Part 7

He wrote that perhaps on one of his bad days, for he did take up the brush again, but with no great spirit or effectiveness. In 1908 he was seriously ill and quite helpless, but he insisted upon living on in his lonely house with entrance forbidden to all but his brother’s family. And there quite by himself he died in September, 1910. He had lived a strange life, produced a strong art, and then died, like a wolf, in silence.

One often wonders regarding such a character as Winslow Homer what would have been the result if the strange in both his life and his art had been eliminated. Would it have helped matters or would his strength have been dissipated thereby? And wherein lay the strangeness of Homer if not that he never inherited a single social or artistic tradition nor would adopt one in later life? He made his own manners and his own methods, in life as in art, with the result that in both he was always a rough diamond. He never received anything of importance by teaching or training. Culture of mind and hand, emotional feeling or romance, were practically unknown to him. He was as far removed from romanticism as classicism, and cared nothing about any of the isms of art. We keep flinging back to an early conclusion that he was a wonderful reporter rather than an interpreter, a reporter who saw unusual things in the first place and reported them with unusual characterization in the second place. The result was about the largest nature truths of our day. Truth was his avowed aim--the plain unvarnished truth. He never intentionally departed from it.

Homer is an excellent illustration of what a man cannot do entirely by himself. With his initial force and his keen vision he could make a very powerful report. Had he been educated, taught restraint and method, given a sense of style, schooled in decorative value, he might have risen to the great gods of art. But perhaps not. Even pedagogues, in their late years, begin to doubt the worth of training. It might have ruined Winslow Homer. Yet, nevertheless, it is the thing that his admirers always feel the lack of in his pictures. He has no comeliness of style, no charm of statement, no grace of presentation. To the last he is a barbarian for all that we may feel beneath his brush

“the surge and thunder of the ‘Odyssey.’”

Unfortunately, much of Homer’s barbarism of the brush lives after him while his splendid vision and stubborn character are in danger of being interred with his bones. He himself has become a tradition, a master to be imitated, for though he founded no school and had no pupils, a great many young painters in America have been influenced by his pictures. The majority of these young men have concluded that Homer’s strength lay in the rawness and savagery of his method; they have not gripped the fact that his compelling force was a matter of mind rather than of hand. An imitator can always be counted upon to clutch at a mannerism and neglect a mentality. So it is that many a young art student of to-day, with just enough imagination to conjure up an apple-blossom landscape is painting with the crude color and gritty brush of Homer, thinking thereby to get something “strong.”

What a dreadful mistake! A surly surface of heaped-up paint _minus_ the drawing that is Homer! And the juvenile error of supposing that the knowledge of a lifetime can be picked up and handed out by a glib imitator in the few hours of a summer afternoon! The attempt presupposes art to be merely a conjurer’s trick--a supposition that history does not sustain.

Homer cannot be counted fortunate in his followers. Accepting a surface appearance of strength as the all-in-all of art, they have abandoned grace of form with charm of color--flung the decorative to the winds. We are now asked to admire this or that because it is “real” or “just as I saw it,” or “absolutely true”--as though such apologies in themselves were sufficient reasons for fine art. But Homer long before he died withdrew to Prout’s Neck and abandoned his fellows of the brush. He no doubt thought them quite hopeless. Perhaps there was reason behind his thinking.

Of course he cannot be held responsible for their paint pretenses. His rank as a painter will be made up from his own works. By them he will be judged and they will surely stand critical estimate. For nothing more virile, more positive, more wholesome has ever been turned out in American art. He had something to say worth listening to. And he said it about our things and in our way. No one will question for an instant the Americanism of his art. The very rudeness of it proclaims its place of origin. Reflecting a civilization as yet quite new to art, a people as yet very close to the soil, what truer tale has been told! The fortitude of the pioneer, with the tang of the unbroken forest and the unbeaten sea are in it.

Homer was not the Leonardo but the Mantegna of American art. He came too early for perfect expression, but, like many of the rude forefathers, he had the fine virtue of sincerity. You cannot help but admire his frankness, his honesty, even his brutality. There is no pretense about him; he makes no apology, offers no preface or explanation. He presents a point of view, and in the very brusqueness of his presentation seems to say: “Take it or let it alone.” He must have known his expression was incomplete. Did he realize that art was too long and life too short to round the whole circle? The majority of painters move over only a small segment of the span. At sixty, Homer had no more than found his theme. It would have taken another lifetime to have given him style and method. And even then, grace of accomplishment might have weakened force of conception. He had his errors, but perhaps they emphasized his fundamental truths. So perhaps we should be thankful that he was just what he was--a great American painter who was sufficient unto himself in both thought and expression.

