in realizing them in his
canvases.
At the outbreak of the Civil War Newman was
employed by the Confederate Government as a
draughtsman and in 1864 he saw some active service
as a member of the 16th Virginia Infantry. How
true it is that he is exclusively an idealist and a
painter of ideas, interested only in some personal
and rare interpretation of religion, history or life,
or some original creation of his own imagination,
may be gathered from the fact that there is no
record in his art of his ever having been to Paris
nor yet of his ever having been a soldier.
For years after the surrender of Lee left him free
to return again to his easel he worked in a com-
parative obscurity that we must presume was any-
Robert Loftin Newman: The Wandering Mind
Collection of the late Sir William Van Home, Montreal
thing but unsatisfactory to one of his naturally re-
tiring dispositions, especially as his pictures were
highly esteemed by a few men and women of culti-
vation and taste who quietly collected them during
all this time. The interest and encouragement of
such purchasers as came to take away his canvases,
fellow craftsmen like Wyatt Eaton and William
M. Chase, literary celebrities like Richard Watson
Gilder, and connoisseurs like Sir William Van
Home and Thomas B. Clarke must have meant in-
finitely more to him than the popular approval of
a general public that was satisfied with the land-
scape of the Hudson River School and the figure
paintings of J. G. Brown.
Not until 1894, when he was sixty-seven years
old, was any public exhibition of Newman's work
ever held. At that time a collection of upward of
a hundred of his paintings, mostly loaned for the
occasion, was arranged by a committee of the artist's
friends and hung in a New York gallery. That he
was practically unknown at the time even in the
city where he lived and worked is evident from the
statement in the Evening Post's account of the exhi-
bition, that "his works are never seen in the art gal-
leries, nor yet in the sales which occur at frequent
intervals." The Post and the Tribune, both of
which reviewed the exhibition at length, speak
highly of the artist particularly as a colorist, the
15
latter, in mentioning a hunting scene and a religious
subject, saying that "in pictures like these Mr.
Newman is one of the haunting masters of color."
From a report published in the Times about a week
after these reviews appeared, we learn that the pic*
tures "are finding favor with buyers," which prob-
ably means that several were sold besides the one*
which the newspaper report adds was purchased
by the painter, Alexander Harrison. From the
date of this exhibition, which was perhaps the great
event in Newman's quiet life, until that March day
in 191 2 when he was found dead in his studio in
New York, he seemingly never again emerged from
the utter obscurity in which he lived, and in his old
age, as in his youth, it was the loyalty and help of a
few true friends and discerning judges of painting
that enabled him to purchase the necessities of a
life of singular devotion to a fine ideal in art that
has never been rightly estimated or properly ap-
preciated.
That Newman was a great colorist in the best
sense is evident in all of his finished work, and few
who are acquainted with it would agree, I think,
with the critic who wrote that "you feel that his
imaginative conceptions were arrested on their way
into concrete images by a flow of light and color
too bewitching to let the constructive faculty of the
artist have free play," for certainly the "obscurity
16
Robert Loftin Newman: Mother and Child
in details," which this critic remarks, is nothing if
not deliberate, a conscious sacrifice of definition
in particulars for the perfect realization of that
mysterious and poetic charm of color which is their
chief delight. His color has a loveliness entirely
due to spontaneous feeling, and in many of the pre-
sumably so-called obscure canvases it is developed
with all the loving and painstaking care that an-
other artist might have lavished on the drawing of
a figure, and simply because he realized that it was
a surer means for the expression of what he had
to say than any further development of the more
obvious detail could be. In some of his canvases
the very indefiniteness of the no less necessary de-
tail is readily recognized as being a condition in-
evitable to their success, inasmuch as their intention
is the suggestion of some elusive sentiment or an
expression of feeling rather than any actual repre-
sentation of the reality of things, however lovely.
In all his pictures it is the poetry of color and of
life rather than the prose that one finds, and in the
sense that poetry is the higher form of expression
it may be said that he is a greater artist than some
of his contemporaries who are unquestionably su-
perior painters. However much of a poet New-
man is, it is quite true that he is never the master of
the poetry of art that Millet is of the prose. Mil-
let's prose is generally perfect in a way that New-
17
man's poetry often is not, and yet the imperfect
beauty of much of Newman's painting has a very
real charm. It is an elusive charm, though, and
is easily missed unless one is peculiarly sensitive
to the sensations of color and to the suggestion of
forms used merely as symbols in a manner of ex-
pression somewhat similar to that of not a little of
the sculpture of Rodin. A representative example
of this phase of Newman's work is the little picture,
in the collection of the late Sir William Van Home,
called The Wandering Mind, where the figure,
though crudely drawn, is a most suggestive as well
as an entirely adequate interpretation of a vitally
interesting idea. Further development of the de-
tail in this canvas, or indeed anything in the way of
more finished drawing, could hardly add at all to
the tragic force of the picture as it stands. One
might suppose that the character of the subject in
this instance partly, if not wholly, accounts for the
success of the painting, and it is quite true that there
is something in the association of ideas that makes
the awkward figure peculiarly suggestive and ap-
propriate. There are other works by Newman,
however, where the detail is quite as obscure and the
drawing quite as crude, that are just as forcible in
their presentation of other and less unhappy sub-
jects. The small Magdalen in the same collection
is one of them. The artist has painted her praying,
18
Robert Loftin Newman: Magdalen
Collection of the late Sir William Van Home, Montreal
and it is the pose that makes the picture, as an artist
would say. And yet here, as in the other canvas, an
unusual but no less beautiful and suggestive color
scheme is a powerful factor first and last in the ef-
fectiveness of what is a spiritual or imaginative
rather than an actual and realistic interpretation.
The picture of the Mother and Child, one of his
last works, dated 1902, proves that he was an ac-
complished draughtsman and an intelligent techni-
cian in other ways when it suited his purpose.
