IXGEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH

From the collection of Daniel Guggenheim, Esq.WESTCHESTER HILLS.By Homer D. Martin.

From the collection of Daniel Guggenheim, Esq.

WESTCHESTER HILLS.

By Homer D. Martin.

From the collection of Louis Marshall, Esq.THE SUN WORSHIPPERS.By Homer D. Martin.

From the collection of Louis Marshall, Esq.

THE SUN WORSHIPPERS.

By Homer D. Martin.

are grandly modelled; strength, solidity, and bulk, contrasted with the tremulous throbbing of the light. This contrast of rude, tawny ground with the vibration of a white sky recalls a favourite theme of the French painter Pointelin; but one feels that a comparison of his pictures with the “Westchester Hills” is all in favour of the latter. Both painters have felt the solemn loneliness of nature folding her strength in sleep, the mystery of darkening and of the lingering spirituality above; but Martin is the grander draughtsman of the two, suggesting with far more convincingness the solid structure of the earth. So we are made to realize that the phenomenon is not merely one that he has noted or that we might note, but one that through countless ages has manifested itself as part of the order of the universe.

Its significance is elemental. We may attribute this to the better drawing, or, with far more justice, to the superiority of intellect, that could embrace this larger conception and find the means to express it. And in studying the means let us not overlook the essential grandeur of the colour; not of the brave or passionate kind, but sober with a concentration of subtle meaning, that discovers infinite expression in the minutest variations of the homely browns and yellows, whichin the shadow yield nothing but their strength and quietude. And, then, what a wonder of suggestion in the sky! It is not only lighted, but quivering with light; an elastic fluid that extends as far as one’s imagination can travel, in height, and breadth, and depth. These limitless skies are a characteristic of Martin’s pictures. He does not seem to have been attracted so much by cloud forms or to have been given, as it were, to building castles in the air; but his imagination loves to free itself in the far stretches of ether, the circumambient medium through which the waves of light travel. His skies are brushed in with firm assurance; it is a pleasure to peer into the canvas and study the sweep and exultation of the strokes, and then to step back until distance blends them into a unity of ranging grandeur. And just as Corot said of himself, that he was “like a lark pulsing forth its songs amid the gray clouds,” and his skies have the vibrative quality of violin music, so there is music in these skies of Martin’s, only it is that of the organ and the diapason stop. True, the note is not always so full and sonorous; as, for example, in the “View on the Seine” in the Metropolitan Museum, where the splendid blue and white have a more silvery resonance, which, however, is less suggestive of songfulness than of the sweep of musictravelling on and on. Indeed, in all his skies, there is less of local significance than of the suggestion that the ether is a tidal ocean connecting the fragment of circumstance with infinity.

This landscape also shows that his imagination was not wedded to the solemn. It is brisk with thejoie de vivre, and yet not in a merely sprightly way. In the line of poplars on the right of the picture, each spiring up into the sky, there is the sense of springing aspiration. Again, in that beautiful “Adirondack Scenery,” with its waves of brilliant foliage rolling between the brow, on which we feel ourselves standing, and the distant cliffs of mountains, what exuberance of spiritual joy! Spiritual, indeed, for the picture was painted far away in the West, indoors, and under the affliction of failing health. But who would guess it from the picture? Martin had so possessed himself of the sweetness and majesty of the Adirondacks, that he could give out from himself, drawing upon the treasures of his memory. It was his swan song, and how characteristic of the essential nobility of the man, that it breathes such ample serenity, such a boundless sense of beauty, pure, spacious, and enduring! He never dwelt upon his troubles, as smaller men do; and this last picture is a grand assertion of the supremacy of mind over matter,—a poet’s triumphant proofthat his dream of beauty was strong within him to the last.

Martin’s work, like that of other great men, was uneven in quality. But if it lacks at times perfect intelligibility of construction or of form, it was not from want of knowledge or ability to draw, as is abundantly proved by the superlative excellence of these very qualities in his finest pictures. He had made countless studies, drawn with the greatest care, revealing a thorough feeling for and comprehension of form. At times, he may have found a difficulty in translating his knowledge into paint. His use of the brush, used as he needed to use it to express what he had in mind, had been necessarily self-acquired, and often it was rather the subtlety of the effect he desired to express than any fractiousness of the brush, which caused him to fumble, though, in the majority of his work, never sufficiently to distress us or to divert attention from the message that his picture conveys. For always, in his best pictures, there is this distinction of a message; not a mere friendly interchange of views between the painter and his friend, or simple, easy platitude regarding nature’s beauty, but a deep, strong, personal assertion of some specific truth of beauty, fundamentally and enduringly true. It is the sort of message that appeals to the depth and

From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.OLD CHURCH IN NORMANDY.By Homer D. Martin.

