Part 9

Yet the very magnitude of canvas and of problem impairs somewhat the intimacy of feeling in the picture, and for all its abounding skill we shall not reckon it among Tryon’s choicest work. In that he gives us, when he wills, the sense of spaciousness within a much smaller frame, and, compassing it around so discreetly, makes its subtle appeal by so much the more insinuating. These comparatively smaller pictures are too numerous and different in character to allow of detailed allusion, yet one may single out a few such gems as “The Rising Moon” and “Sunrise,” owned by Mr. Charles L. Freer; “After Showers--June,” owned by Colonel Frank J. Hecker; “The Meadow--Evening,” owned by Mr. A. T. Sanders; “Springtime,” owned by Mr. George

A. Hearn; and a “Winter Evening” and “Early Spring,” the property of Mr. N. E. Montross.

These are masterpieces,--and the list is incomplete,--pictures that you may study from the strictest standpoint of technical excellence, and that exert an influence upon the imagination which one may believe will be felt by those who come after us as fully as by ourselves.

In considering American landscapes, there is more than a little tendency to dwell upon the names of the painters who are dead, regardless of the fact that the traditions which they established are being maintained. Among those who are maintaining them, Tryon is conspicuous, and in a way that is, perhaps, more distinctive than theirs. He represents much more closely the kind of contribution that the American temperament may be expected to make to the progress of painting. For unless painting can continue to reflect the evolution of human progress, it is, after all, only a “dead language.” But it is landscapes such as Tryon’s that prove its vitality. They represent the combination of qualities that differentiate American civilization in its worthiest form from that of other countries and of past times. They combine a largeness of outlook with alert sensibility to impressions; being, at once, big in character and minutely subtle.

XII

HORATIO WALKER

Upon his first appearance last year as a contributor to the exhibition of the British Institute of Water Colours, Horatio Walker’s picture, “The Potato Pickers,” was prominently hung, and he himself was elected a member. Considering the fine record of the Institute and its high rank among water colour societies, such instant recognition of a newcomer was very notable.

But it is just the way in which an artist of Walker’s calibre is likely to make his impression--at once and authoritatively; for he is a painter of unusual personal force, and of a persuasiveness quite as remarkable, qualities not always found in combination, but, when united, irresistible. And these artistic qualities are the counterparts of similar elements in his character as a man. His is a forceful personality of moral as well as mental force. How much this means! There is a kind of forceful person who slaps you on the back in the street, and you probably consider him a nuisance; and there is a kind of painter who would violently arrest your attention by the bravery of his brush strokes or some surprising crash of colour scheme or chiaroscuro.

In such forcefulness there is a certain effrontery that one resents at once; or which, if it arouse a little momentary curiosity or even interest, will in the long run be followed by intolerable weariness. For it is almost entirely a mere display of manual gymnastics, an exploitation of self. There may be a little mind behind it, but it will be the quality of mind that is simply of the active kind, enamoured of its own activity. It is not regulated by the moral sense, responsible to self-control, contributory to some serious and absorbing purpose, involving a realization of the intense meaningfulness of nature and life. This is the foundation quality of what is big in life and art: a noble seriousness that penetrates the facts, and lifts them upon the elevation of its own spirit to the dignity of what is grandest and most abiding in the universal scheme.

Painters who possess this faculty are apt to concentrate their sympathy and force upon some particular phase of life, and Walker has found the pivot point for his in the island of Orleans, in the St. Lawrence, some twenty miles northeast of Quebec. Here the descendants of the early French settlers still retain the simple faith and habits and fine ingenuousness of the peasants of northern France; a sturdy race, close to the soil, and drawing dignity as well as nourishment therefrom, perpetuating their origin even in their belongings: the domestic utensils, the farm implements, in the racial characteristics of their clever little horses and oxen, and in the very fashioning of their harness. Nor was the singling out of this Acadia merely the happy discovery of a painter in search of the picturesque. It was a harking back to the associations of his boyhood; for, though Walker’s later youth was spent in Rochester, N.Y., he is a Canadian by birth, the son of an English army officer.

It is a beautiful thing for an artist when he can thus graft his maturity on to the roots of his early impressions.

“A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

How often the will passes, we know not whither, like the wind; and the thoughts, swallowed up in the materialism of far other thoughts, come back to us in later life only as random visions of what might have been! Indeed, it is beautiful for the artist when he can recover that boy’s will, and link the early thoughts on to the maturer thoughts of manhood. This way lie sincerity, depth and fulness of conviction, and ripest fruitfulness. It has been difficult for American artists to maintain this continuity of evolution, since they have had to travel far for instruction, and the way of return to the associations of the past has not seemed clear. Still, many have found it, and perhaps a volume of criticism might be based upon this one fact; and it might be shown that those whom we most admire as powerful painters, for the reality of what they have to say and their impressive way of saying it, are the ones who, in their art, have got back closest, either to the actual scenes or to the mental associations of their youth.

