VIEDWIN A. ABBEY

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.THE LOOKOUT—“ALL’S WELL.”By Winslow Homer.

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

THE LOOKOUT—“ALL’S WELL.”

By Winslow Homer.

From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.THE WEST WIND.By Winslow Homer.

From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.

THE WEST WIND.

By Winslow Homer.

than in that of the French section as a whole. The Americans did not seem to be painting in obedience to some vogue, still less with the purpose of creating one; they were not thrashing around for motives which should electrify, by shock or thrill, and prove a brief sensation; nor, on the other hand, did they seem to be bent upon exhibiting the particular advantages of this or that method of technique. Their work for the most part was unassuming and straightforward, penetrated with realism and often tempered with poetic feeling; not less suggestive of the true painterlike way of conceiving the subject because it was executed with so little desire to exploit the mere painterlike facility of brush work, and yet showing a sound and advanced acquisition in technique. Indeed, it was in this particular that the American work showed superior to that of Norway, with the fresh, vigorous spirit of which it otherwise had so much in common. These qualities of earnest force, of directly independent vision and strong, straightforward treatment, so conspicuous in Homer’s pictures, drew the foreign critics to a conclusion that this virile personality might be really representative of American art.

And so it is in the sense that it embodies the qualities and point of view for which all our mostindividual painters are striving, though its power and depth place him above any direct comparison with other painters, unless it be with Homer Martin. Like the latter, his art has grown out of and into the circumstances of his environment, the most reasonable and fertile way of growth both in plant life and in the life of man. As a boy at Cambridge, Mass., he led the true boy’s life, interested in animals, fond of fishing, observant also of the character and forms of nature, early recording his impressions on paper in a long series of methodically careful drawings. So, from the start, he learned to feel things and to see things for himself, and to express them as they affected him. The accident of an advertisement in a local paper landed him in a lithographer’s workshop, where for two years his habits of methodical application were confirmed, leaving him at the end no less earnest and enthusiastic as a student, but determined that henceforth he would bow the neck to no one. After a brief sojourn in a Boston studio, during which he contributed drawings to Harper and Brothers, he came up to New York, refusing an offer to enter the art department of those publishers, but accepting an appointment at the outbreak of the war to represent them at the front. Meanwhile, he had been attending the night school of theNational Academy, and taking lessons in painting from Frederic Rondel, a Frenchman, then in considerable repute as a painter.

His contributions toHarper’s Weekly, though somewhat tamely precise in drawing, gave with much spirit the character as well as the episodes of camp life. Subsequently, on his own behalf, he paid two more visits to the Army of the Potomac, during which he put in practice what he had learned of painting, finally producing “Prisoners from the Front.” This picture, shown at the exhibition of the National Academy in 1864, made a profound impression. Popular excitement was at fever heat, so the picture fitted the hour; but it would not have enlisted such an enthusiastic reception if it had not approximated in intensity to the pitch of the people’s feeling. It has, in fact, the elements of a great picture, quite apart from its association with the circumstances of the time: a subject admirably adapted to pictorial representation, explaining itself at once, offering abundant opportunity for characterization, and in its treatment free from any triviality. On the contrary, the painter has felt beyond the limits of the episode itself the profound significance of the struggle in which this was but an eddy, and in the generalization of his theme has imparted to it the character of a type.

It is at this point that the true artist parts company with the mere practitioner, however accomplished. His work is more than of local and temporary interest; it has a savour, at least, of the universal, which keeps its significance from perishing. The savour need not necessarily be serious; it may be, as in Watteau’s case, a distillation of the elegance of life; but with Homer its seriousness was inevitable, his temperament seeming to require a ground-bass of motive, grand and solemn. So when he occupies himself with character pictures, drawn from country life, they are comparatively trivial. He cannot, like Millet or Israels, discover the fundamental note of humanity beneath the individual. That note may be solemn enough, but it is not big enough in a forceful way to awake his imagination. His pictures of this genre are shrewdly studied and reasonably good in characterization; but, being detached from any background of big intention, their interest is merely local, and they are not done with that ease and style which might secure them technical distinction. But while waiting for the fountain of his motive to be again moved, how commendable it is that he did not set to work to repeat his success of the “Prisoners from the Front,” as a smaller man would have been tempted to do!

At length, however, he finds again the fundamental motive which he needs, this time in the inspiration of the ocean. Off and on for many years he has led the life of a recluse on a spit of land near Scarboro, Maine, whose brown rocks piled in diagonal strata have from time immemorial withstood the onset of the Atlantic combers; an atom of impregnable stability in presence of vastness, solitude, and the perpetual flux of elemental forces. Grounded on his own stalwart individuality, he has kept himself aloof from the truck and scrimage of conventional life and filled his soul with the vastness of nature. How instances of this isolation from the world multiply in the story of art: Watteau retreating into the impenetrability of his own soul; Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes into their barred studios; Rousseau, Millet, and the rest of their brotherhood into the recesses of the forest. Such isolation seems to be the road to greatness; partly, perhaps, because the man himself must have the elements of greatness in him to wish to do without the constant reinforcement of the world, where men and women prop their shoulders together and make believe that they are standing independently.

