Part 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI

DWIGHT W. TRYON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

however, the spirit of strength is lacking. They are the work of men who mean strongly, but are not themselves strong men. So surely does personal character, or lack of it, show in a painter’s work, not the mere robustiousness of personal force, but the settled, earnest, habitual convictions that are the elements of character. And quite as evident to our experience in pictures is the distinction between the real and the false in refinement. Mere subtlety of brush work, while it may create for a while an illusion of refinement, will not satisfy us in the long run.

Many of Tryon’s landscapes reach a pitch of delicate suggestion in the rendering of soft air, caressing atmosphere, and shrouded light that is unsurpassed by any painter in this country; for the impression is much deeper than that of an entrancing skill in the management of the pigments. The spirit of the landscape stole into his heart when a boy, and has abided with him in his manhood; he is so much a child of New England, sweetened by its tenderer influences as well as nurtured on its hardihood, that, sharing its strength and refinement, he gives expression to himself when he reproduces these qualities in his pictures. Hence, in both directions, their complete convincingness. A fact, too, which helps to justify this appreciation is that his pictures show an interest in so many moods of the landscape, and the degree of force or of subtlety with which he renders each is regulated by the demand of the occasion. You cannot divide the past twenty years of his productiveness into special periods of style; any attempt to do so will bring you up against the insurmountable objection of finding that two canvases of very different feeling and manner of painting are dated the same year. Development, necessarily, there has been in style; increased acquisition of facility and the power to render more penetratingly the mood of nature he is studying. But evolution of motive you will scarcely find. That from the first has been realistic; in the sense that the landscape, as it appears to him to be, affords primarily sufficient incentive to his study.

In the presence of nature he makes studies, intent for the time being solely on recording what he sees; later, in his New York studio, the poetic suggestion of these studies will come to him, and he composes a picture. But the process is from realism to poetry, and not contrariwise, as one suspects to be the case in the poetical landscapes of some painters. Tryon’s way is not unlike a man’s regard for a good mother. In the days of his habitual intercourse with her, it is her dignity and sweetness that grow into his life, the changes of expression in her face and voice that win upon his devotion, her beautiful reasonableness that is accepted as quite a natural thing. It is only when the son’s life is drawn apart from the habit of her presence that the sentiment of a mother’s love is realized. So Tryon’s withdrawals to city life allow the poetry of nature to steal in upon his imagination; when he resumes his face-to-face communing with it, the life habit of absorbed regard comes back to him. The result of this is that the sentiment of his pictures grows out of the actual, and represents the soul of a fact. One finds one’s self admiring the extraordinary truth of the visual impression, and then often surprised that material so homely should yield such abundance of poetic suggestion; forgetting, for the moment, that poetry is not an element of nature, but a quality of the painter’s mind, representing the degree of sincerity and elevation of purpose with which he has approached his subject. Tryon’s poetry comes of the associations garnered through a life of affectionate intimacy with the country of his birth. It is as true and spontaneous as filial love.

His technical skill has secured the respect and admiration of his fellow-painters. They assign him that final title of approval, “a painter’s painter;” meaning that only those who know by practical experience the difficulties and trials of technique can properly appreciate his ability and resourcefulness, and certainly not implying, as is sometimes the case when this expression is used, that the admirable qualities in the picture are primarily and solely technical ones.

Attempting in non-painter language to summarize the spirit of his method, one may, perhaps, reduce it to the equivalent elements in his own character--poise and sympathetic penetration. The balanced effect of his landscapes is very notable: a harmony of colour in which there is no jar, a similar equipoise in the details introduced, a delicate adjustment of strength and tenderness and of sentiment to facts; an _ensemble_ of uninterrupted unity. In the matter of sympathetic penetration--a rather clumsy expression for which I can find no happy alternative--his method is even more remarkable. I allude to the affectionate studiousness with which he analyzes the significant constituents of the landscape, and to the degree in which his eye penetrates the secret of the envelope of atmosphere, of that particular quality of atmosphere characteristic of New England.

I would cite the “Early Spring, New England,” not as an example of one of his most beautiful landscapes, but as a triumph of technical resource, to which was awarded the gold medal in 1898 at the Carnegie exhibition in Pittsburg. The foreground is a pasture with a brook winding through it, and several leafless trees which spread their delicate network of branches against a clear, open sky that reddens slightly near the horizon. Beyond is cultivated land, partly covered with the brilliant green of young vegetation, and partly red, upturned soil, with a team ploughing. Farther back are gently rising hills.

The front of the picture is painted with remarkably delicate detail, and in the distant parts there is a similar suggestion conveyed of the worthiness of the scene to be minutely studied. There is not a square inch in the composition that is without individual interest, and yet this elaborate mosaic unifies into a single impression of spaciousness; for the relative significance of each plane in the picture has been so shrewdly realized. The eye is invited to travel back to the remotest part of the ground and up into the expanse of sky. This is the primary invitation of the picture as would be that of the actual scene; and then follows, if you have eyes for it, the beckoning in this and that direction to the separate interest of the various parts. This accurate rendering of the effect of intervening atmosphere upon the receding forms and colours brings the atmosphere itself into the picture; a softly stealing animation, not yet nimble, but gently quickening into life. It is, indeed, a picture of quite extraordinary subtlety; and so much the more a triumph of accomplishment because it is a very large one, and the mere problem of filling such an extent of canvas with the evidences of minute observation, so that it should still hold well together, was a most formidable one. There was no possibility of evasion or of falling back upon convenient generalizations: the problem, once grasped, had to be solved to its ultimate conclusion.