But besides the quality of force in Walker and his art, there is the other one of persuasiveness. You may remember his “Oxen Drinking,”--the two broad-fronted, patient heads side by side at the water trough, their driver, in blue shirt, standing by them, and the rich brown backs of the massive beasts showing against the dark-gray horizon. For the sky, reaching far up above the group, has been whipped into turbulence by the wind; it is slaty-hued, threatening storm. How grandiose this elemental fermentation! How significant the bulk and solidity of the beasts! There is force all through the picture, the force of disturbance and the force of immobility; for the beasts are grounded like boulders; the man, motionless. It is a force that compels attention and communicates its own strength to one’s self; and then succeeds an infinite suggestion of restfulness. The heavens may labour, but for man and oxen the appointed task is done, and they enter into their rest. And note that this suggestion is not arrived at by a process of the intellect, but by pure sensation.

It is the colour scheme that conveys it; that note of blue, so clear and flute-like, against the sullen grayness of the sky; the sobering, complementary note of tawny brown, even the chromatic variations of the gray sky that vibrate like music. For all its menace, the sky is beautiful, and in union with the other notes of the scheme produces a throbbing tenderness of harmony that is irresistibly appealing. It is through his colour schemes that Walker tempers his force with persuasiveness. For he is one of that small band to whom colour is as essential a part of their expression as notes are to the singer. You may see pictures in which the colour is little more than tints to differentiate the objects; others in which it is merely an accurate rendering of the phenomena studied; then others, again, wherein the colour is as inseparable from the conception as fragrance from the rose. It is essential, interpenetrating the structure of the picture, complete and indivisible as the components of a passage in music; structurally, æsthetically, and intellectually essential. While one will find this true feeling for colour in all his work, it is only in the later ones, as one would expect, that it reaches its fullest subtlety of expression.

One of his early pictures is the “Milking,” a large canvas to which was awarded the gold medal, by the vote of exhibitors, at the exhibition of the American Art Association in 1887. The scene is a stable interior, with drab walls, in which a woman in a blue gown is milking a black and white cow, whose calf is standing near. The light enters by a window on the right, and percolates through the dim recesses of the stable. At first one is conscious of the quiet beast standing across the picture, turning its mild head toward us, and of the woman in half shadow, a strong-bodied form in the easy attitude of a habitual occupation; but by degrees the eye penetrates the surrounding gloom, and discovers another figure and other objects in the background. In this gradual evolving of the subject, art has followed nature, and one feels also the evidence of a dignified reserve, as of a man who does not wear his heart upon his sleeve or admit you hurriedly into the privacy of his thought, but assures himself first of your sympathy and then bit by bit unfolds to you his purpose. Another characteristic of this picture is its grandiose passivity, its suggestion of a liberal acquiescence in nature’s plan. We shall find this same large outlook, under various guises, in a great number of Walker’s pictures. Represented most differently, one meets with it in “Morning,” in which a flock of sheep have just emerged from a shed and are beginning to nose about the meadow, which stretches behind them, glistening with dew and bounded by a coppice of delicately branched trees, through which the morning sky, just quickening with light, is visible.

Here again is a suggestion of the routine in nature’s scheme: the awakening of day, the following on of the beasts to play their appointed part. And I think we shall be conscious also, for this is a later picture, penetrated with subtlety of manner and meaning, of an extraordinary suggestion of the remoteness of nature at this silent, undisturbed hour. It is a repetition of an occurrence as old as any time we wot of, and it links this modern scene in our imagination with Virgil’s “Eclogues,” with Homer’s “Odyssey” and the Hebrew Laban’s flocks, forming a link in the endless chain of pastoral recollection, at once the most enduring and most lovable of all our impressions of nature. Nor let us omit to notice the remarkable technical skill involved in the painting of this stretch of meadow, the exquisite gradations of tone in the silvered greens as they recede from the eye, the delicate stir of animation in the grass, and also in the painting of the sky, which is kept so surely behind the trees, while its gathering volume of light steals gently through them. So complete is the unity of the picture, so musical its vibration, that from the whole scene there seems to exhale a delicate sigh that floats through the fragrant soundlessness of awakening nature.

