Part 6

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 leanings toward 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 my trust 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 elder brother 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

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 “The Romany 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 complete _résumé_ of 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, what strong 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.

VIII

HOMER D. MARTIN

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, and dwelt upon the details of the scene with a lingering appreciation that did not, however, prevent him from coördinating them into a very charming _ensemble_. 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 have no 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 of Martin 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 brilliant _raconteur_, 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 much indifference 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 into strength, 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

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, which in 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 music travelling 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 the _joie 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 proof that his dream of beauty was strong within him to the last.