This canvas is as fine a representation of a subject
so often painted as one will be likely to find in mod-
ern art. The figures are very happily arranged
and the expression in the faces is so finely felt and
expressed that the entire poem of the mother's love
and the child's response is fully evident; while the
golden curls and rosy cheeks of the baby against
the black hair and cooler tones of the mother's face
emphasize that charm of color which, like a lovely
music, is the accompaniment to this song of life.
The canvas is as exquisitely finished as are some of
those rare figures of Rodin's which exhibit a similar
though perhaps greater degree of technical pro-
ficiency in a sculptor, who quite as generally, for
the sake of emphasizing the ideas he wishes to ex-
press, is accustomed to neglect many if not all of
the little niceties of art.
In the Girl Blowing Bubbles it is again alto-
19
gether an unusual and interesting color scheme that
emphasizes the idea of mystery which is suggested
by the enveloping shadows and the inarticulate curi-
osity of the watching dogs. This is a finished work
of art, in that it is a finished piece of rich and satis-
fying color; the figure of the child, the green-cov-
ered couch on which she rests her hand and the two
dogs are merely sketched in sufficiently to serve as
notes in an exquisite color harmony, which is at once
attractive to the last degree and highly expressive.
To have insisted upon the drawing could hardly
have added to the beauty of the canvas and, one
feels, might have resulted in the sacrifice of much
of its charm.
20
KOBERT LOFTIN NEWMAN : GlRL BLOWING BUBBLES
BLAKELOCK'S SMALLER LANDSCAPES
AND FIGURE-PIECES
BLAKELOCK'S SMALLER LANDSCAPES
AND FIGURE-PIECES
A LARGE majority of the best of Blakelock's
paintings are those of the smallest dimen-
sions. As yet these masterpieces in miniature have
never received the attention they deserve. If, as
seems probable, he preferred and worked more nat-
urally and therefore more effectively in a small
area, in much the same sense as we may say that
Inness worked in the compass of a canvas thirty by
forty-five inches, it is surely necessary for us to know
these little pictures if we are ever to appreciate
fully his abilities. They will acquaint us with cap-
abilities that his great canvases like the Pipe Dance,
the Indian Encampment and the several large
Moonlights have not already made familiar. The
faultless drawing and the fine characterization in
the Indian Girl and Shooting the Arrow will be a
revelation to many, as will also the exquisite en-
amel-like quality of color and of finish in a work
like the Girl with the Fan.
Shooting the Arrow is a poetic interpretation of
a phase of primitive life in America that has passed
23
away forever. The arrangement of the lighting is
very notable. The Indian brave, clothed only in
his loin-cloth and poised, with bow half-drawn, in
the full glow of the setting sun, stands out in high
relief against the shadowed darkness of the sur-
rounding forest, like a bit of Wedgwood done in
the colors of life — a typical and unforgettable figure
from an heroic past. The Indian Girl presents an-
other phase of primitive life with similar success.
Sitting on her heels in a characteristic attitude and
with one hand playing with a string of beads, she
is an almost perfect piece of idealism, preserving
the pensive charm and unstudied grace of Indian
girlhood. The feather in her hair, the fillet about
her forehead and her robe of soft tanned skin or-
namented with beadwork, the deer-skin spread
upon the ground and the trinket in her lap are all
beautifully indicated, while the personal element
of her own individuality is present and evident in
a degree unique to the artistic creation of genius.
The Indian Madonna in the collection of Mr.
George S. Palmer, illustrates just as forcibly Blake-
lock's ability as a figure painter. Here the compo-
sition is so simple that the almost monumental dig-
nity of design in the little group of the girl and her
baby is apt to be overlooked. The artist's admir-
able restraint and mastery of line are evident, and in
addition a technical method exactly adapted to the
24
perfect rendering of a subject of this character on a
canvas of this size. It is, indeed, continually sur-
prising in these smaller pictures of Blakelock's to
note how admirably suited his method in every in-
stance is to the character of the subject portrayed,
a fact which is not always true of the larger can-
vases, as one will gather from looking at even so
fine an example as the Pipe Dance. This large
picture is one of his most famous works and rightly
so, for though it is a failure in some ways it is a
splendid failure, and in other ways it is a grand
success. In it, if anywhere in American art, you
may read something of the epic of our native Indian
and you will look in vain elsewhere for its like in
our art so far as the heroic cast of the composition
is concerned.
A picture that comes from the collection of the
late Dr. Charles M. Kurtz, formerly Director of
the Buffalo Museum, is Going to the Spring. This
young girl going to fill her jar with fresh water,
performing a common daily task, translates one of
the prosaic duties of life into poetry no less noble
because of its homely human origin. She is as
graceful in her movement as a Tanagra figure and
with the added interest for us of being seen in her
natural surroundings.
Blakelock is the only American painter who has
adequately rendered on canvas Indian life in this
25
country as it was prior to the final wars, the removal
of the Indians to the reservations and their change
from savage dress and customs to those of our civili-
zation. For this reason if for no other a consider-
able part of his production can never be a negli-
gible contribution to American art. Its evident
historic interest and importance is sufficiently great
to preserve all of the pictures that present this phase
of his work. Of his landscapes and moonlights
there is but little doubt that the unimportant ex-
amples will cease to interest our collectors as they
become familiar with the somewhat limited num-
ber of really fine ones. Of examples of large size,
sixteen by twenty-four inches or over, there are
relatively few of the first quality. It is apparent
therefore that there is a position of importance in
our public and private collections awaiting his
master-pieces in miniature and that that man will
be fortunate indeed who may possess one or two of
the best of them.
It has been said and truly that "Blakelock's talent
was a talent of pure gold — but a small one." It
would seem that in the elaboration of some of his
larger pictures he had often to hammer it very thin,
producing a pretty piece of painting that is not con-
vincing, or to mix it with a baser metal, producing
perhaps a noble canvas like the Pipe Dance, which
is a quite atrocious piece of painting. This is not
26
u r?
i-J ^
P3 >=;
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£ -2
true of his smaller pictures. They glow with all
the richness of pure color and they satisfy one as
only the gold of genius unalloyed ever can or will.