From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.

OLD CHURCH IN NORMANDY.

By Homer D. Martin.

earnestness in ourselves; and with a comprehensiveness that permits each of us to draw from it what particularly satisfies himself,—qualities that are the unfailing distinction of the great works of imagination.

Some of his pictures, in which we shall find these qualities conspicuous, are “Normandy Church” and “Normandy Farm,” painted during the years that he lived at Villerville and Honfleur, “The Sun Worshippers,” “Autumn on the Susquehanna,” “Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario,” and “Headwaters of the Hudson.” Individual preferences count for very little; but I cannot resist the pleasure of recording a particular fondness for the “Normandy Church” and “Sand Dunes.” In the former it will be remembered how the roof and tower of the church, embrowned with centuries softened by moss and lichen, stand like an embodiment of stability against the quiet movement of fleecy clouds that cross the blue sky, like a token of faith and protection to the little cottage on the left. It is an idyl of the permanence of hope and consolation in a simple faith. Then what a full-lunged inspiration of rest and vastness does one draw from the “Sand Dunes”! It is not the vastness of distance, for the evening sky is wrapping with greenish gray the sand hillocks, which are separated from usonly by a belt of warm green-brown grass and a strip of golden-brown scrub. But it is the character of the scene that is vast in suggestion. We do not feel the sky to be a quilt of softness, but an abyss of tenderness, assuaging the desolation of the spot,—a desolation that has the feeling of primeval loneliness.

For, at the risk of repetition, I would dwell once more upon the elemental quality that characterizes all the best work of Homer Martin. Not only is his theme elevated and serious, clothed moreover in pictorial language of corresponding significance, but it shuns the trivial and transitory and attaches itself to what is basic in nature’s beauty and perennially true. In his masterpieces there is the evidence of a great mind, for the time being unreservedly consecrated to great ends, and expressing itself in an imagery of grandeur and enduring suggestiveness. To recognize these qualities is to rank him highest of all the poet-painters of American landscape.

TO many a young student, regretfully turning his back on the few bright years of study in Paris, has come the question, “What must I do to be saved?” Hoping all things, believing all things of his single determination to succeed, he feels within him a capacity; but how shall he apply it? I fancy there are two classes of such aspirants: those who look around them for suggestion, and those who look within. Among the latter seems to have belonged George de Forest Brush.

Knowing him in the light of his later work, we may feel it one of the anomalies of art that his master in Paris should have been Gérôme. Yet looking back over our own lives, we realize that it was the element of character, the presence or lack of it in those with whom we came in close contact, that determined their influence upon us. And this quality of character was strong in Gérôme,—of all the more value to Brush because it was of a kind in many respects so dissimilar tohis own. He is something of a rebel,—I use the word in its most respectable sense—intellectually independent, prone to dissatisfaction with things as they are, unconventional, perhaps a little impractical and visionary, as rebels are apt to be,—qualities, all of them, that are facets of character. Gérôme, however, a conservative, addicted to rote and rule, with his scholarly devotion to semi-classicalism or, as some more severely style it, pseudo-classicalism; a cold precisionist, who would render the death of a Cæsar as accurately and dispassionately as a surgeon dissects a corpus—such a character would be a wholesome make-weight to a young romantic mind.

It would emphasize especially the need of knowledge and mastery of facts, encouraging the formation of a stable basis on which romance, if it were minded to push its head into the clouds, might at least have sure foundation for its feet. Certainly, one accomplishment that Brush brought back from Paris was a feeling for form, and another was a faculty of seizing upon the reality of things and of keeping close to facts. No doubt it is as a painter of ideas that he is significant; but do not let us overlook the point that all his work, especially the earlier examples, shows an appreciation of the actual. How much of this he owes to the influence of Gérôme it would behard to estimate; but even if this realization of the mental and artistic value of the actual is an element in his own character, the contact with this master must have done much to give it fibre. For the sense of actuality is communicable, while ideas are not only personal to their author, but inalienable. And how distressingly elusive, tame, and profitless in pictures are ideas unbased on actuality—the landscape, for example, that makes for sentiment without support of drawing and construction. In pictures of the human figure an inspired control of colour may fill us with enthusiasm, but cannot wholly stifle our regret if the drawing is inadequate; for the beauty of nature is the beauty of its forms and of the coloured raiment that clothes the forms without disguising them, while in the world of spiritual ideas the beauty depends upon their association with or analogy to the world of matter.