Henceforth, then, the ocean supplies the ground-bass of motive in Homer’s art, and themagnitude of its influence begins to inform his work. Deepening in significance, it becomes simpler in expression, and the simplicity is revealed in a fuller synthesis of manner; it grows in comprehension, in force and directness, gaining breadth and freedom of execution, greater purity and subtlety of colour. But he does not at once realize the full significance of the ocean itself. For a time he sees only its secondary significance in relation to the life of the fisherfolk, to whom it is, at once, the means of existence and a perpetual threat of danger. He paints such grandly dramatic pictures as “The Life Line,” “Eight Bells,” “Danger,” “All’s Well,” “Undertow,” “Watching the Tempest,” and “Perils of the Sea”; a series of dramas to which the ocean is the background. How original they are: the subject seen so individually and carving itself out in the artist’s imagination with such incisive force! Moreover, what wholesome breadth in his sympathy! He does not, like Cottet, the eminent painter of the fisherfolk of Brittany, picture the lives of his people as darkened by the pall of an irremediable fatality. He paints them as strong men and women, fronting with strength the vicissitudes of their existence; a point of view entirely akin to his own strong force of character. For here one reaches the tap root of his

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.THE MAINE COAST.By Winslow Homer.

From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.

THE MAINE COAST.

By Winslow Homer.

power. It is character: a personal strength; not of the complex kind that diffuses itself over many issues, but self-centred and direct. It is the actuality of things which perpetually seizes his imagination and on which he concentrates for the time being all his energy. And, surely, it is because this is so essentially the quality of present American civilization that he is preëminently the most representative of American painters. He is a product of his time, has sucked nourishment from it, and translated its nobler quality into terms of art.

But it is in his marines that he seems to reach the ripest maturity of his genius; and most completely, perhaps, in the “Maine Coast.” The human import of the ocean has spoken home to him at last, in its least local significance. This picture involves a drama; but the players are the elements; the text, of universal language; the theme, as old as time. With the enlargement of purpose has come a corresponding grandeur of style; they realize, as no other marines with which I am acquainted, the majesty, isolation, immensity, ponderous movement and mystery of the ocean,

“boundless, endless, and sublime—The image of Eternity—the throneOf the Invisible.”

—They seem to be the spontaneous utterance of a soul full to overflowing with the magnitude of its thoughts.

A word must be said of Homer’s skill in water colours. They have the quality of improvisation; snatches of impression, flung upon the paper in the ardour of the moment; tuneful bits of movement and colour, gladsome as the light and quick with the spirit of the occasion; and, being so close to their author’s intention, they have a vigour and directness all his own.

IT was but yesterday, though in this country that is a long time ago, that American painters with the zeal of the neophyte were declaiming against the story-telling picture. Of course, we know that the objection was well taken in regard to a large class of pictures, wherein the story was the “thing,” the way of telling it merely incidental and generally banal. But, like many other good principles pushed to excess, it resulted in a bathos as complete as that from which it would have saved us. Countless canvases have been painted, which possess no human interest and very little artistic justification; the barren issue of a mere negation. Slowly there is coming a reaction, and we are beginning to realize that a painter is none the less an artist for having something to say, may even ultimately depend for his ranking as an artist upon the quality of what he has to say, provided always that he says it in true painter fashion, with reliance, in fact, upon the vocabulary of his own particular art.

Among those who have never allowed themselves to be troubled by the art-for-art’s-sake grain of truth in a bushel of chaff is Edwin A. Abbey. As an artist he must largely stand or fall upon his merit as a teller of stories. Have his stories been intrinsically interesting? Is his way of telling them artistic? That he has won his way from a stool at the drawing table of Harper and Brothers to a seat in the Royal Academy will not of itself convince a great many people, who are of the opinion that the story-telling picture is just what attracts the English and is the bane of their Academy. So, to reach an acceptable estimate of Abbey’s rank as an artist, we must confine ourselves strictly to the character of his work, both in pen and ink and in paint.

It was in 1871, when he was nineteen years old, that he passed from his student days at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts into the employment of the Harpers, becoming one of the firm’s band of illustrators, including, among others, Charles S. Reinhart, Howard Pyle, Joseph Pennel, and Alfred Parsons, who helped to draw attention in Europe to the superiority of the chief American illustrated monthlies. In 1878 came his first great opportunity, when he was commissioned to illustrate some of the poems of Herrick, and, in search of material, visited England, where, except for a few short visits to this country, he has remained ever since. He betook himself to Stratford-on-Avon and Bidford, and later to Broadway, in Worcestershire.

Probably every true artist has within him a little world of his own, an island in the ocean of the world around him, a little spot of fact, on which flourish the trees and flowers and personages of his imagination. He is happy if circumstances permit him to work in it, and still more happy if his world of fancy has some correspondence to the actual world about him. Such was Abbey’s happiness in having his footsteps directed through rural England. On the other hand, it could have been no accident that put it in his way to illustrate an old-time poem. The whole tenor of his subsequent work, since he has been at liberty to choose his own subjects, proves that the bias of his temperament is toward the past: to the days of picturesque costume, to a period remote enough to justify his fancy in selecting what it would, and ignoring what it would not. Nor do I overlook the fact that Abbey from the first has shown an ability to create from within himself an environment for his conceptions. Yet, even so, he could not have lighted on a place more fertilizing to such a temperament than the English scenes among which he has moved, withtheir old-time associations and simple rural loveliness.