VI

JOHN LA FARGE

La Farge is an exceptional man in American painting--the exception that will perhaps prove the value of tradition and education in the craft. More than any other in our history he was born to art. He did not live through a barefoot stage on a farm and then by chance come to a speaking acquaintance with painting at twenty or thereabouts; he could not boast of a struggle against adverse circumstances in an uncongenial environment. On the contrary, he was rather luxuriously raised in a city, and as a child found art in the family circle and a part of the family life. He had begun to see, hear, and think about it at six years of age. At thirty, when he definitely decided to accept painting as a vocation, he knew the tale quite well, was highly endowed intellectually, and had the insight and the imagination to see things in significant aspects. What wonder that he made an impression and left a body of work that voiced authority! He himself became a master, caught up the torch and carried on the light, spreading it and diffusing it in this new world. He was an inheritor and transmitter of art as well as a creator of it.

By that I do not mean that La Farge was raised in a studio and trained in hand and eye like a Florentine apprentice, but rather that his family, with its collateral branches, was made up of highly educated dilettanti, and art as a theme was ever up with them for discussion and appreciation. He grasped it historically and æsthetically long before he took it up professionally. The practical processes were taught him, to some extent, even as a child; but the philosophy came first and remained with him to the last. It was the French philosophy of taste--the best of the time--and La Farge himself was French save for the accident of his birth here in New York. It was the tradition of Delacroix that he finally accepted and transplanted here in American soil, adding to it, of course, his own profound thought and fine feeling. “He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention,” according to his long-time friend Henry Adams.

The story of his birth and education reads somewhat romantically to-day, though it was only yesterday that he was here. His father as a young man was an officer in the French navy and had been sent to Santo Domingo, during an uprising there, to seize Toussaint the revolutionist. The enterprise went against him, but he escaped the general massacre that followed and eventually found himself a refugee in the United States. He did not return to France, but instead went into sugar-growing in Louisiana, acquired property in New York, and married there a daughter of M. Binsse de St. Victor, a Santo Domingo sugar-planter, who, like himself, had been driven from the island by the uprising under Toussaint. These French refugees were La Farge’s parents and he, himself, was born in Beach Street, near St. John’s Church, in 1835. The house was in what has latterly been called old New York and La Farge never entirely got out of that quarter. During his life he did not live above Tenth Street.

His parents were very cultivated people and as a boy La Farge’s education was precisely guided. His father was a rather severe type and instilled rugged principles. He was a good teacher, and the pupil was brought up to do exact thinking. In his reading he was not permitted to roam at large. He tells us in his letters and communications to Mr. Cortissoz, whose admirable account I am paraphrasing,[8] that as a child he read French and English, read St. Pierre, Rousseau, Bossuet, Homer, De Foe, Voltaire--certainly an odd lot of authors for childish consumption. The house was full of books--Molière, Racine, Corneille, Cervantes, Byron--some of them illustrated with handsome Turneresque engravings, which no doubt had quite as much influence on the boy as the printed texts. The outlook of his parents was large and La Farge grew up in an atmosphere of liberal ideas.

[8] _John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study_, by Royal Cortissoz, Boston, 1911.

As for the house, he speaks of it as being “really very elegant” and regarding the pictures on the walls, he says:

“The influences which I felt as a little boy were those of the paintings and the works of art that surrounded me at home.” There were examples in the house of Vernet, Le Moyne, Salvator Rosa, Sebastiano del Piombo, many Dutch pictures, particularly “a beautiful Salomon Rysdael.” “It so happened that my very first teachings were those of the eighteenth century and my training has covered almost a century and a half.”

At six he had wished to draw and paint, and was handed over to his maternal grandfather to be taught. The grandfather had been ruined by his Santo Domingo losses, and in his age had no other resource than to fall back upon the polite learning he had acquired in his youth. He took up miniature painting and gave drawing lessons because, as La Farge explained it, “it was in the family.”

“On a small scale he was an exquisite painter. He was also a good teacher and started me at six years old in the traditions of the eighteenth century.... The teaching was as mechanical as it could be and was rightly based upon the notion that a boy ought to be taught so as to know his trade. There was not the slightest alleviation and no suggestion of this being ‘art.’”

He was taught to sharpen crayons, to fasten paper, to draw parallel lines, and produce a tint. Gradually he came to copy such things as engravings. The work became more interesting, and at eight he could do something that had resemblance to an original. Later he copied everything that came to hand and was free to do as he pleased.