So let us recognize the value of the master’s influence upon Brush. There was much that he had to unlearn as he pursued his own evolution, notably the sleek, hard, and dispassionate method of Gérôme’s painting. But his brush work every painter of distinguished character must acquire gradually for himself, just as a writer, if he is an honest craftsman, will discover his own fashion of words, adjusting his methodof expression to what he is trying to express; the main thing, both for painter and writer, being to have something to say: something which is a part of the man’s self and convictions. The method will grow to it.

Leaving Gérôme’s studio, Brush, like other students, stood at the dividing ways. He might have cast his eye around him, noted what seemed to be the tendencies of the day in art, the “latest style,” as the fashion-makers call it, and set to work to reproduce in New York the impressions aroused in Paris. Then, in time, he would have been among those who excuse their own lack of initiative with the lament that in our city there is no “art atmosphere.”

In the sense they seem to mean it, the absence is not an unmitigated evil, for what is this “art atmosphere,” when you search it closely? A little, perhaps, like Scotland, as characterized by a Scotchman, “The most beautiful country in the world to live out of.” So it is well to know there are places where the art atmosphere abounds, that one may visit for a time with pleasure and profit; yet it is remarkable how the great painters, the men of force and character, whose minds push them on continually, live either outside of it or within it behind closed doors. The smallness inseparable from an artatmosphere, the mutual admiration and amiable reciprocity of patting of backs, or worse, the “Bully, my boy!” to his face, and the “How he’s missed it!” behind his back; the petty rivalries of little cliques that clutter of themselves across a café table, setting up little standards and gaining brief conspicuousness by repeating one another’s efforts—this is not the sort of atmosphere that strong painters need to breathe. They would be stifled in it. They need, like Delacroix or Puvis de Chavannes, the ample privacy of their own inner life, or, like the Barbizon men, the large seclusion of nature. For such an atmosphere a painter of Brush’s calibre would have no use.

He returned to this country; not to city life, but to the wide freedom of the western territories, and found inspiration for his imagination among the Indians. I know nothing of what impelled him; whether it were a survival of a boy’s enthusiasm for the story of his country, or a suggestion received from the archæological associations of Gérôme’s studio, or some happy chance of idea, seized upon and followed out; but the significant point is that, though fresh from Paris, or, shall we say? because of it, he found motives that attracted him in America. The older men had found them too, but many of the younger generation, returning from Europe, were proclaiming, and many do so still, that the conditions of America are unfavourable to pictorial motives. May it not be that the barrenness is in themselves? I am not speaking of the landscape painters, but the figure men. One of their laments is the lack of picturesque costumes. This same word “picturesqueness” has been the bane of painting for two hundred years, implying the necessity of certain formulated qualities in a landscape or figure, rendering it suitable for the purposes of a picture. Owing to this obsession, Corot was fifty years old and had paid three visits to Italy before he, poet though he was, could feel the suggestion of loveliness in the scenery of his native country. So one must not be too hard on others who are deaf to the calling of their environment. But let us give no quarter to picturesqueness. It is a discredited, discreditable evasion of the facts. The true painter sees pictures all around him or evokes them from his imagination; the world of matter or of spirit continually presents itself to him in pictorial fashion; it is only a journeyman who hunts for picturesque jobs.

It may be said that possibly it was just this picturesque quality in the Indians that attracted Brush. I cannot say; but had he penetrated no further than the unusualness of their costumesand habits, as is the case with others, so far as I know, who have painted them, there were nothing to be said. But he has penetrated into the life and thought of the Indian, and, more than that, has re-created in his pictures something of the primeval world; its vast isolation, silence, mystery. He has found in these modern redmen a clue to their past and has created a series of picture-poems which have the lyric melody of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” an equal individuality and appeal to the imagination and a greater virility. Let me instance “Silence Broken”—a little glimpse of river, banked with dense foliage, out of which a goose has burst above an Indian in his canoe. It is a small picture, representing a contracted spot, but it needs very little imagination to make one feel that this fragment of seclusion is part of an immensity of solitariness. The man, kneeling as he plies the paddle, looks up in no wise startled, but with a grand composure that seems a part of the elemental suggestion of the scene. It is a work of powerful imagination, projecting itself upon the solemn spaciousness and mystery of the past.