Broadway, for instance, is on the old post road that runs from London, through Oxford, on to Worcester and the west; within easy reach of Stratford and Kenilworth; its nearest station, Evesham, an old market town where Simon de Montfort, who first stood up for Englishmen against the Norman conquerors and for the rights of the common people, was slain in battle. As you near the village the pleasant vale of Evesham narrows into a horseshoe of hills, gentle slopes of verdure intersected with hedges, and rimmed with coppices and woods. Millet’s house is at the entrance; a little farther on, the village green; and a little farther still a fine old gabled inn, where Cromwell, says the story, slept after his victory at Worcester. The broad street, continually mounting, passes between gabled farmhouses, buried in ivy, and cottages whose windows are bright with pot geraniums and little gardens filled with the flowers and herbs that Ophelia crooned of; past doorways that bear the date of that first James, “the most learned fool in Christendom”; past the remantled farmstead where Mary Anderson in her presentrôleof wife and mother would fain forget that she has been a star; till it winds up in a thin line of white between the green and

THE PENANCE OF ELEANOR, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.

By Edwin A. Abbey.

From the collection of Whitelaw Reid, Esq. Copyright, 1902, by Whitelaw Reid.PAVANE.By Edwin A. Abbey.(Painted in 1895 to occupy a special place in the room where it now is.)

From the collection of Whitelaw Reid, Esq. Copyright, 1902, by Whitelaw Reid.

PAVANE.

By Edwin A. Abbey.

(Painted in 1895 to occupy a special place in the room where it now is.)

brown, and vanishes at the top of the hill, where beyond the mounds and hollows of a Roman encampment there is only the knowledge of a modern world. But you have scarce seen Broadway until you have penetrated into some of the cottage and kitchen interiors, with their wide-open hearths, smoke-stained timbered ceilings, from which hang hams and flitches of bacon and strings of onions; or passed to the backs of some of the houses and explored the dairies and quaint inglenooks of architecture, the trim vegetable gardens, the apple orchards and the barnyards, in close companionship with which is always the vivid green of the pleasant hills.

And it was in such places that Abbey gathered material for his illustrations to “Selections from the Hesperides” and “Noble Numbers” of Robert Herrick; to the “Old Songs” and “She Stoops to Conquer”; a spot wherein there must have been so much akin to his own moods of imagination. What wonder that his drawings have the fragrance of apple blossom and new-mown hay, the sweet musicalness of rippling brooks, the delicate atmosphere of the quiet life, and the savour of the old-time spirit! Within the limits of their particular intention, I doubt if any drawings are more perfect. Nor do I forget those drawings of the country by Alfred Parsons, madeabout the same time and around the same spots; drawings which show such apprehension of the subtle qualities of rural beauty, such an eye for lovely fragments, such a sensitive artistry in picturing them. But the difference in the work of these two close friends throws a clear light on the special quality of Abbey’s mind. Parsons pictured what he saw, interpreting the bit of nature in daintiest terms of art; while Abbey has the power of calling up a picture in his imagination. Yet in these drawings, at least, there is not an act of pure imagination; for the text of the poem or play supplies the idea. His skill is shown in the vivid recreation of the borrowed theme; in a delicate tact of choice, in his way of representing it and of illuminating it with a few choice details, and in his manner of setting the figures and objects in an atmosphere of their own. And I am not thinking now of that technical accomplishment which surrounds the figures with an envelope of lighted air, but of that more poetical gift which enables him to recreate the impression of the old-time feeling. As he says himself, a picture of bygone manners should be treated as an artist of its own period might have treated it. It is undoubtedly Abbey’s faculty of borrowing the habit of mind as well as of manners of the past that gives a special distinction to these drawings.

But the recognition of this should not obscure the larger faculty of which this is only a phase, of being able to illuminate the text; to illustrate it in the true sense, for the term has fallen into discredit. This is partly the fault of publishers who are apt to insist on the most literal interpretation of the text, instead of allowing the artist to reinform the essence of the text with the spirit of his independent art; and partly, no doubt, to the inability of many draughtsmen to do more than baldly literalize. Thus we have a perpetual crop of so-called illustrations, either crowded with detail or almost flippantly negligent of anything but a certain loose bravura of line and spacing, clever, if you like, but tediously similar in general character. “She rose to greet him”—can you not predicate with tolerable accuracy how such and such a one among many illustrators would represent the incident? In Abbey’s case you could not. The phrase would formulate in his mind a picture; complete, daintily suggestive, full of the charming quality of unexpectedness. But it is when an illustration tries to enforce the text by picturing some incident of prime importance in the story, with its play of passion, perhaps, and diverse possibility of appeal to different minds, that the effort of the ordinary illustrator is so hopelessly jejune. Such subjects are onlypartially acceptable when one like Abbey essays them. Indeed, many of us may have felt that where, as in Shakespeare, the scene is one of very full significance, affecting the sensibility of different thoughtful readers as diversely as the same passage of music will affect its auditors differently, one’s intelligence and power of appreciation can hardly be satisfied with any one man’s crystallizing of such fluidity and diversity of appeal into a fixed presentment.