Such technical accomplishment is the outcome of Walker’s penetrating earnestness. Like most of the best landscape painters of every country, he is entirely self-taught. The appeal of nature, to one who is a true lover of it, is so personal that no other man’s method will avail to express what he feels. He is compelled to discover his own way of utterance, conforming in its individuality to the particular quality of his sincerity. With Walker the sincerity is characterized not only by a determination to reach the truth, but by an instinct for the larger kinds of truth, those which need no enforcing, but make their own significance slowly and surely recognized. Nothing is more conspicuous in his best work than the reserve with which everything is stated. He puts forth his strength with calculated orderliness, gradually letting one into the heart of his meaning, continually stimulating and rewarding by further study, and leaving one at last with the consciousness that he has held back part of what he had in mind. He leads one, indeed, to the dim border land where one says good-by to facts and yields only to the imagination. In this respect he is nearer to Israels than to Millet in his attitude toward peasant life. The peasant of Gruchy was so profoundly impressed with the pitifulness of the peasant’s life that his story of labour with all its force is a restricted one. He missed its nobler aspect in relation to the universal scheme, and feels only its heavy fatalism. Israels has a wider sympathy, which can discover beauty in the monotonous routine, the beauty of little observances well and faithfully done, and the quiet intervals of rest and homely joy that intervene. But while Walker is akin to the Dutch artist in the embracing tenderness of his vision, he excels him in breadth and force. Israels continually invites you to look in; Walker, to look in also, but to look around as well.

In this respect he reminds one of Troyon, whose magnificent landscapes and grand cattle are big with nature’s fecundity and strength. There is not a little of these two men in Walker; of Israels’ tenderness and Troyon’s breadth. Even in so stirring a subject as the large “Ploughing in Acadia,” painted about 1887, there is this infusion of tenderness. The three horses straining abreast are full of vigour; they tug with a sustained effort in which the continuity of the movement is finely expressed; the high gear above their saddles, covered with sheepskin, tosses in the air over their shaggy arched necks; the old man at the plough tail is stocky and hale; lusty green weeds have their roots in the strong earth, and the sky is full of bracing weather. Through and through it is a sturdy picture; but note, also, the affectionateness with which the head of the nearest horse is rendered. He is of the Normandy breed, the most willing of servants, the most intelligent of animal companions. His eye is bright, the nostril inflated; he is rejoicing in his strength; and later on, when labour is over, he will nose into his master’s jacket and both will feel like friends to one another. This is the wholesome, natural view of the peasant’s labour, when it is really close to the soil and uncorrupted by a cheap press; man and the animals going about their appointed task until the day is done, and finding companionship with one another and with nature; and it is not without a quiet happiness of its own.

This ploughing scene reminds me of a later one, painted a few years ago, of two oxen coming up the furrow with their massive, leisurely movement, while behind them the light is mounting up in floods of crimson, that overflow upon the broad backs of the beasts and lap the cool, glistening earth. It represents the first moments in nature’s daily awakening to life and in man’s daily routine of labour. Both in the sky and on the earth there is the steady gathering of force; not a burst of energy, but that massing of energy that will not readily expend itself. I have heard it remarked that the oxen look tired already, and the men likewise; but perhaps it is rather a passivity of feeling that is conveyed, that slow, unquestioning resignation, that is at once so pathetic and heroic in the true peasant.

And in another way many of these canvases of Walker’s involve this heroic suggestion. While close studies of pastoral and agricultural life in a portion of this continent to-day, they have a more universal significance and set one’s imagination back in the Old World that we call Homeric; times of spaciousness and simplicity, when we fancy that man’s strength was in closest affinity with nature’s; times of wholesomeness and poise of mind and body, when man lived by nature’s rule, and labour was loving.

This universal suggestion is the product of the force, united with persuasiveness, that one marked at the outset as characteristic of Walker and his work. It comes of the large seriousness with which he thinks and works, of the true perspective through which he views his subject, wherein facts and sentiment take their due place not only in the foreground, but in their relation to a distant horizon. These risings and settings of the sun, that he loves so much, have run their course through ages; not a little of his love for them no doubt is due to their suggestion of infinity in relation to the life of man; and that life, too, he prefers to view as itself a heritage of the ages.

For many of us life is now a complicated affair, with much whirring of human machinery within ourselves and around us; yet it still has elemental facts and emotions. The painter who can express these with their personal, local significance, and show, as well, their relation to the universal, is one whose work will be likely to endure.