Recall, too, another small canvas of big significance, “Mourning her Brave.” Standing by her dead in the snow, high up on a mountain ledge, the woman utters her dirge to a leadensky. What emptiness and desolation of world without and spirit within! A breath of the ceaseless mystery of sorrow throbbing out of the void of time! Then a tenderer feeling pervades “The Sculptor and the King.” Stroke by stroke the sculptor has compelled the marble to respond to his thought, or wooed it, for he has a gentle, dreamy face; a youth only dimly conscious of his desires, and he waits for the king’s verdict, tremulously eager, and withal so glad in his heart at what his hands have found the skill to do; a poetic embodiment not only of the primitive man’s yearning after expression, but of the springtime of every artist’s soul. Then note the king, standing with folded arms, wrapping his doubt of the desirability of such things and, yet, his wonder and admiration of them in the convenient impenetrability of silence. There is a touch of humour in this figure, as of the critic non-plussed and unwilling to commit himself, but much more of serious reference to the early dawnings of a comprehension of the beautiful, as “a thing to be desired to make one wise.”

Those Indian subjects are of a high order of imaginative work. They have a great power of suggestion, stirring directly and forcibly one’s own imagination; and they are informed with an elevation of thought, a deeply penetrating earnestness

From the collection of Miss Henrietta E. Failing.THE SCULPTOR AND THE KING.By George de Forest Brush.

From the collection of Miss Henrietta E. Failing.

THE SCULPTOR AND THE KING.

By George de Forest Brush.

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright, 1897, by Foster Brothers.MOTHER AND CHILD.By George de Forest Brush.

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Copyright, 1897, by Foster Brothers.

MOTHER AND CHILD.

By George de Forest Brush.

and a largeness of conception that has been able to grasp the big significances and to feel them in their relation to perennial truth. For they not only suggest the life and environment of the early redman, picturing both with a fulness of comprehension that brings them vividly to our consciousness, but they involve allusions to our own experience. There are periods of sorrow when the world seems very empty and desolate to-day; there still are yearnings after higher things, the flutterings of doubt and hope that precede the beginning of growth of something better; and still a grandeur in the solitude of nature and maybe in that of a man’s own communings with himself. We may or may not have experienced those things, but, at least, we have an intuition of their possibility; and if a picture can recall the past and show it as part of the eternal relation of spirit and matter, we are justified in honouring its author. So these pictures of Brush’s seem to me great, notwithstanding a certain smallness—I will not call it pettiness—in their execution. As I recall the “Mourning her Brave,” it has considerable breadth of method, and, no doubt, others of the Indian series show increase of manual accomplishment. But the painting in “Silence Broken,” still influenced by Gérôme’s, is hard and shiny; and the drawingin “The Sculptor and the King” has a quality of timorous and laboured exactness. It is not in consequence of style, but despite it, that they are impressive.

With the artist’s personal development has come maturity of craftsmanship. His latest series of “Mother and Child” are marked by fluency of composition both in the lines and masses and in the colour schemes. But with the ripening of his powers has scarcely followed increase of individuality. He has freed himself from the hard, evenly lighted, rather tight character of Gérôme’s manner only to yield himself to the fascination of the old Italian style. It is a little surprising that one whose imagination is so individual should have failed to discover a really personal language of expression. It would seem as if the lack of facility was beyond his power to remedy, and that, feeling the need of broadening his method, and conscious that breadth with him would mean chiefly a larger kind of precision, he had found in the example of some of the Italian masters just that union of qualities. Then, too, if he were searching for precedents it is to the dignity and quietude of the Florentines that such a temperament as his would turn. And in these later pictures one is conscious of these qualities. They have an air of noble sweetness, serenity, and highand earnest purpose, creating, wherever they appear, an atmosphere of their own, pure and elevating as that of the upper air. Yet, as creative work, I think many will rank them lower than the promise of his early days. Their motive is a borrowed one—borrowed with their technique. True, it is one of beautiful human significance, but its representation, especially to one who is a husband and a father, makes a comparatively small demand upon the imaginative faculties. So that, if we feel the evidence of these faculties in painting to be the rare and superlative thing, the artist’s persistence upon a somewhat lower plane of endeavour must seem regretful. It is rather a merging of the artistic prepossession in the human.