Abbey’s illustrations to Shakespeare, though I know they are considered one of his greatest triumphs, have seemed to me to mark the beginning of less perfection. Again, I am not speaking of the craftsmanship, but of the spirit that animates the artist. So long as he confines himself to fragments from the scenes and to subordinate persons, or to those whose character is very simple and direct, his old charm remains; but when he attempts a complex character, as that of Portia, he necessarily cannot please all comers; and when he essays to build up scenes, the old spontaneity of imagination seems to dwindle. It is as if the foliage of a tree were beginning to lose its freshness and twinkle of artless movement; as if by degrees the leaves were losing sap and falling; and the naked boughs, the bare construction of the tree, were gradually being revealed. And in Abbey’s case it seems to be a process that has been going on more and more as he passed to the use of paint and to the building up of importantmise en scènes, such as “Hamlet,” “Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and the Lady Anne,” or “The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester.”

His passage to paint was but a question of time; not only because to all artists it seems to offer the largest scope, but because, as a draughtsman, he has always had the feeling of a colourist. He has avoided hardness of contours, softening them with light and atmosphere, and merging the figures in the ensemble. The latter are not merely set against a background, they are always in and part of the picture. Further, he sees them as masses. You will scarcely find in his drawings authority of line, or fascination in the direction and quality of the line as line; instead, an infinity of little lines, not without feeling, doubtless, but without a separateness of æsthetic value. It is in the mass that they count; so that a woman’s gown will not afford a sweep of movement, but a delightful tissue of lights and shadows. And when he proceeds to colour it is again the mass that captivates him—masses, especially of black, of crimson and white. But with this very marked love for colour, he is not a colourist in thesense of weaving harmonies of colour. His pictures are still a balancing of masses rather than an effect of orchestration; and in the voluminous draperies that he introduces, while there is much influence of the amplitude of Venetian painting, there is little of its love of light or bigness of architectonic use of colour. In his treatment of coloured masses he is nearer to the manner of Holbein or Van Eyck. He does not seem to have an antecedent realization of the structure of his colour scheme, but builds it bit by bit, and the units more or less retain their separateness. Yet, while there is a lack of breadth in the picture as a whole, the parts are broadly treated, and often with a fine freedom of stroke. In his earlier paintings, such as the “Pavane,” belonging to Mr. Whitelaw Reid, he was still drawing with his brush, but in his later ones the manner has become a painter’s.

But no less natural than this progress of his technical evolution has been that of his mental one. In the course of this how could he well escape the Shakespeare cycle; not only because he had begun by interpreting old English poems and plays, and it was only a question of time as to when he would feel the influence of the poet-dramatist, but also because his imagination is of the dramatic kind. He would have made an idealstage manager of the highest type. As I have said, it is less by any originality of conception that his imagination is distinguished than by an aptitude for grasping the thought of another, reclothing it with actuality, setting it in its appropriate environment, and making it breathe again with the spirit of its time. But such a gift, on the stage at least, is rarely, if ever, accompanied by personal histrionic ability. It is a gift, of selecting, assembling, and combining, rather than of absorption of self in a given line of motive. The stage manager gives the appearance of life to a scene, the actor makes it live, and I wonder whether it be not true that in these Shakespearian canvases of Abbey’s and in his mural decorations of the Holy Grail in the Boston Public Library there is a marshalling of the scene without the dramatic force. Do they carry us away and fill us with the emotion that we should receive in presence of the play well acted on the stage or in the reading of the legend intelligently? We find ourselves, I believe, rather studying the parts of those elaborate productions, the accuracy and beauty of detail, admiring the manipulative ability that has collected and coördinated, and waiting, meanwhile, for the drama to begin.

And if this is true, may it not be the result of choosing for pictorial representation a subjectof such complex emotions as the player’s scene in “Hamlet,” or one of such almost inexplicable subtlety as Richard’s love advances to Anne as she follows in the funeral procession of her dead husband, or even one of comparatively directer significance as that of “The Penance of Eleanor”? In his last picture, the “Trial of Queen Katherine,” he has not attempted to portray the climax of the scene, but the first pathetic pleading of the “most poor woman.” Surely he did well to seize for representation this intermediate movement in the scene. He has gained thereby our human sympathy for a subject which might easily have been too complicated with highly strung emotions to be immediately intelligible. And it is one of the merits of this picture that its appeal is not only impressive but immediate. He has exhibited a tactful modesty, and I use the word with a thought of its real meaning, which is something choicer than moderation. He might have attempted a more heroic note, pitched it to the extreme possibility of the scene. But he avoids atour de force; and draws us as much by persuasion as by strength; by the strength, in fact, of what he holds in reserve.