The space is sufficient for the composition and the
composition fills the space ; there are no uninterest-
ing passages, no empty spaces, nor are there any
that are crowded with unnecessary and meaningless
detail. Each is a simple, direct statement in brief
of some single beautiful thought, some one fine emo-
tion, or if but an impression yet one that is never-
theless full of suggestion.
The Moonrise, reproduced herewith from a
photograph that admirably reveals the character-
istic detail in a painting that is so dark in tone as
to require specially good lighting to be properly
seen at all, is a memorable piece of the pure poetry
of night with just that touch of light withal that
makes of it a thing of magic like the moonlit night
itself. Furthermore it is a distinguished compo-
sition, the subtile gradation from dark to light in-
evitably leading the eye into the picture and em-
phasizing the beauty that is there. It shows,
through a tangle of woodland trees, between two
huge boulders, the first glow of the rising moon
across an expanse of quiet water. This little panel
together with many other of the masterpieces of
American landscape was formerly in the collection
of Mr. Thomas B. Clarke.
27
Of the great Moonlight, now in the Toledo Mu-
seum, probably the earliest version was the little
painting (No. 15 of the sale), six by eight inches,
formerly with the Toledo canvas in Mr. Catholina
Lambert's collection. The late Mr. John N.
Andrews owned another and in the William M.
Laffan collection there was a fourth, thirty-five and
a quarter by fifty-five inches, engraved by S. G.
Putnam, and published (1887) in the book of
"Engravings on Wood" by members of the Society
of American Wood Engravers.
The Golden Afternoon is a composition that the
artist repeated many times with but little variation
upon larger canvases and seldom with anything
comparable to the sumptuous beauty of its render-
ing in this instance. Generally in the bigger pic-
tures the necessity of an emphasis in the breaking up
of the line of the horizon, by the introduction of
more trees at intervals not always happily chosen,
disturbs the balance of the composition and ruins its
effect; while the greater area of sky requiring a
diversity of interest to save it from monotony is
robbed of much of the beauty and richness as well
as all of the simplicity it has here.
On the Plains exhibits in a space but four and
one-quarter by nine and one-eighth inches an ex-
panse of prairie that successfully impresses the spec-
tator with a true sense of its vastness. Further, this
28
Ralph Albert Blakelock: On the Plains
Ralph Albert Blakelock: The Woodland Road
Collection of Mr. John F. Degener, Jr.
tiny canvas illustrates the artist's manner of making
a picture out of the simplest material. Here a
foreground of flat, uninteresting country, a group of
Indian tepees in the middle distance and a bit of
cloudy sky are transformed by the magic of mere
paint into a poem of the prairies in which their im-
mensity as well as that sense of loneliness that per-
vades it finds complete expression.
An interesting example of a little-known phase of
Blakelock's work is The Woodland Road owned by
Mr. John F. Degener. In this canvas the color
scheme is confined entirely to a range of greens with
which he manages a most engaging and at the same
time very precise, if not quite literal, interpretation
of nature. The painting was but recently seen in
the benefit exhibition in New York and introduced
a practically unknown expression of Blakelock's
ability as a landscape artist. In it one realizes a
vigorous response to the actual aspect of the natural
world evidenced by masterly draughtsmanship, to-
gether with a sensitive recreation of atmospheric
envelopment that accounts for much of the basis of
truth upon which he built the lasting beauty of those
purely imaginative pictures like the Toledo Mu-
seum Moonlight and the Autumn at the Buffalo
Museum which are more truly representative be-
cause more evidently characteristic. This wood-
land interior, however, may almost be said to rank
29
with the greatest of any school or period. The
drawing of the trees at least reveals a knowledge of
their anatomy that rivals that of Rousseau and the
recognized masters. Its real charm, though, has
little or nothing to do with drawing or with fact.
It is inherent rather in the sense of sylvan solitude
it so subtly conveys — a suggestion as of the leafy
haunts of fairy folk far hidden from the ways of
men.
30
SOME PAINTINGS BY ALBERT
PINKHAM RYDER
SOME PAINTINGS BY ALBERT
PINKHAM RYDER
ALBERT RYDER'S color and the way in
which he uses it is a calculable quantity in the
genesis of his paintings just as truly as are either his
conceptions or the designs in which they are em-
bodied. One may estimate quite accurately its ac-
tual value in relation to the total effect produced
by any and every picture he has painted, though
of course it cannot be mathematically stated.
Whether the picture is thoroughly synthetic in its
subtile harmonization of delicate shades and values
or whether it be simply a masterly piece of design,
as is sometimes the case, the color itself, though in
the former instance entirely neutral in effect, and
in the latter seemingly as negligible as that of a
silhouette, is always an appreciable equation adding
interest or meaning to the composition. His color
simply as color embroiders his imaginations with
rhymes as perfect as the rhythm of his line, and
though a less important contribution to the poetry
of his product than the design, in the sense that,
one may say, rhyme is not a necessary part of poetry
33
in that some of the noblest is written in blank verse,
it is yet a means of informing it with an added
loveliness.
Mr. Huneker in one of his brilliant essays has
spoken of that quality of the old masters of Italy
which Ryder's color suggests at times, and if I re-
member aright added that the artist deliberately
sought in his own manner to emulate the beautiful
coloring that adds distinction to their works. He
must have been consciously trying to work out a
more satisfactory approximation to their customary
habit when he undertook the little panel now in the
Brooklyn Museum representing a lady, full length,
in a landscape, which is seemingly done entirely
over a background of gold. In a similar method
he painted two panels of a three-fold screen for the
late William M. Laffan which has now been broken
up, these two panels and the center one, by Homer
Martin, having been sold separately. The color
of the Italian masters, however perfectly suited to
the ecstatic elaboration of religious allegory though,
is hardly that which harmonizes with our present
day visualization of nature or of life, and naturally
therefore he never very nearly approaches them. It
might have been otherwise had he been of a deeply
religious nature, which he was not, or more hu-
manly sympathetic to that hint of divinity within
one's self which generally was their inspiration.