And I wonder whether this may not be the explanation. In early manhood, while the impulse was from within, he sought the objective for it in the world outside, characteristically choosing those scenes which would least interfere with the seclusion of his own mind. In later years he has found the seclusion in his own home, yielding to the natural tendency, as the years grow upon one, to feel the world to be less and less, and those closest to one more and more. And, it must be remembered, the conditions of the world were never quite to his liking, while his home iswhat he has made it and would have it. Yet this, after all, represents the evolution of a man rather than of the artist—a yielding to circumstances, inclinations, conveniences, rather than a following of one’s star.

I write these words with hesitation, as it may be my own fault that I do not detect in these later works as much evidence of elevated imagination as in the Indian studies. If so, I would plead in extenuation my enthusiasm for those earlier pictures.

THERE is a species of ivy in England—I do not know if it exists in this country—that grows over old stone walls and towers. It is treelike in character and size. Probably it was never planted deliberately against the masonry, but reached itshabitatby one of those romances of nature’s accidents. Finding the support that its young life needed, it clung and mounted; gradually, however, gaining independent strength until in the maturity of its growth it has its own boughs, so hardy that a man may climb by them, and puts forth bunchy masses of leaves and berries that disguise the original support in a luxuriance of independent growth.

Such is often the story of an artist’s development, and is that of Wyant’s. In the small town of Defiance, in Ohio, where he lived, there was little to suggest to the boy what pictures meant, and yet he had the picture-making faculty in himself: the observant eye and desire to translate into line the forms of things. He drew incessantly: the forms of stones, of banks, and tree roots, their stems and branches, and made studies of the leaves, separately and minutely, as well as in masses. I like to think of him as a child lying full length before the kitchen fire with a bit of burnt wood taken from it, drawing on the floor; and fancy that in that soft, suggestive medium of charcoal, and on the rough surface of his improvised panel, he may have got his first dim consciousness of the meaning of synthesis in landscape; the securing of character and tone, and the fascination of working in masses rather than in outline.

When he was old enough to be set to a trade, he was apprenticed to a harness maker, working in his leisure hours at sign painting. But all roads lead to Rome, and a youth might derive much skill in form, as well as breadth of manner, in this humble department of the fine arts. Somewhere about the fifties he found himself in Cincinnati, even then an oasis in the desert of western indifference to, or ignorance of, art. It was here, in a private collection, that he first discovered what painted pictures were like, and, with a rare instinct for one so young, it was Inness’s work that captured his imagination. A youth, passionate and eager as Wyant was, must have his god or goddess; a being infinitely above him, yet, perhaps, of infinite condescension, who will listen to his devotion. Some of us may have offered our heart and future to ladies nearly old enough to be our mothers; Wyant’s divinity was of the other sex, an Apollo at whose oracle he would inquire. He found the means to come to New York and lay his sketches before the master, and never forgot the kindly criticism which bid him be of good courage and persevere.

He was now about twenty years old, and nearly ten more years were to elapse before his own independent growth was to establish itself. Meanwhile its direction had been assured by the influence of Inness; its manner of growth was to be partly affected by the Norwegian painter, Hans Gude, who had graduated from Düsseldorf and was at this time working in Carlsruhe. He had been the pupil of Achenbach, who, as Muther says, had “taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour.” He had felt the influence, also, of Schirmer, whose fondness for the so-called Italian landscape had guided him to the “acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his pictures.” Such was Gude, to whom Wyant went for instruction. He spoke in after years of the kindness with which he had been received as almost one of the household by the painter and his good frau,and one may imagine that the student took much profit from the master’s emphasizing of form and construction, and also from the reposeful dignity, academic though it was, of his compositions. But when the older man passed from the teaching of principles to that of methods, and urged his pupil to imitate his particular manner of presenting the truths, Wyant’s independence rebelled. He had learned what could properly be taught, and recognizing that for the rest he must depend upon himself, returned to New York.