For the peculiar qualities of his strength are quietness and depth. One may find it in “The Jongleur,” where coming from the castle gate,flanked on each side by a sheltering range of roof, cheerless outside, but suggesting cheer within, across the waste of snow the man in motley’s solitary figure is seen, wincing as he faces the cold and touching a strain on his mandolin to keep up his spirits. It is a beautiful picture, full of significant suggestion, not only of the immediate incident, but of the pathos of the life which lives to amuse others and of the emptiness of the world for one whose spirit is apart from it. It is a picture that compares in spontaneousness of expression with the earlier drawings, and has the fuller import of a maturer mind. Surely it is along lines such as this of purer imagination that Abbey will find his truest self.

To his decorations at the Boston Public Library much of what one has said of the Shakespeare paintings is applicable. They are not dramatic; their impressiveness is of a quiet and tempered sort. As one becomes familiar with these pictures, their power to make one feel the reasonableness and the beauty of the old thought; to feel it, too, not as something entirely strange, but as of present interest, grows and grows upon one. The intellect that has conceived them is not of the kind that leaps to an inspired result. Its quality is choiceness and delicacy of imaginativeness that wins us by persuasion.

In these pictures, as generally in his others, it is the women that he introduces who are the most captivating features of the conception. How beautiful they are! The alluring purity of expression, for example, in the faces of the Virtues is irresistible. Their heads, fragrantly pure, sway like a row of lilies in a gentle wind. Their motionless bodies are arrayed in costumes of delicate richness, each one of which is differently exquisite; the expression is mostly signified by movement of the hands and head; along the line there is a simultaneous act of unveiling, diversified by separate traits of modesty. Perhaps the most captivating of all the figures is that of the one who holds the young knight’s left hand. She draws back and yields at the same moment, with a gesture in which there is a most subtle mingling of confidence and hesitation. The touch of man is so new to her, yet who may doubt this youth?

One of the gems of the whole series is the representation of Blanchefleur, sitting in her dove-gray wedding gown; rose-wreathed and holding roses in her lap; gazing before her with a look of surrender, so infinitely spiritual. In her as in the Virtues the painter has made purity adorable; neither ascetic nor ecstatic, not at variance with the humanity of womanhood, butrepresented as its choicest flowering. Again, in his rendering of the angels he helps us to realize that they are creatures of the imagination; especially in the last picture, where their form is vague and they are felt rather as presences. And to this detachment from mere humanity spiritualized corresponds the expression of their faces; the rapt adoration of beings raised above the stir of human passion, in an atmosphere of calm where passivity is action.

However, judged as a series of decorations, following around the frieze of a room, these pictures are less satisfactory. They count as units, rather than in progression. One fails to find a rhythmic continuity or periodic emphasis of movement and colour, they vary conspicuously in size and colour and in character of composition and motive, and make their impression separately, instead of being in consecutive accord.

But if from a decorative standpoint these canvases are open to adverse criticism, let it not divert attention from their essential merit. Such big and serious effort is none too usual in painting—the opportunity for it, one must add in fairness, too infrequently occurs—so that, when one meets it, one’s heart goes out in appreciative acknowledgment. Within the scope of Abbey’s primary intention of commemorating a greattheme in a series of noble pictures and of reinvesting old truth with present force, he has achieved a triumph that will win the admiration of all to whom seriously imaginative work appeals.

WHEN Fortune is apportioning qualities to the artistic temperament, she does not always include character. I mean that unflinching rectitude of purpose which at once answers “Adsum!” to the call of duty, and is not of the kind that says, “‘I go, sir,’ and went not.” Sacrifice to the call of art is by comparison a slenderer quality. It is not so difficult to suffer for the sake of an ideal, especially when a man is young, or even when he is old, if he keeps his heart young within him, a faculty which is often rather an incident of the artistic temperament than a matter of personal effort. But sacrifice to the call of duty, a duty outside of the art ideals, represents a much higher quality, demanding the exercise of personal force and the maintenance of a quite unusual endurance; the quality, in fact, which one sums up as character.

This is one clew to the reading of George Fuller’s life as an artist; that, at the call of what seemed to him to be his duty, he gave up the single-aimed pursuit of the treasure where his heart lay; disregarded, as the world would say, the chances of a lifetime for the dull monotony of a life of arduous routine, and yet, despite the sacrifice, more probably because of it, found his ideal after all. But there is another clew. Fuller’s ideal and his craving after artistic expression were bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, an integral, inseparable part of himself. They did not need stimulating any more than a healthy appetite, were so normally a part of him as to preserve their natural functions under any circumstances of life. This is not the way in which artistic proclivities always reveal themselves. In some cases the art instinct is not dissimilar to a taste in waistcoats; double-breasted to-day, to-morrow, single; sprigged, plain, coloured, sober, to meet the occasions of the moment; put off as easily as put on; a habit rather than an instinct. This is the trivial, masquerading side of art, so detestable in a solid world of facts; a conscienceless sniffing of the air for change of fashion, that reminds one of the jackdaw with a few peacock feathers in his tail, strutting around and trying to deceive us into recognizing his superiority to fowls of ordinary degree. I doubt if the true artist ever humbled himself to proclaim his worth, and nothing more proclaims his worth than his beautiful humility. It was so, I am surewe may believe, in Fuller’s case. He was not even conscious of his power in the way that smaller men of less character are: only conscious of something that he longed to do and would do in time, if life were spared, notwithstanding the claims upon his attention of other and more mundane matters. The beauty of such a process of evolution is all from within: natural, like the bursting of the honeysuckle into fragrance and blossom over waste, dry places; not to be judged by what it might have been in other soil and climate, but fulfilling its special function of beauty through the inherent mystery of its own independent force.

