Part 7

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

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 us only 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.

IX

GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH

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 to his 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 be hard 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 method of 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 art atmosphere, 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 costumes and 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 leaden sky. 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

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 drawing in “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 high and 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 is what 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.

X

ALEXANDER H. WYANT

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 its _habitat_ by 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