Face to face with the problem of making a living, and hoping to gain useful experience, he joined a government exploring expedition to the West. But the party suffered terrible hardships, to which Wyant’s physique succumbed. He was put upon the train to return East, and might have stopped at his mother’s home to be nursed and cared for. And much he needed tending, for he was helpless, stricken with paralysis; but the mind in his poor body was still active; he argued that to be taken off at a far western station was to become stranded, to lose all touch with the painter’s life, on which his determination was still fixed. So he let himself be carried past his home and reached New York. No words can add to the pathetic heroism of this decision. But in our admiration of the delicate poetry which belongs

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.THE MOHAWK VALLEY.By Alexander H. Wyant.

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.

THE MOHAWK VALLEY.

By Alexander H. Wyant.

From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.By Alexander H. Wyant.

From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.

THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.

By Alexander H. Wyant.

to the work of Wyant that we know best, let us not lose sight of the force of will-power that was involved in the making of it. “Yes, he had been in hell!” exclaims Carlyle of Dante; and while suffering may not be the only road to highest effort, it is one of them, and the man who passes along it like a man, even if he cannot tread it, but must be carried, as in Wyant’s case, is very apt to produce something more than ordinarily appealing to the hearts of other men. While Wyant recovered the use of his body, though obliged ever after to paint with his left hand, he was never really free from some bodily discomfort; and I wonder whether this may not have had some influence upon his notable preference for depicting nature at the hush and restfulness of twilight. To one whose days were, more or less, days of weariness, constantly sensible of the afflictions of the body, with what a benediction the evening would come, full of spiritual refreshment! Out of the cool cisterns of the night his spirit would drink repose.

For many years he made his summer home in the Adirondacks; then, fearing that he was getting too much into a groove in his way of seeing nature, he transferred his study to the Catskills. The move is characteristic of his alert sensitiveness to nature’s impressions. His temperament was likean Æolian harp, delicately attuned to nature’s breath, responsive to its faintest sigh; but he dreaded lest the melody might become too uniform, too much a merely passive expression. There was a similar mingling of purpose and of surrender in his relations with his fellows. To a few friends, among them always Inness, he gave a welcome, and no little of his time and means in constant acts of kindness to those who needed help; but from social or official functions he kept, as far as possible, clear. He had so much that in his heart he longed to do, had begun his life’s work comparatively so late, and knew the years left to do it in were few. It was only by unremitting application that he could realize his ideal.

This concentration of endeavour affected his ideal, limiting the range of moods of nature that he strove to represent. Such versatility as Inness’s and that painter’s alacrity of impression to constantly differing phases of nature were impossible to his temperament and circumstances. Drawn by both to isolate himself, he heard in the silence of his own heart the still small voice of nature, listened for it always, and strove to woo it. The echo of it is felt, I think, in all his landscapes. We may recall some of his large woodland pictures, in which sturdy trees are gripping the rocks with their roots. Strength and stabilityand the evidences of time confront us, just as they would in the forest itself; but like cathedral architecture when music is pulsing through it, they are for the moment secondary to the spiritual impression of the voice. Wyant heard it in the movement of the tree-tops, and in the stir of weeds and ferns that nestled in the hollows, and it whispered to him of peace, a quiescence that stirs the soul to gentle activity, gladsome by turns or subdued in the alternate sun and shadow, that inexhaustible mystery of nature’s peace that passeth man’s understanding. We have all felt it and know how far it is from our everyday lives, and we look to word-poets and to poet-painters to create an illusion of it. Surely no American painter has done this more irresistibly than Wyant. Nor is there wanting to the peace of his pictures at times a more solemn suggestion. While so many of his twilights breathe simply the ineffable loveliness of quiet, others are astir with persuasion to spiritual reflection, with the gentle admonition to sadness that itself is purifying, or with deeper, fuller suggestion of the infinite mystery of nature’s recurring sleep that swallows up the littleness of man in its immensity. I remember, too, a little picture of darkened earth and rather turbulent dark sky in which a large boulder alone glistens in the fading light—a rock of illuminationand strength in the surrounding uncertainty of gathering night. Brimming over with the suggestion of an elevated melancholy sustained by faith, and painted with an extraordinary earnestness of simple and direct conviction, it seems like a symbol of Wyant’s own art life.