34
Nevertheless, one of his noblest creations is a re-
ligious subject, the Noli Me Tangere, and though
it has little or nothing in common with any early
picture of the scene, it surpasses most, if not all, of
them in an elevation of imaginative mysticism that
distinguishes it among the masterpieces of religious
art. He has painted the Christ as a suspended
spirit visible in human form and clothed in the
cerements of the grave, the very color of the flesh
emphasizing the impression of the body of one
newly arisen from the dead. The old masters pic-
tured His a living presence in this incident, the
measurable weight of which is supported by feet
firmly set upon the earth. Ryder has succeeded in
conveying more convincingly, at least to the world
of today, the essential spiritual significance of the
scene.
In such a painting as the Marine owned by Mr.
Montross the value of the color in a composition
notable rather for its design is very evident. It
pervades the picture with a glamour as of the night
at sea and puts one en rapport with this epic of the
ocean as surely as the noble rhythm of the line em-
phasizes the movement of the waves which it in-
evitably suggests. However little there may be of
any resemblance to reality either in color or in
drawing in such a canvas, it is no less a penetrating
interpretation of the might and majesty of the sea
35
and, like a vivid dream, more moving than any
memory of the ocean is ever likely to be. In the
canvas called The Sheepfold, recently presented by
Mr. Augustus A. Healy to the Brooklyn Museum,
it is the pigment again that stamps the painting with
the authority of a masterpiece in that it approxi-
mates in both color and intensity so nearly the ac-
tual effect of the moonlit night, recreating in a
magical way the vibrating mystery that constitutes
its essential charm. The huddled group of sheep
instinctively drawn together by the dark and the
lighted window of the farmhouse near by indicat-
ing the gathering of the family therein, give the pic-
ture an extra human interest and lend it a meaning
associated with life that brings its beauty home to
all. The poetry of the moonlight, the shadows
of the trees against the glowing skies, the silence and
the solitude of the night, it is reasonable to say are
made evident to all by this vital human touch.
Ryder's astonishing ability as a draughtsman, his
unerring instinct for the very lines of truth in draw-
ing horses, sheep and other animals as well as do-
mestic fowls and birds, is seen in many canvases in
which they are the chief if not the only interest.
His horses are as fine as Gericault's and his sheep
as fine as Jacque's when he wishes them to be. No-
where else in art, sculpture or painting, I think, will
one find anything more tragically beautiful or more
36
Albert P. Ryder: Noli Me Tangere
Collection of Mr. N. E. Montr oss
poignantly pathetic than his picture of a dead
canary. It is a more touching Elegy upon a dead
song-bird than one may hope to find in music or
in poetry, and it is a matchless piece of drawing and
painting besides. Another panel with which I am
familiar portrays three sheep so faithfully that a
fellow craftsman once hesitated to purchase it be-
cause it seemed to him beyond the artist's abilities
as a draughtsman.
He could also build up with wonderful verisimili-
tude scenes of witching splendor like the Siegfried
and the Rhine Maidens in the collection of the late
Sir William Van Home or present the very essence
of a tale from Chaucer in a painting like the Con-
stance in the same collection. In The Temple of
the Mind he originated an idea quite as romantic
and expressed it just as completely and attractively.
Indeed he is notable for his invention as well as for
the magical quality of his color — the invention of
new incident to inform historic facts and romantic
ideas with new interest, as well as the invention of
eloquent and attractive compositions in which to
embody them. It is just this portion of something
that is new in all of his work, the original part of it
that is his own creatian, that is the measure of his
genius and his greatness.
His landscapes are the least successful of his
works, and yet even in landscape he has done some
37
fine things. Like the Sunset Hour, though, they are
generally those in which the human element is in-
troduced by a single figure or more, and becomes, in
reality, the centre of interest however lovely the
landscape may be. In practically all of his pictures
the human interest is present, and in most of them it
is paramount, whatever their magic of mere paint
or color, their suggestion of music or of rhyme, of
time or of place. It is indeed the vital thing in his
art. It informs the most imaginative of his works
with meaning so evident as to be almost unmistak-
able. In the Forest of Arden one senses it in the
broken limb of the blasted tree repeating the ges-
ture of the cavalier who woos his lady in the fore-
ground, he dwelling upon the beauty of Love's de-
mesne and that dumb finger of earth's dead point-
ing upward as if to recall the lasting loveliness of
Heaven. I do not wish to be misunderstood as
implying that Ryder ever consciously attempts to
point a moral in a picture or to tell a story, but sim-
ply to indicate how truly his work is informed with
meaning and pregnant with suggestion — so much
so, indeed, that from the best of it one gets an in-
tellectual as well as an emotional pleasure of the
highest sort. In the picture of Pegasus the figure
rides the white winged horse out of the radiant
heavens right over the edge of the world, bringing
back to us today the message of the gods. What
38
Albert P. Ryder: Pegasus
matters it if the winged steed is badly drawn in such
a picture? Perhaps the spindly legs that would
scarcely carry its weight subconsciously emphasize
the power of those mighty wings outspread! In-
variably almost Ryder sacrifices everything un-
necessary to the realization of an idea in his effort
to give the fullest and most forcible expression and
effectiveness to his pictures. Their interest and
their charm sufficiently prove how wisely he chooses
between the vital and the ineffectual elements in
their composition and execution.
39
AN AMERICAN PAINTER OF
THE NUDE
AN AMERICAN PAINTER OF
THE NUDE
MISS LILLIAN GENTH is, so far as I am
aware, the only American artist whose whole
career evidences a deliberate effort to earn a repu-
tation as a painter of the nude. Some canvases
with draped figures, several portraits and a few in-
timate landscape studies, undertaken as settings for
her nudes, constitute the remainder of her product.
