AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTERSDwight William Tryon
FIVE
The world stands ready to admire a painter whose trees bend beneath the gale, their tops all but whipping the torn, gray, low-driving clouds, and whose lightning and rain and frightened animals aid the dramatic impression of violent storm. Yet the world often forgets the sort of skill that can show a light wind barely swaying the straight, stark woods of March, or can bring home to everyone the chill and the melancholy of oncoming frost in an autumn evening. When trees toss we know that the wind is up. Running cattle suggest thunder. But in “Twilight—Autumn†there is nothing to tell us why we seem to hear the far-off moaning of the November wind. Tryon makes one feel the spirit of scene and season.
At the age of twenty-five Dwight William Tryon first set up his studio. Before this he had been a clerk in a bookstore at Hartford, Connecticut. At seven he began studying at the École des Beaux Arts under Daubigny and De la Chevreuse. Two of his pictures were exhibited at the Paris Salon. Since then he has won prizes everywhere—a gold medal of the first class at Munich in 1891; thirteen medals at the Chicago exhibition, 1893; and many more. He is a member of the National Academy.
Some of the best of Tryon’s earlier work is included in a series of landscapes and marines which he painted for the hall of a collector in Detroit. One of his series, “Dawn—Early Spring,†is remarkable for its simplicity. The foreground is a low, marshy field, back of which an almost uniform line of trees runs the whole width of the horizon. Yet this painting, with all its simplicity, is so full of imagination that a beholder feels the dawn and the bleakness of March sinking irresistibly into his mind. It is Tryon’s method to conceal his art, and make us feel the emotion in a picture without knowing why we feel it.
All his paintings have the same subtle simplicity. Among the best known are his “Winter†and “A Scene at New Bedford.â€
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATIONILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 26, SERIAL No. 26
HEART OF THE ANDES By F. E. CHURCHMetropolitan Museum of Art
HEART OF THE ANDES By F. E. CHURCH
Metropolitan Museum of Art