The product of good New England stock, George Fuller was born at Deerfield, Mass., in 1822, his father being a farmer and his mother the daughter of a lawyer. At thirteen years he was taken to Boston and put first into a grocery and later into a shoe store, but only for a short time, soon returning to the home farm and resuming his studies at the country school. Already he had displayed a taste and aptitude for drawing. When fifteen, he joined an expedition to Illinois that was engaged in making surveys for the first railway in the state, and then again, after two years, returned to school at Deerfield. It soon became evident that the youth had more leaningstoward art than business, and he was allowed to accompany his half-brother Augustus, a deaf mute who painted miniatures, in a ramble through the smaller towns of New York State, executing portraits at fifteen dollars apiece. How much of simple romance there was in these beginnings: the early influence of the hill life, for Deerfield is a village among the hills; the wider freedom on the western prairies; and the roaming from place to place with paint box and wallet, light of heart and heel! All these influences tended toward independence, self-reliance, and wholesomeness of mind, to the natural and firm upbuilding of the individuality in himself, before he came in contact with influences directly artistic. He was fortunate, also, in his early friendship with artists of so fine a quality of mind and beautiful personal character as the sculptors Henry Kirke Brown and Thomas Ball. The former, eight years his senior, invited him to his studio in Albany, where he studied drawing for nine months, until Brown and his wife went to Europe. Then he spent the winters of 1842 and 1843 in Boston, returning to Deerfield each summer. In the latter year, having been elected a member of the Boston Artists’ Association, he wrote to Brown, who was then in Rome, “I have concluded to see nature for myself, through the eye of no one else, and put mytrust in God, awaiting the result.” It is just such simple-souled, reliant men who can possess their souls with patience and reach their end by waiting.

In these early days at Boston, during part of which he shared a studio with Thomas Ball, he was painting portraits; but in 1846, the year after his mother’s death, he sold his first imaginative picture, “A Nun at Confession,” to a patron in Pittsfield, Mass., for six dollars! In the following year he moved to New York at the solicitation of his friend Brown, who had returned home, eager to devote the experience he had gained abroad to the representation of American subjects in America. During the ten years which followed of study and work in New York, varied with visits to Philadelphia and the South, it is not difficult to trace the effect of Brown’s influence upon his earnest friend. One result of it was to prepare the latter for his own visit to Europe; to open his understanding beforehand to the wonders that he was to see, and at the same time to habituate him to an attitude of study, which would enable him to receive the technical lessons of the various schools and their stimulus to the imagination without being lost in the wealth of impressions or unduly influenced by any one of them. The opportunity to visit Europe came in 1859, when, at an interval of only a few months, both his elderbrother and father died, so that the duty of caring for the farm and for those left dependent upon it fell to him. But before settling down he made a tour of five months, visiting London,—where he met Rossetti and Holman Hunt,—Paris, and the chief cities of Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Holland; making sketches in the galleries, and finding especial delight in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Correggio, and Murillo, apparently with a particular admiration for the colourists.

An infinite pathos, we may feel, gathers over this visit, affording, as it did, a view of the Promised Land to a pilgrim whose steps were so peremptorily recalled to the hard routine of the far-off hill farm; a first meeting with the lady of his imagination in her full glory at the moment when he found himself compelled to forego entire allegiance; a brief vision of the ideal before setting his hand to the prosaic reality of life. Yet, perhaps, to feel this is to misread the nobility of Fuller’s character. To him, we may believe, there was a fuller, more rounded comprehension of beauty in life, manifested simply in the living of it well with hands and back and brain as well as with the subtler forces of the imagination; that in this big organic beauty, the beauty of art might be a fly wheel, but still

THE SIMPLE GATHERER.

By George Fuller.

was only a part of the beautiful whole. So what seems to us such a tremendous sacrifice, to him may have been assuaged by the satisfaction of having the method in which his life should be lived so clearly set before him; and in this reading of his mind one pays, perhaps, the most honourable tribute to his character.