In practically all of our great museums and private
collections of American paintings, she is represented
by a picture of the nude. These paintings have
about them a glamour of youth, a healthy vigorous
beauty that seldom fails to arrest attention and to
reward one for a generous consideration of all that
visible portion of it which is realized in the me-
dium. Her choice of models for her figures is con-
fined to the gracious and winning perfection of
girlish bodies which she habitually uses merely as
symbols in the interpretation of romantic ideas.
This gives to her work an inescapable individual
character, differentiating it from that of other
painters of the nude and indicates its limitations as
well as its merits. Whoever delights in the buoy-
43
ancy of bright color and the suggestion of poetic
thought will not fail to find satisfaction in her can-
vases. Her figures stand forth upon the painted
stage of her pictures in a loveliness as altogether re-
moved from reality as the figures that interpret for
us in the theatre some Shakespearean scene of won-
der and delight.
In the sense, however, that a figure by Degas,
Daumier or Millet seems alive, Miss Genth's are
generally lifeless. In other words, the figures that
people her pictures, faultless though they may be
at times in drawing and intriguing as they almost
invariably are in their youthful charm, symbolize
life but do not live. Of the significance of life as
indelibly recorded by nature in its effect upon anat-
omy, there are no indications in her figures and the
absence of it one senses in a definite lack of that
modicum of realism that makes of a painted figure
a living presence. The tragedy of bent forms and
misshapen bodies, the endless drama of the human
face, has, as yet, no representation in her work,
which more nearly approximates today the popular
portrait painters' presentation of personality in its
attention to what may be termed the inessentials of
feminine prettiness, as to both line and color. To
reveal upon canvas by a broken body the tragedy
of life or by a face of woe the drama of sinful love
is just as possible as to paint pleasant subjects
44
Lillian Genth: The Fount of Life
Collection of Mr. Marvin Lewis
whose symbolism permits always of happy faces and
perfect bodies, and it is infinitely greater art. All
of which is not to say that I quarrel with Miss
Genth's choice of subject, but merely to suggest a
development that I feel reasonably certain must
follow in her art if she continues to paint the figure.
She is too sensitive to life and too little bound by
convention not to feel and to see its rewards and its
consequences in figures of sorrow as well as of joy,
and to endeavor to picture life, real life, as well as
imaginary and invariably lovely fables from life.
When that period arrives it will mark another and
greater period in her art.
A brilliant technician Miss Genth unquestionably
is. The bravura of her brush is evident in all of
her paintings, and yet so unerring is her stroke that
it may be said never to jeopardize her effects. This
may very well be because it does not involve her
figures, which are painted with sensible deliberation
and extreme care in an effort to draw them to the
life, however removed that may be from any ap-
proach to realism. As a method of painting I can-
not help but feel that a more consistent procedure
would produce finer results, for the broad, free way
in which her backgrounds are brushed in seems
often to emphasize a trifle too strongly that little of
something approximating precision with which her
figures are painted. She is quick to see the artistic
45
possibilities in gracious and graceful attitudes
whenever and wherever seen and however momen-
tary or unusual, and thus even the most spiritual
and imaginative of her nudes preserve in pose a
relation to reality that satisfies the eyes, yet does not
interrupt the intellectual enjoyment of the poetry of
her pictures.
For color as color Miss Genth has an unerring in-
stinct, though without any of that supersensitiveness
which would surely have evidenced itself in a more
deliberate and careful manipulation of pigment for
its own sake, resulting in passages of corresponding
subtilty and appeal. The studied effects of the
artist improvising with his medium are not to be
found in her painting. Both her color and her
technic are altogether individual and peculiarly at-
tractive. Her handling of the medium and her
brushwork are very personal and always adapted, it
would seem, to a specific effort in each instance to
reproduce the feeling as well as the appearance of
whatever she may be painting, whether earth, sky,
water, foliage, figure or flower. Her drawing is
not faultless, but oftener than not her color is so in-
triguing as to make one overlook little inaccuracies
there. I do not know of any other contemporary
artist who more delicately and successfully re-
creates upon canvas the shimmering beauty of light,
the silvery haze of a Spring day, a Summer blue so
46
Lillian Genth: Sunlit Dell
soft and lovely or a green of foliage that seems so al-
ways tremulous as though the winds of heaven were
faintly blowing through the leaves.
The Fount of Life and the Sunlit Dell are two of
her finest figure compositions. The former is a
picture fragrant with the thought of youth, fasci-
nated by the mystery she cannot fathom, gazing
into the quiet waters of the spring of life. The sun-
light and the birds, the whispering leaves and the
caressing winds are forgotten for the moment while,
in this sylvan spot, she searches for the secret hidden
in the pool. The latter is more elusive in its in-
tention and escapes exact interpretation except as
a matter of feeling that the shadowed dell, the drip-
ping foliage with the sunlight still breaking
through so as to touch the receding figure signify
youth's first experience of sorrow. In these two
canvases and in some others Miss Genth equals her
Adagio in the National Gallery at Washington, a
picture of the nude which she has never surpassed
as yet. It is a figure finely drawn and truly en-,
veloped in an atmosphere as charged with the real
emotion of the subject as a Summer's breeze is
with the fragrance of Summer. As a nude it chal-
lenges comparison with the best in American art
and takes its place with Benjamin Fitz's Reflection,
Wyatt Eaton's Ariadne and the rest of the few
really great ones.