In the meantime his general education was not neglected. His grandmother Binsse de St. Victor had opened a school for young ladies which was very successful. La Farge as a boy took lessons under her, and in his reminiscences recalls the severity of his drilling in eighteenth-century French. He got English from an English governess, and some German from an Alsatian nurse. Then came books and school and the dreariness of lessons on dry themes. He was sent to Columbia Grammar School, passed into Columbia College, changed over to Fordham, and finally, in 1853, graduated at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland.

He recalls that during his school-days there was much reading of history, literature, and archæology. In English his professor led him to read Newman and Ruskin--the two great masters of style, though the one was classic and the other romantic. In French there was De Musset, Balzac, Heine. He was familiar with Greek and Latin--he could not have graduated from a Catholic college without knowing Latin--and had early gone over the classical writers in the original languages. As for art, he studied engravings of Dürer and lithographs of the old masters. “An English water-color painter had been found who gave me thoroughly English lessons.” After college days he got lessons from a French artist. In later life, looking at his drawings made in the early fifties, he thought them “respectable.” “They were largely based on line and construction, which of course gives a basis of seriousness.”

After graduation he entered a lawyer’s office and began studying law, though he still held his interest in art. Some pictures of the men of 1830 were beginning to come into the country and he recalls buying for a few dollars a Diaz, a Troyon, and a Bargue, and his delight in them. He met artists like Inness, talked art and thought much about it, but he was not yet prepared to embrace it for better or worse. In 1856, when he was twenty-one, he went to Europe, not minded even then to study art professionally, but merely wishing travel for travel’s sake and to be for a time a looker-on.

He went directly to Paris and joined his cousin, Paul Binsse (or Bins), Comte de St. Victor, who was just then holding prominent place in literary and journalistic Paris. The cousin was writing in a brilliant style dramatic, literary, and art criticism for _Le Pays_, _La Presse_, and _La Liberté_, and publishing books such as _Hommes et Dieux_, _Barbares et Bandits_, _Les Dieux et les_ _Demi-Dieux de la peinture_. He was in association with the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Flaubert--all the great gods of little Paris. The father, Jacques Benjamin Maximilien Binsse, Comte de St. Victor, had had a literary and artistic vogue before the son. He had been the editor of _La France_ and the _Journal des Débats_, had written for the stage and the opera, and was the author of numerous books of poetry, archæology, and history. He was still alive and flourishing when La Farge reached Paris, and his house was open to the young man from America. It was the house of a collector of paintings; the most famous artists and literary men met there; there was much comment and criticism in the air--much roaring of the lions. La Farge was in the midst of it. As he expressed it: “Art and literature were there at my hand, in rather an ancient form, but with the charm of the past, the eighteenth century, and the wonderful beginning of the nineteenth.”

The great uncle was in sympathy with the classic and the academic, stood up for David and Guérin, and looked askance at everything new; but the cousin, Paul de St. Victor, was the champion of the younger men. La Farge was between two fires in the home and listened to both sides when he went abroad. He met Gérôme, then a young man, frequented the house of Chasseriau, heard much of the controversy between Ingres and Delacroix. He never met Delacroix, but was profoundly impressed by his works. He was also much impressed at this early time by the glass in the Paris churches, and during a trip to Brussels met Henry Le Strange, who had decorated Ely Cathedral, and through him became interested in methods of mural painting.

The father in America thought that his son was wasting his time and wrote him urging that he take up art seriously. The result was that La Farge went to Couture’s studio and had a talk with the master. He did not even then think of art as a profession, and wanted from Couture not so much technical education as general education in art. He spent only two weeks in the studio and then set about copying the drawings of the old masters in the Louvre. Presently he went to Munich and afterward to Dresden, copying in each place more of the drawings of the old masters. He thought this a logical and very serious way of learning art. And so it was. In copying the drawings he got at the understructure whereas in the paintings he got only the surface. La Farge from first to last was always seeking the logical, philosophical, and scientific bases of things. And meanwhile thereby

“I kept in touch with that greatest of all characters of art, style--not the style of the academy or any one man, but the style of all the schools, the manner of looking at art which is common to all important personalities, however fluctuating its form may be.”

In Copenhagen he made a copy of a Rembrandt.

“I was enabled to learn a great deal of the methods of Rembrandt and to connect them with my studies.... Rubens I followed in Belgium, trying to see every painting of his throughout the whole kingdom and as many of his pupils’ as I could gather in.”