For fifteen years no picture by him was seen at the exhibitions, and only a few intimate friends knew that he still painted in the intervals of farm labour; at first in one of the rooms of his home, and later in an old carriage house, converted into a studio. His subjects were elaborations of the sketches made in Europe, small landscapes, and portraits of his children, relatives, and friends; often never finished, sometimes destroyed because they did not reach what he desired. Meanwhile his work on the farm was successful; many improvements were carried out, and tobacco culture was introduced with good results, until the fall of prices in 1875. This forced him into bankruptcy and restored him to art. During the ensuing winter he finished twelve canvases, which were exhibited at Boston, meeting with hearty praise and a ready sale. In 1878 appeared at the exhibition of the National Academy “By the Wayside” and “The Turkey Pasture in Kentucky,” followed in succeeding years by “TheRomany Girl,” “And She was a Witch,” “The Quadroon,” and “Winifred Dysart.” Being elected a member of the Society of American Artists, he sent to its exhibitions “Evening—Lorette, Canada,” “Priscilla Fauntleroy,” and “Nydia.” Among his other works, exclusive of numerous portraits, especially of ladies and children, were “Psyche,” “The Bird Catcher,” “Girl and Calf,” “Fedalma,” and “Arethusa,” the last named being his single example of the nude. But this rich aftermath of creative work was all too short, lasting only eight years, for George Fuller died after a brief illness in March, 1884. He was buried at Deerfield, and a few weeks later a memorial exhibition was held in Boston comprising 175 paintings: an almost completerésuméof what existed of his art work, produced through forty years. Two years later the house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published a sumptuous memorial volume, containing appreciations by W. D. Howells, Frank D. Millet, Thomas Ball, W. J. Stillman, and J. J. Enneking; a sonnet by Whittier, and engravings by Closson, Kruell, and Cole.

It is useless to speculate upon what might have been if Fuller’s productivity had not been interrupted by those fifteen years upon the farm; but when he emerged from them it was with a style of painting very different from his early one.That had been hard in outline, minute and careful in finish; now it was immersed in atmosphere, tenderly elusive, quietly luminous, a revery of colour, reticently harmonious. It was no longer the work of an observation intent upon the outer world, but the outpouring of his innermost spirit, mellowed, chastened, become contemplative by time. One may believe that the outer world had become more and more identified with the necessities of his life, from which he sought a refuge within himself in his own dreams of spiritual beauty. For the names of his pictures count as little as the subjects. In all his best, notably in the “Winifred Dysart,” “Nydia,” “The Quadroon,” and in “The Romany Girl,” especially that example of the latter owned by J. J. Enneking, he is not concerned with portraying the individual but a type, and in giving to it especially a significance of spirit, investing it in each case with phases of what he had learned to realize as the spiritual quality of rarest, subtlest beauty. How could the essential fragrance and indefinable loveliness of maiden innocence as it appealed to the matured sympathies of his advanced years be expressed otherwise than he had felt it,—veiled in the romance of shadowed light, a thing too rarely delicate for sharp, decisive handling? And yet beneath this tender suggestiveness of method, whatstrong brush work is discernible! Not clever, truly, or facile and masterful; rather plodding, ay, tentative, as of compressed emotion striving patiently for expression. One has seen a dreamy, tender treatment of the female form, which had no such staunch underlying structure to support it, work which attracts by what we hastily style subtlety, and later find to be but an exquisite veneer to an unstable conception; the artistic affectation of men whose coarseness of character belies the exquisiteness, and, as one studies their pictures longer, leaves us unconvinced of their sincerity. But in the purity of Fuller’s conceptions the man himself and his deliberate, habitual conviction are embodied.

It is a remarkable feature of Fuller’s development that whereas in age he belonged to the earlier generation of American painters, he should have emerged from his fifteen years’ retreat and unaided communing with himself more truly modern in feeling than the younger men who were then returning from Paris. By very different ways he had reached an ideal not dissimilar to Whistler’s; not, to be sure, expressed with the latter’s inimitable, because so personal,finesse, but alike in its devotion to the abstract and in realization of the correspondence between painting and music, and not so unlike in its method of expression, so reticent and mysterious. Fuller also anticipated the motives of the still younger man, such as Le Sidaner and Duhem, to whom the inherent spirituality of the landscape or figure is the absorbing search, which they seek to embody in terms as intangible as possible. Wrapt from all contact with the distractions of the art world, he had with the prescience of sincerity put forth his hand toward the most interesting phase of the latest movements. I mean the search for the significance of things, as of higher and more abiding value than the things themselves.

Fuller’s life was a romance of more than usual human import, characterized by a singular unity of purpose. He is not to be considered, on the one hand as a man, and on the other as an artist, with qualities, as is not unusual, respectively dissimilar and conflicting. His art was of himself, truly an ingredient, nourished, disciplined, chastened, always sweetly wholesome, modest and noble, like his life. He lived the latter well, and in this high ideal of manhood realized the ideal of his art.

HOMER D. MARTIN has been called the first of American impressionists—doubtless not with reference to his manner of painting, but to the way in which he formulated his conception of the landscape. He was not concerned so much with its obvious phenomena as with the impression that it aroused in his own imagination.

The distinction is a very general one. Everywhere there are those to whom the obvious appeals with undisturbed frankness; they have an instinct for facts, and for confronting them singly and directly; always, too, there are others to whom the facts are but a basis of suggestion. A lamppost on the sidewalk implies another one beyond, still others farther on, and on and on; and, by inference, the endless footsteps in both directions, passing and repassing.