47
ELLIOTT DAINGERFIELD
ELLIOTT DAINGERFIELD
PROBABLY to no two people have colors the
same values, and the work of any painter who
is, in a particular sense, a colorist, more than that
of other artists, is sure to challenge an amount and
degree of criticism that can be pretty accurately
measured by its importance. And the colorist, like
the poet, generally depends upon delicate sugges-
tions and idyllic ideas for the beauties which fill
his canvases with visions, as of the gods and god-
desses, nymphs and satyrs, temples and shrines, and
the wonder of a world made beautiful by imagina-
tion. Thus, again, from another point of view, his
work suffers from a criticism it can never escape,
for to not a few observers the subtile beauties of
such painting pass unseen. That "truth is beauty
and beauty truth" does not necessarily mean that the
obvious are more important than the hidden beau-
ties and truths, though they may reach and satisfy
more people. The very fact that the obvious in
nature and in life is understood and appreciated so
generally, makes it all the more important that the
artist concern himself with the elusive glories that
5i
escape the untrained eye and must be lost to the
world except for his labor.
But no mere painter, whatever his technical skill,
has ever yet or ever will comprehend the secret
beauties or truths, either of nature or of life, suf-
ficiently to re-create them upon canvas with that
inescapable touch of magic which any painting
must have to stir the imagination and satisfy the
eyes of them that, having eyes, look inwardly as well
as outwardly, and see the glories beyond as clearly
as the beauties about us. Genius only is capable
of such a task and genius has idiosyncrasies of its
own which give to its work individuality, some-
times in literature a style as strange as Whitman's
or in painting as weird as Blakelock's. But the
work of genius, however touched with madness
it may seem, is vital. It moves with splendid
rhythm, it sings with a voice of heavenly beauty, it
throbs and glows with life!
Mr. Elliott Daingerfield, among contemporary
American artists, pursues an ideal which the public
imagination very often fails to visualize, and his
most poetic conceptions indeed seem to be viewed
by the general public as through a glass darkly,
however brightly they may glow with that richness
of color which at times suggests the old masters.
As a young man his work aroused the enthusiasm of
so able and discriminating a judge of painting as
52
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2 Si
George Inness, and his later work won the eager
and hearty praise of another great critic of art,
John La Farge. Recently, in writing about "Na-
ture vs. Art," Mr. Daingerfield has modestly told
a story which goes even farther as an illustration of
the point I wish to make in connection with his
work, as the remark of the great surgeon which he
quotes: "I want a picture of the sea or the moun-
tains seen in a better, finer way than I can see it
myself," was intended to explain the satisfaction he
found in Mr. Daingerfield's work and illustrates
the very real and deep meaning it has for great
natures and great minds. Compared with the abil-
ity to stir the imaginations and to fill the eyes of
such men with revelations of the wonder and the
beauty of nature and of life, a popular success,
such as might be won by the effort more nearly to
gauge one's genius to the understanding of the
many, could never bring any real or lasting satisfac-
tion to an artist capable of great things.
I do not know that any of Mr. Daingerfield's
pictures, save one, a Madonna done many years ago,
has ever taken a prize in any exhibition. Some of
his canvases which have never been entered in com-
petition and seldom shown to the public are, how-
ever, among the most poetic conceptions in Ameri-
can art. I should say that their interest as well as
their charm, is due to his insight into the glory of
53
nature and the meaning and the mystery of life —
that, and the individuality of his color, its depth
and its brilliance.
His landscapes are never mere pictures, for, with
all the perfection of their finish, re-creating as they
do the sentiment of the place as well as the scene
itself, it is the sense of truth that is in them, their
meaning I may say, that makes them really vital.
And this is because he sees a meaning in our land-
scape and fixes it in his paintings of it.
With a subtile perfection of emphasis which is
estimated very accurately, he fixes in his revelation
of it the feeling, the sentiment or the meaning of a
landscape; it may be by a shadow or by a touch
of light, by a flower or by a figure, or by several
figures, either realistic or fanciful. And, after all,
the meaning is not invariably obvious but only sug-
gested, as it is in nature itself, and so it often escapes
the eyes of the superficial observer, just as it remains
undiscovered in the world about us by thousands of
unobservant people.
Any one who has seen his painting The Waters
of Oblivion must realize how without meaning that
mysterious and strangely beautiful little landscape
would be were it not for the tiny white-robed figure
standing before those peaks of night and fairly upon
the brink of the unfathomable pool lying at their
feet. Except for that touch, with all its miracle
54
Elliott Daingerfield: The Waters of Oblivion
Collection of Dr. Fred Whiting
of rich color, the canvas would be a monstrous
thing, not simply unreal but unnatural. Yet as it
stands this painting is one of the most vital and
most beautiful that I recall by an American artist,
and it has an almost inescapable meaning, the whole
suggestion of which lives in that little white figure.
Sunset — Mists and Shadows illustrates very
forcibly how literally true it is that the lasting love-
liness of his most imaginative revelations of the
beauty of landscape has its firm foundation in a
conscious and just appreciation of the necessity for
realizing the actual aspects of a scene sufficiently to
be always convincing. However he may enrich
with color or with imagination the visible beauty of
a scene, its essential individuality is duly em-
phasized and informs the poetry of his landscape
with an inevitable and unmistakable resemblance
to the reality of the world in which we live.
A fine example of his offering in the lyric vein
is the Arcadian Huntress, in the City Art Museum
at St. Louis, a landscape pervaded by a perfume
from Parnassus, in which Diana is glimpsed again
as in the brave days of old, still following the chase.
Mr. Daingerfield visited the Grand Canyon a
few years ago and ever since his first trip thereto
it has continued to be the inspiration of many of his
most important canvases. Beginning with the ap-
proximately realistic rendering of its shimmering
55
glory in the Opalescent Morning, which turned out
to be but a prelude, he developed the motive with
the assurance of a great composer improvising upon
an enchanting theme and produced that miraculous
apotheosis of earthly beauty, the City That Never
Was, which is certainly the equal of a fine Turner,
as well as the brooding mystery of the moonlit
Tower of Silence, that mighty rock in the wilder-
ness standing alone like a monument to a vanished
race on the edge of the world.