XIII

GILBERT STUART

“Another King arose which knew not Joseph,” and so it goes still. Most American children are familiar with the so-called “Athenæum Portrait of George Washington,” yet probably very few, even of their parents, know the name of the artist, Gilbert Stuart. We have got into the habit of dating the growth of modern American painting from 1875, and with some reasonableness, for that was the period at which students began to arrive home from Munich and Paris in sufficient numbers to make their arrival felt. Yet twenty-five years earlier, about the time that George Inness was starting for Europe, William M. Hunt had returned, bringing with him pictures of the Barbizon painters and introducing their principles of nature study. We are apt to dismiss the painting of the previous half-century as representing only the draggled ends of the English influence rudely severed by the Revolution; forgetting that the period is linked on to the Augustan age of English painting, to Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the somewhat later Constable. For Gilbert Stuart was a contemporary of all three, and to some extent a rival of Reynolds, even in London, and was born also within the lifetime of the first of the great Englishmen, William Hogarth. Stuart, moreover, was not a follower of others, but a distinct and forceful individuality that played a leading rôle in the stirring drama of his times. He was, with little doubt, the first of American masters of painting.

There is a romance in every life, however gray and level, but in Stuart’s the romance foamed upon the surface. Perhaps he had inherited it; for his father, a native of Perth, in Scotland, reached this country shortly after the battle of Culloden Moor, that shattered the prospects of the Pretender; and there is more than a suspicion that his espousal of a lost cause had made it well to put the ocean between himself and his past. However that may be, he built himself a little mill with a gambrel roof, at the head of the Petaquamscott Pond, in Narragansett county, R.I., and settled down to the quiet occupation of grinding snuff. He had married, and in 1755, after several other children, came a boy, who received the name of his father, and was duly entered in the baptismal registry as “son of the snuff grinder.” But in time the mill proved unprofitable, and the family migrated to Newport, where the mother superintended the boy’s education, the Rev. Mr. Bissert instructing him in Latin. He seems to have been quick at learning but averse to study, being of a frolicsome disposition and addicted also to drawing. None remains of Stuart’s early sketches, but one day some of them were seen by Dr. William Hunter, as he was paying a professional visit to the family. The kind and discriminating physician invited the boy to call upon him, and when he came presented to him a box of paints and brushes,--a day of days in the child’s life, to be marked with red, and to be looked back upon in the after years with thanksgiving.

What a pretty picture it presents of those brave old colonial days, when simplicity and culture went hand in hand. It is very sad, of course, that the poor boy should have lived too early to enjoy the blessings of a school system, based on the strictest principles of pedagogy, graded to an average not inconveniently high, making much of words and relegating ideas to the proper limbo of things that are unpractical and, therefore, useless. How pathetic, too, the unique event of this paintbox in view of the profusion of presents which our children now enjoy! Truly, there is much room for complacent congratulation over improved conditions. Yet it is a little disconcerting to notice how much the less favoured children made of their meagre opportunities; and we may begin to wonder whether education--the leading of the child step by step to a fuller and fuller consciousness of the realities of life--and instruction--the laying of brick upon brick to build an edifice of character--may not be a thing outside of systems, and to be looked for rather in the daily contact of the child’s expanding personality with good wholesome personalities around it. Perhaps, after all, the quiet spaciousness of those old colonial days was a fine nursery for men, just as the western forests nurtured Lincoln and many a quiet home to-day is fostering the goodness and greatness of the future.

Stuart’s earliest picture is said to be a portrait of Mr. Thomas R. Hunter, of Newport, and we read that when he was thirteen years old he received a commission to paint portraits of Mr. and Mrs. John Bannister. Two years later a Scotch painter, Cosmo Alexander, arrived in Newport and interested himself in the boy’s efforts, giving him instruction, and when he returned to Scotland two years afterward, taking him with him. One notes how readily the boy ingratiated himself into the hearts of those with whom he came in contact, a trait that marks each stage of his subsequent career. He had a quiet, self-contained demeanour, with a store of spirit that could flash out enthusiastically upon occasion and in a very tactful way; with humour, too, and satire as he grew older, and with a growing brusqueness and even intolerance, toward his later life. The urbanity, discreetness, and humour he would have inherited from his Scotch father, drawing from his Welsh ancestry on the mother’s side the ardour of his character and his love of music. For his education had included the practice of music--he could play the organ and was skilful on other instruments. He must have been, indeed, a personality of rare graciousness.

The stay in Scotland was short, for Alexander died very soon after their arrival. He had established his ward in the University of Glasgow, and, dying, committed him to the care of Sir George Chambers, who himself died shortly after. The youth pined for home, and managed to get passage back to America on a collier. With a friend named Waterhouse he hired a model to study from, “a strong-muscled blacksmith.” It was characteristic of the bent of choice that reappears in his mature work: a love of strength and resolution, delighting in the robust physical qualities or in the strong evidences of mental and moral character which time has impressed upon the face.