Martin’s earliest study, as a young man at Albany, was with William Hart, a literalist of very engaging qualities. Hart was faithful to the forms of nature, as every true landscapist is, anddwelt upon the details of the scene with a lingering appreciation that did not, however, prevent him from coördinating them into a very charmingensemble. But his joy in the latter was of the obvious kind, such as any intelligent lover of the country shares; a joy in the pleasantness of generous pastures, dotted with cattle, and pervaded with a quiet prosperity; in the smiling sunshine and grateful shade, in cosey woodland retreats, that a man might seek in order to bury himself in the attractions of a book. Always it was the domestic happiness of the country side that won him, much, indeed, as it won Daubigny; for such choice of subject is not a consequence of a painter’s particular way of painting, but of his temperament. The much or little of suggestion that he receives from the landscape, the quality of personal feeling that he puts into his pictures, depend upon his character as a man; and the loyalty with which he follows his own true bias determines very largely the value of his work. Certainly this is a truism, and yet how often it is ignored; painters and amateurs establishing, each for himself, some particular basis of appreciation.

For example, to look for poetic quality in a landscape picture has become with many an axiom of standard, and they find its expression chiefly in the manner of tone. So they haveno eyes for one of Monet’s naturalistic studies; its subtle fidelity to a phase of nature does not interest them. He has found the truth of nature to be enough for his own enjoyment, and as he has striven to make nature speak direct through his picture without any promptings to sentiment on his own part, they miss the suggestion of some special sentiment such as another painter will enforce, and find Monet unintelligible; much the same, presumably, as nature itself would be to them a sealed book. The text to them is unsuggestive; they need a commentator. And how scarce good commentators are! The vogue of poetic landscape has called into activity many whose sentiment is merest sentimentality; minor poets of the brush with a pretty knack of tone and tenderness that passes for poeticalness. It is necessary to clear the air of any such mild pretence of poetry before venturing to speak of Homer Martin as essentially the most poetic of all American landscape painters.

It has been said that there is a Homeric quality in his landscapes. Clearly this is no attempt to place him in relation to other painters, as we regard Homer among other poets; but is a reference to the big significance of his work, to those elemental qualities which we habitually associate with the poetry of Homer. The bigness ofMartin was principally that of a big intellect. It had its inner shrine, where he kept to himself the sacredness of his deepest artistic inspiration; an outer court, wherein he mingled with other men of intellect, and its sunny entrance steps, where, beyond the shadow of what was to him most real, he could prove himself to be “a fellow of infinite jest,” a brilliantraconteur, one that all who knew him loved. And the love for Martin one finds to have been greatest among those who knew him best, and were most aware of the deeper qualities that underlay his wit and jollity.

There is, indeed, a rare attractiveness in this combination of depth and brilliant surface. It is so easy to take life seriously or hilariously, if one is formed that way; but to be big with seriousness in season, and big with sportiveness betimes, is the quality of an extra large-souled man. Of a man, indeed; for the quality is essentially a masculine one, and rare even among men, particularly in art, so large a portion of which is feminine in significance. I suppose most of us feel this in comparing, for example, Tennyson with Browning; and, consciously or unconsciously, have had a feeling of it in the presence of many pictures, even by acknowledged masters. Not improbably it is the latent reason of so muchindifference toward pictures in this country by persons otherwise cultivated. Our past history, as well as the immediate present, has demanded qualities essentially masculine, and so many people instinctively suspect the superabundance of the feminine in painting, or have regarded it merely as a pastime on the part of the painter, and as suitable chiefly for decorating the walls of a drawing-room. The one class has ignored the claims of painting; the other committed itself unreservedly to that kind of picture, which is least of all the product of intellect, or likely to make any demand upon the intelligence. They have found it difficult to take a painter and his work seriously, or would be, perhaps, surprised to find that such an attitude toward art could ever be expected of them. They would find incomprehensible the suggestion that a man may be found who puts into a picture as much mind and force of mind as another man puts into the upbuilding of a great business; that the qualities of mind expended in each case may be similar in degree, and not altogether different in kind; power to forecast the issue, and to labour strenuously for it, with a capacity for organization, for selecting, rejecting, and coördinating; a gift of distinguishing between essentials and non-essentials, and of converting sources of weakness intostrength, so that the issue becomes in each case a monument to the intellect of its creator. And when one finds, as with Martin, that these big qualities of mind have been directed to the expression of what is grand in nature, least transitory, most fundamental, one begins to have that respect for his art which must precede all true appreciation, and to discover that it has a close relation to what is noble and most endearing in life—a deep, abiding reality. During his lifetime comparatively few appreciated the significance of his work, but it is of the kind that time is justifying.

A very characteristic example is the “Westchester Hills,” because it is at once so powerful and so free from any of the small and perfectly legitimate devices to attract attention; a picture that in its sobriety of mellow browns and whites (for such, very broadly speaking, is its colour scheme) makes no bid for popularity; in a gallery might escape the notice of a careless visitor, and grows upon one’s comprehension only gradually. In the gathering gloom of twilight we are confronted with a country road crossed by a thread of water and bounded on the right by a rough stone wall. The road winds away from us, skirting the ridge of hill, which slumbers like some vast recumbent beast against the expanse of fading sky. The dim foreground and shadowed mass

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