His paintings of this locality are not literal
transcripts of any scene you will see, but marvelous
re-creations of the glowing color and the wild gran-
deur of the place — opal mountains and crimson
peaks touched with mists of pearl and of pink and
the chasms between brimming with many-colored
shadow. He has put into his renderings of it the
miracle of color which is the essential glory of the
Canyon without sacrifice of necessary truth to na-
ture in his drawing, and the result is that his can-
vases are full of the poetry as well as the beauty,
the wonder as well as the grandeur, of its scenery;
and while they impress one with its sublimity they
thrill one at the same moment with the joy of its
vibrating light and the peace of its shadowed mys-
tery.
In his figure subjects it is the subtile meaning of
a gesture, the look on some half-turned face or a
56
a
pose perhaps that suggests the emotion of the scene ;
but always his paintings are informed with some
motive sufficient to lift them beyond any peradven-
ture of the commonplace.
57
LANDSCAPE PAINTING
LANDSCAPE PAINTING
NATURE AND ART
THE work of no artist who truthfully reports
the facts of nature is negligible. Whatever
method he may employ in the accomplishment of
that end matters not at all. He may be as literal,
as precise in his elucidation of detail as Hobbema,
as indefinite as Monet or as preoccupied with the
expression of his moods as Tryon, his canvas in any
case will be worth while. Whatever its faults, its
one conspicuous merit of truth is sufficient to make
of it something of real value. It may not satisfy
one, it may lack any special distinction either of
composition or sentiment, it may express little of the
spirit of a place, little of the mood of a moment
charged with feeling, nothing of the personality of
the painter, but the one thing it does it does truth-
fully. It holds a mirror up to nature in which
we see an accurate reflection.
The sketches in oil of Wyant and the water-
colors of Winslow Homer are of this order of
things. Dissimilar as they are in method and in
style, they each mirror nature in a way almost mi-
61
raculous. Homer gets his effects with an economy
of effort that is wonderful for anything so finished
in its finality. Wyant, with loving attention to all
the precious detail of his subject, particularizes in
his studies the things Homer simply suggests.
There are painters whose best work never goes
farther than the studies of such men and who yet
must be reckoned with in any consideration of land-
scape art which pretends to be in any way conclu-
sive. And the ability to produce such work is after
all not so common as to seem simply ordinary. I
doubt if it ever will be, for it implies a painstaking
and serious study of landscape painting and a really
admirable knowledge of the various forms of nature
and of nature's coloring. An artist with such an
equipment is pretty well capable of doing work
that is far enough above the average to arrest at-
tention. His trees will be distinguishable — chest-
nuts, elms, birches, maples; his shrubs and grasses
no less, and his pictures of Italy will never look like
American landscapes in which Italian shepherds
guard their sheep.
Some of the European canvases of even so great
a landscape artist as Inness are more American
than foreign so far as the landscape itself is con-
cerned— with perhaps no more than a peasant driv-
ing his flock, or some women washing clothes in a
stream to tell that they are pictures of Italy or of
62
France. On the other hand, Wy ant's Irish sub-
jects, with nothing but the look of the land to dis-
tinguish them by, are unmistakable. This fidelity
to the facts of nature in the painting of landscape is
of sufficient importance for the absence of it to af-
ford an opening for criticism of a very material
sort regarding some of the accepted masterpieces of
contemporary artists. It is a too essential part of
great landscape art for any painter ever to slight it
and produce a truly great picture.
The knowledge of nature's forms and the faithful
rendering of them is almost as necessary to the land-
scape artist as is the knowledge of anatomy to the
painter of the nude. Too frequently he tries to
work without ever having seriously studied the an-
atomy of nature. The various tree forms are recog-
nizable in the canvases of comparatively few con-
temporary painters. And apparently they know
the rock formations but little better. It is only the
more evident topographical characteristics of a
landscape that they seem to get — the sort of thing
that could never escape the notice of any one with
eyes to see.
Any painter, to embrace that branch of art, ought
to go to school to nature — study the trees, the rocks,
the earth, and learn to draw and paint their various
forms in such a way as shall be distinguishable to
others before he hangs out any sign of his pro-
63
fession in a public place. When he has mastered
all this, finished a very thorough schooling in the
great out-of-doors, and learned to paint nature as
she is, then, even if he fail to express himself
through her or to interpret any of her many moods,
he will nevertheless be able to add something of
real value to landscape art — a truthful picture of
nature. Later he may learn to differentiate the es-
sential from the trivial facts, to sacrifice the unneces-
sary detail for the larger aspects of a scene and,
progressing along these lines, arrive finally at some
such understanding of nature as will enable him to
express some one or more of her many moods in such
a way as to produce a really great picture.
PAINT AND PERSONALITY
THE personality of an artist as it affects his art
is an interesting study in itself, and if in land-
scape it is a more elusive quality than in other sub-
jects it is no less effective. Without it many land-
scapes of unquestioned merit are produced through
sheer ability to see and to paint Nature as she is.
Often enough the influence of a painter's personal-
ity in his art makes for something other than truth.
For instance the light in Sorolla's canvases is gen-
erally rather artificial than real, more like flame
than the sunlight. But the light in the great
Spaniard's work is its chief attraction, and it is, one
64
1
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may say, the light of his own personality in as much
as it is peculiar to his work. Thus one realizes
how the personality of a great artist expressing it-
self in his work gives to whatever he does a certain
quality that distinguishes it from the work of all
others just as the "style" of a great author distin-
guishes his poetry or his prose from that of all
others. But only a great author or a great artist
may ever be said to have a "style," because none
other is ever able to fully express himself, his per-
sonality, in his work.
There are many good writers as well as good
landscape painters who have no "style" at all ; they
tell good stories, paint real pictures, but with noth-
ing in the manner of their making to make them
memorable, no hint of what joy or sorrow moved
the maker's heart nor of the mood that was upon
him. They have learned to do their work, to write
stories, to paint pictures, but unfortunately not yet
how to express themselves in their work — and until
they shall they may never achieve a "style" that will
distinguish them among even their contemporaries
much less, in the future, among the artists of all
time.