But almost everything that he painted is expressive of some phase, at least, of himself. His work is more than ordinarily personal; perhaps, for the reason already mentioned, that he so deliberately concentrated his motives. And the quality of his poetry was lyrical. I have seen it called idyllic, but that is to miss its higher and deeper qualities. The idyl, Tennyson notwithstanding, is too much identified with the little pastoral poem, that breathes the simple gladsomeness of the meadows; but a more serious strain is interwoven with the gentleness and lovableness of Wyant’s muse. He was passionately fond of music and, before his illness, could play the violin, not learnedly, but with true feeling. And the music of his painting is that of the violin; tenderly vibrating, searching home to one’s heart, by turns lightsome, melancholy, caressing, impetuous, but with a tenderness in all. He did not play on many colours, but reaches a subtlety of tone, often as bewildering as it is soothing. The bewilderment will be aroused as much by his shadowed foregrounds as

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.MOONLIGHT AND FROST.By Alexander H. Wyant.

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.

MOONLIGHT AND FROST.

By Alexander H. Wyant.

by the faintly luminous sky. They defy analysis and are triumphs of impressionism. Impressionism of the true kind, I mean, pregnant with suggestion and divested of aught that would clog its directness; exhibiting, not knowledge, but the fruit of knowledge, and especially its tact of omission. To the careless and commonplace eye his landscapes have “nothing to them”; approached with a little understanding they mean so much, and the measure of their meaning is the technical knowledge involved. If there were any doubt of this, it could be disposed of by an examination of his earlier work, in which he lets one into the secret of his love of form and construction. Admirably sure and full of character is the drawing of the ground and its features, bit by bit receiving its due share of individuality; so also with the trees and their anatomy of trunk and branches, and with the structure of the sky. Everything has been studied, so that later out of the abundance of his technical skill he could be significantly spontaneous. Yet increase of facility did not lessen the self-exacting conscientiousness of his work. Some of his most impressionistic pictures were the result of trying to reach a fuller exactness of expression; when, finding confusion growing, he would seize another canvas and return to the simplicity of his original thought and let itform itself. Few painters are better represented in their extant works. The fumbled canvas, or the one that, however sketchily, did not attain to his intention, never left the studio, and after his death, Mrs. Wyant, with a fine regard for his memory and with honour to herself, destroyed them. So the real Wyants—for I am told there are sham ones on the market—are invariably worthy.

So truly did he retain the spirit of the student that it was not until a little before his death that he allowed himself to feel that he had mastered the grammar of his technique. Then, with the consciousness of his end before him, he would exclaim, “Had I but five years more in which to paint, even one year, I think I could do the thing that I long to.” Brave, modest soul! What he might then have done we shall never know; but what he did do we know to be very good. For another nature poet of our race, of like simplicity and singleness of love for nature, of as choice and elevated a spirit, and as lyrical in expression, we must go back to Wordsworth, who also in his communings with nature found her message—

“Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,And melancholy fear subdued by faith,Of blessed consolations in distress,Of moral strength and intellectual power,Of joy in widest commonalty spread.”

IF we wished to introduce a foreigner to what is most distinctively American in our painting, we should show him, I think, the work of some of our marine and landscape painters. He would be least likely in these to detect the influence of Europe. The point of view he would recognize, no doubt, as the one common to all nature students since the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century; but in regard to the technique he could not attribute its character to the influence of this or the other master abroad, for our landscape painters, like most other true students of nature, have found, each for himself, their own necessary and inevitable language of expression. Necessary because it originated in their own peculiar need, and inevitable because it grew out of the particular character of the portion of nature that they studied. And in most cases it is some phase of the American landscape that has engaged the American painter, which accounts in no slight degree for the individuality of his work.

For do we pay enough heed to the essential differences that nature presents in different localities? At the moment I am not thinking of the variations in construction, forms, and configuration, as, for example, between the aspects of mountains and of simple pastoral regions, nor even of the separateness of impress set upon the landscape by man in the character of his buildings or of his farming occupations, but of that more subtle difference produced by varying kinds of atmosphere. The great landscape painters, we may have noticed, all belong to northern countries, who have lived, comparatively speaking, within the same degrees of latitude; and yet the landscapes of Holland, France, Scotland, England, Norway, and America can never be mistaken for one another. Apart from local conditions of man’s handiwork, each varies in the local quality of its atmosphere—its degree of clarity or humidity, of briskness or caressingness.