He had an admiration for the severe training of Rubens and for his later prodigal expenditure of energy and paint on canvas. In the autumn of 1857-1858 he was studying Titian, Velasquez, and many others of the famous masters at the Manchester Exhibition in England. There also he saw and studied the Preraphaelite painters and became acquainted with several of them.

“They made a very great and important impression upon me, which later influenced me in my first work when I began to paint.”

When La Farge returned to New York (his father’s illness had hastened his return) nothing as to art had been decided upon and no method of painting had been definitely learned. He had had a unique and very wonderful experience for a young man, had gathered up much information, and perhaps unconsciously had developed an inquiring attitude of mind. This latter became his habitual attitude; he was always contemplative, meditative, disposed to question. Perhaps that is the reason why he still hesitated about embracing art as a profession. At any rate, he went back to the study of law, though not forsaking his interest in painting and architecture. The following year he took a room in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he was accustomed to go to make little drawings and paint “in an amateurish way.” He recognized that he needed technical training and once more thought of returning to Europe to get it.

In 1859 he went to Newport to study painting under William M. Hunt, whose methods he did not altogether like, though he was fond of the man. Hunt was then devoted to Jean François Millet, and, through Hunt, La Farge came to know that painter’s work. He copied two or three of Millet’s pictures but could not accept him wholly any more than he could Hunt. The truth was that even then La Farge was an original and would follow no one. He could not abide recipes for doing or making things, though eventually he invented a recipe of his own and followed that.

At Newport he did some landscapes looking through a window to show the difference in light between the inside and the outside. It was for educative purposes, not for picture-making. In the same way he painted flowers in a vase at haphazard, or did the corner of a table, with no idea of composition but merely to get acquainted with all phases of light, texture, and surface. The next year he was back in New York, painting was temporarily abandoned, and presently he departed for Louisiana. He could not, however, keep away from painting wherever he went, and he soon returned to New York to start a picture of St. Paul Preaching for the Church of the Paulists. With John Bancroft he next took up the question of light and color, then being investigated by scientific men. That, he declares, had an important influence on his later work. But probably the event that definitely decided him for an art career was his marriage in 1860 to Miss Margaret Brown Perry, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin.

I have helped myself largely to Mr. Cortissoz’s book (for which I am sure he will not quarrel with me) regarding these educational happenings of La Farge’s early days, because they point to an unusual acquaintance with philosophic, literary, and artistic traditions. La Farge was saturated with them at twenty-two. His education was extraordinary when compared with his American contemporaries--Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer. He had found himself before he was thirty and knew what he wanted to say and do, whereas Homer at sixty was still uncertain and groping. Art had come to La Farge almost as a child learns to talk, that is, unconsciously, without great effort. The formulas had been largely thought out for him and he had merely to accept them. With Inness, Wyant, and Martin it was necessary to make their own formulas, work out their own philosophy, establish their own premises. And that, too, after they had come to man’s estate. La Farge had a great advantage over them. He was not only born to art but had it thrust upon him. With his fine natural endowments of mind and eye it is not, perhaps, remarkable that he afterward was able to achieve art in a large way and in more than one department.

But he did not rest content with his early experiences. He took up new problems and remained a student to his latest day. His mental curiosity was remarkable. He was always trying to get at the cause or sequence of things. I remember very well arguing at him one day, with undue vehemence perhaps, about some question of the hour, and hearing his quiet answer that it made no difference which of us was right, but that we should go along together and try to get at the truth. That was his Gallic cast of mind. He had no wish or care to put the other fellow in the wrong, and as for disputatious argument, it was not intellectually good form. In this respect Ruskin had amused and vexed him during his early years. The great critic was not only wrong in matter but in the method of presenting it. Fromentin, on the contrary, pleased him much. The French critic’s mind was of the same order as his own.

La Farge had evidently heard of Japanese art in Paris, for in 1863 he began collecting Japanese prints, sending directly to Japan for them. He records that he imported at that time many for himself and his friend Bancroft. He was interested not only in their linear patterns but in their color relations, particularly as shown in landscape. He was painting landscapes at this time and working out-of-doors.

“My programme was to paint from nature a portrait and yet to make distinctly a work of art which should remain as a type of the sort of subject I undertook.”

Almost the whole of his theory of art lies in that sentence. It will apply to his painting of water-lilies as well as to his figures or landscapes. He was after a type of the species--something typical and universal rather than something odd or singular. Perhaps the most notable result of his theory and practice at this time was the landscape called “Paradise Valley,” painted between 1866 and 1868.