The dreamy loveliness of Tryon's landscape is
never likely to be mistaken for the work of another.
It is the expression of too singular a personality.
And in all that he does this dreaminess, this thin
65
strain of minor poetry, is inescapable. It breathes
in the budding trees of his Springtime, it blossoms
in the stars of his night and it sings in the sunshine
of his Summer. It may not satisfy you, may not
be food for your thought or light to your path, but
unless you are blind surely you can not fail to sense
its beauty.
We are much given to thinking and talking about
the poetic quality of both Tryon and Francis
Murphy, a quality which is unmistakable surely in
their landscape but that just as surely is not the
vigorous epic poetry of the earth. The poetry in
their pictures is mostly their own, a drenching of
the fields and the foliage in the sunshine or twilight,
the mists or the shadow of their own thought, an
interpretation of nature through the atmosphere
of their own personality. Their canvases have
something more than the simple truth, a faithful
rendering of the facts of nature, to recommend
them; they shimmer in the light of their creators'
thought, fade in the shadows of their moods or
sparkle with the splendor of their fancy. Always,
however, one is conscious of how inevitable are
their limitations, prescribed as they are by the per-
sonalities they so charmingly express. As most of
us have a bit of poetry in us, the effect of which is
to add something of beauty to our understanding of
the world in which we live, it is not to be questioned
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that it is less of an accomplishment adequately to
express that in one way or another than it is to dis-
cover "sermons in stones and books in running
brooks." In other words, it is a far more magnifi-
cent landscape that expresses the epic poetry of the
earth than that sings the song of any artist however
great a poet he may be.
There is a lot of feeling in contemporary land-
scape art, but too much of it is personal feeling and
not enough the feeling, the sentiment, the mood of
Nature herself. Few artists seem to understand
her, as few in proportion as there are men who have
any understanding of women, and without a deep
understanding of her and of her moods no artist
may ever expect to interpret her in the fullest, finest
sense — to paint for us a portrait of her in which we
shall see not simply a face but a soul.
THE REAL AND THE UNREAL
SO much of what is unreal in landscape art is
extremely interesting and lovely that one may
be pardoned for exaggerating its importance.
There is no question but that the artist whose per-
sonality pervades his landscape, whose pictures ex-
press his moods, produces work more charming and
poetic than he whose ability stops at the point of
painting simply the visible aspects of a scene. Art-
istic arrangement in landscape helps an artist to
67
express what he has to say and helps others to un-
derstand him, but however important, however
fine, however enchanting his message may be, Na-
ture herself has that to say which is of infinitely
greater importance to mankind. That this fact is
not more generally appreciated is natural because
so few understand Nature.
Human nature, however, we all understand, more
or less, and so it is that landscape which expresses
the personality of the artist, his feeling, appeals to
us all. We enter into it more easily because of the
trail he has blazed and we are apt to believe that
the view which we get is the finest there is to be
had. As a matter of fact the painter, in all prob-
ability, chose his course with particular regard for
what interested him, and with a very definite idea
of expressing himself, in pretty much the same way
as the woodsman would cut a trail as directly as
might be to a fixed point, with due regard for mak-
ing it as easy as possible for travel and as pleasant.
Few of us are able to really enter into the spirit of
a landscape except where a path is beaten for us
through the personality of the artist, as few as there
are of us who are able to find our way in the virgin
forest or the pathless desert. The result of this is
that whatever of beauty is visible in landscape art is
that which we see through the personalities of the
68
artists, and most of whatever feeling we get out of
it is that which they have succeeded in putting into
it.
Artists, like the rest of us, are men of tempera-
ment, of sentiment, of emotion, of one kind or an-
other, and they generally succeed in expressing it
in their work, but that they should express it in a
landscape that is as singular as its variations are
many, and that serves them, with but few excep-
tions for a lifetime, is as curious as it is regrettable.
A single arrangement, a single picture, as it were,
suffices them for the expression of practically every
emotion, this is as true of Corot as of Tryon, as true
of Daubigny as of Murphy. Their greatness con-
sists rather in doing one kind of landscape superla-
tively well than in doing many kinds in a manner
to mark them as real masterpieces. Their pictures,
whether silvery with the morning light, or golden
with the after-glow, tremulous with the winds of
Summer or carpeted with the fallen leaves, are
mostly of one spot or of places very much alike.
Atmosphere is the stuff whereof their masterpieces
are made, the landscape as it were a mere scaffold-
ing on which are hung their filmy tapestries of
shadow and of light. And very beautiful their pic-
tures are too, but with little of the lofty grandeur
of nature, no more than a mere suggestion of that
69
infinite variety of beauty which is all about us in
this world in which we live. Looking at one of
their pictures and noting its similarity to all the
others, one wonders if perhaps that particular land-
scape is the only one the artist found lovely, only
to realize in a moment that even that loveliness in
their eyes was probably very much a matter of their
success in glorifying it in the atmosphere of their
own emotion. Their ability in doing just this sort
of thing is prodigious, their mastery of atmosphere
marvellous indeed. With anything so subtile, so in-
substantial, so elusive, to express so much — for they
do express a wide range of feeling — is an accom-
plishment of considerable importance in itself.
But some of us at times get just a little tired of
the artists, their moods, their emotions, the atmos-
phere of their personalities, and wish for something
more of art — pictures with the large, deep feeling
of the great out-of-doors in them, landscapes that
express the moods of nature, the wistful tenderness
of the Spring, the loneliness of the moorlands, the
peace of the little hills lying in the sun or the
shadowed mystery of the night.
Without forgetting one's self one may never hope
to win one's way to Nature's heart, to really get to
know her, to understand her well enough to even
begin to express any one of her various moods, and
until one can do this he may never hope to do the
70
best in landscape art, for the greatest pictures of
that sort are those that express her, her moods, not
the feelings, the personalities of artists.
THE END
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Landscape and figure painters of America