In a country vast as ours, there must needs be diversity in different parts, so there cannot be any one character of landscape distinctively American; but, in their faithful rendering of the local character, all may be distinguishable from those of other countries. And this expression on the countenance of nature is not unlike that on the face of a man or woman; the painter may suggestit perfunctorily, or he may render it with a completeness of sympathy and understanding, products of alert sensibility and interested acquaintanceship. It is the evidence of these qualities that gives enduring charm to Tryon’s landscapes.

No one who knows his work will need to be told that he is a New Englander. His landscapes show an intimacy of knowledge of that locality, and an affectionate sympathy with its particular phases of expression, that could only result from the painter having grown up in that part, the boy’s associations gradually maturing into the man’s convictions. His home was in Hartford, Conn., where he was born in 1849. He entered upon life as a stationer’s assistant, and pursued the occupation until he had accumulated sufficient means to visit Paris, all the while spending his leisure time in studying from nature and in discovering for himself how to represent his ideas in paint. There is evidence in this of sanity as well as earnestness, of a fine poise of character, qualities later to appear in his landscapes.

Above all, there is the perfectly natural process of a painter’s evolution; I mean, the antecedent love of nature, the clear apprehension of the kind of nature that he aimed to paint, the love of it and the knowledge preceding the final acquisition of technique; meanwhile, the gradual upbuildingof personal character by the discipline of postponing his ideals. So, when he reached Paris, it was not as a raw, enthusiastic student whose subsequent career spun suspended upon a mere cobweb of his fancy. He had married, and took his wife with him, establishing a little home and having clear plans in view, being, in fact, a man. He painted under Harpignies and Daubigny, an excellent combination of influences, mutually complementary: the one so sound and methodical, if a little prosaic; the other so captivating in the perennial boyishness of his mind, so lovable a student of the simple loveliness of rural scenes. What a happy antidote was Daubigny to the excessive earnestness of a typical New England character; how persuasively suggestive must his landscapes have been to one whose heart was implanted in the austerer charms of his New England home. The influence of his two masters served on the one hand to send the roots of his growth farther down and to stiffen the trunk, and on the other to encourage a more abundant leafage and the added fragrance of blossom. From both, also, he must have gained a store of technical principles; but of direct influence in his manner of painting there is no trace. His own special problem was one different from theirs, and he had to find his own way of solving it.

Even in one of his earliest landscapes painted about 1881, after his return from Paris, from studies made abroad, there is a decisively individual note. It is a scene of ploughing, owned by Mr. Montross—a stretch of dark rich soil, with man and horses pushing the furrow toward a clear, cool horizon. There is a larger feeling than Daubigny would have portrayed; a sterner one, if you will, certainly one more bracing in its suggestion of vigorous earth and breezy sky, and more distinctly inspired than Harpignies could have made it, with the sentiment of the soil and sky in their relation to the life of man. Still, the motive of the picture is so far a borrowed one that, although it has the feeling of a New England scene, it has not its local characteristics of atmosphere or of soil colour, lacking the more sensitive quality of the one, and the tenderer hues of the other. While, then, this picture is without the subtle qualities that mark the later ones, it has a clear, strong note of vigorous earnestness, strongly felt and strongly realized. Indeed, it seems entirely characteristic of the strength of purpose and sturdy qualities which are the foundation of Tryon’s equipment, both as a man and a painter. He seems to have grown up with the smell of the soil in his nostrils as Millet did, though without the latter’s saddened associations;to have been nourished with the brisk New England air, and to have gathered muscle over its ploughed and grassy uplands. The keen stimulus of nature went through and through him early and has stayed with him, so that his art partakes of its strength. In his pictures, one finds, I think, a stronger foundation than only that of good drawing and construction; an earnest, wholesome delight in the strength of nature as being something in which he himself shares; which, indeed, has so grown into his mind and life that its expression in his work is but a matter of course. It is a part of his most serious convictions, so that his rendering of it is convincing.

Put into words, the distinction may seem a little fine drawn; but I feel sure that our experience of pictures gives it substance. How often, for example, in the work of the French classicists we may see illustrations of human vigour, on which good drawing and construction have been expended, and yet their suggestion of vigour is only an affectation; a quality aimed at by the painter, but not vitalized by strong, earnest convictions of his own. What a protestation of strength there is in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes, and how little real convincingness! And, coming to the landscapes of our own time, it would be easy to quote examples of strong drawing and construction from which,

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