American Men of Mind Part 6

Remarkable as Harding's story is, it is no more so than that of many of his contemporaries. Francis Alexander, for instance, born in Connecticut in 1800, a farm boy and afterwards a school teacher, never attempted painting until he was over twenty. Then one day, having caught a pickerel, its beauty reminded him of a box of water-colors a boy had left him, and he attempted to paint the fish, with such success that he was filled with amazement and delight. He practiced a while longer, decorating the white-washed walls of a room with rude landscapes filled with cattle, horses, sheep, hogs and chickens. All the neighbors came to see his work and marvelled at it, though none of them cared to have his house similarly decorated; but finally one of them offered Alexander five dollars if he would paint a full-length portrait of a child.

Other orders followed, and finally with sixty dollars in his pocket, he started for New York. Some years later, he sought Gilbert Stuart, at Boston, got some systematic instruction and ended by painting very pa.s.sable portraits.

Some amusing stories are told of the persistency with which he hunted for orders. In 1842, Charles d.i.c.kens visited America for the first time, and while his ship was yet out of sight of land, the pilot clambered on board, and after him Alexander, who begged the great novelist for the privilege of painting his portrait. d.i.c.kens, amused at his enterprise, consented, and Alexander's studio, during the sittings, became the centre of literary Boston. It is a curious commentary upon Alexander's development that, after a trip or two abroad, he professed to find the crudities of his native land unbearable, and spent his last years in Italy.

A third self-made artist was John Neagle, whose portrait of Gilbert Stuart, which heads this chapter, is the best that exists. Neagle was apprenticed, when a boy, to a coach-painter, and soon was spending his spare time practicing a more ambitious branch of the painting profession. As soon as he was through his apprenticeship he set up as a portrait painter, and travelled over the mountains to Lexington, Kentucky, hoping to fare as well as Harding had. But he found the field already pre-empted by two other painters, one of whom, Matthew Jouett, was an artist of considerable skill.

Neagle had a hard time getting back home again, but he finally reached Philadelphia, and spent most of the remainder of his life there.

Practice and study gave him a certain skill; he visited Boston and had the advantage of some instruction from Gilbert Stuart, but his work remained to the end inferior to either Harding's or Alexander's.

Henry Inman had a more varied talent than any of these men, for besides portraits he painted genre scenes and landscapes, and excelled in all of them. At the age of fourteen, he had been apprenticed to a painter by the name of John Wesley Jarvis, a picturesque character, better remembered by his anecdotes than by his work; and when his apprenticeship was over he began painting on his own account in New York and afterwards in Philadelphia. For a time his popularity was very great and his income large; but reverses came, ill health followed, and he died in poverty at the age of forty-five.

It is worth noting that, up to this time, practically no landscapes had been produced by American artists. A few of them had tried their hands at landscape work, but soon abandoned it for the more profitable field of portraiture. The first of the American school of landscapists may be fairly said to be Asher Brown Durand. Durand was the eighth of eleven children, and his father, who managed a small farm on the slope of Orange Mountain, in New Jersey, was renowned throughout the neighborhood for his mechanical ingenuity. Much of this ingenuity his son inherited, and his first artistic effort was an attempt to reproduce the woodcuts in his school books by engraving them on little plates which he had beaten out of copper cents. This led to his being apprenticed to an engraver, and after his apprenticeship was over, he devoted three years to engraving the plate of Trumbull's "Signing of the Declaration of Independence." The work was excellently done and established Durand's reputation.

But he was not satisfied with engraving, and soon abandoned it for the more creative work of painting. He tried his hand first at portraiture, in which he had considerable success; but he turned more and more to landscape work as the years went on. He practiced it continuously until his eighty-third year. Then he laid down his brush forever, saying, "My hand will no longer do my bidding," and the remaining seven years of his life were pa.s.sed peacefully on the farm where he was born.

Durand's work is marked throughout by sincerity and skill, if not by genius. His portraits were in a style especially his own, thorough in workmanship, delicately modelled and strongly painted. His landscapes, too, are his own, clearly and definitely finished, and with a bewitching silvery gray tone, which could have come only by painting direct from his subject in the open air, a practice exceptional at the time. His pictures are not "compositions," in the artistic sense of the term--that is, he did not combine detail into a balanced whole; they are rather studies or sketches from nature, with a central point of interest. But the work is done so truly and with such patience and enthusiasm that it deserves the sincerest admiration.

Joined with Durand as the earliest of the landscapists is Thomas Cole.

Cole was born in England and did not come to America until he had reached his nineteenth year, but he afterwards became so good an American that he declared he would give his left hand to have been identified with America by birth instead of adoption. He found employment in Philadelphia as an engraver. Then, after some practice, he got together a kit of painting materials, and started to tramp about the country as a portraitist. He found the woods full of them, and compet.i.tion so fierce that he was unable to make a living; but, determining to be an artist at any cost, he returned to Philadelphia and pa.s.sed a fearful winter there, living on bread and water, half frozen by the cold, with only a cloth table-cover for overcoat and bed, and suffering tortures from inflammatory rheumatism. A second trying winter followed, but in the spring of 1825 he removed to New York, and his privations were at an end.

For in those years of suffering he had developed a delicate art as a landscapist, and he found a ready sale for his pictures, at first at low prices, it is true; but his fame spread rapidly, and he was able, in 1829, to go abroad and spend three years in Italy and England. He lived only to the age of forty-seven, his last years being pa.s.sed princ.i.p.ally in his studio in the Catskills, where some of his most famous pictures were painted.

Cole was widely known for many years for the various series of moral and didactic pictures which he was fond of painting. Perhaps the most famous of these was his "Voyage of Life," showing infancy, youth, manhood, and old age floating down the stream of time. The taste of the period approved them, and they were especially popular for schoolrooms, lecture-halls and other places where youth would have a chance to gaze upon and gather edification from them. It has since come to be recognized that the proper way to tell a story is by words and not by pictures, and "The Voyage of Life," and "Course of Empire," and "The Cross and the World" have, for the most part, been relegated to the attic.

Durand and Cole were the founders of the famous Hudson River, or White Mountain school, which loomed so large in American art half a century ago. Its members, now rather regarded in the light of primitives, gloried in the views of the Hudson, especially as seen from the Catskills, and journeyed into the wilds of the Rockies and the Yellowstone in search of sublime subjects--too sublime to be transferred to canvas. They loved nature--loved to copy her minutely and literally, loved to live in her hills and woods. Some of them came afterwards to see that, after all, this was not art, or only one of her lower forms--that to achieve a great result, a picture must express an idea.

Cole had a pupil and disciple, who did some admirable work, in Frederick Edwin Church. Church was born in 1826, and lived with Cole in his house in the Catskills until the latter's death. He then established himself in New York, and proceeded to visit the four corners of the earth in search for grandiose scenes. For he made the mistake of thinking that the greatness of a landscape lay in its subject rather than in its execution; so he painted views of the Andes, and Niagara, and Cotopaxi, and Chimborazo, and the Parthenon, throwing in rainbows and sunsets and mists for good measure. These pictures were welcomed with the wildest enthusiasm--just as Clarke Mills's statue of General Jackson had been, fifteen years before. Strange to say, they were not absurd, as that amazing figure is, but were really fine examples of clever handling and of a true, if untrained, feeling.

Two men attempted to duplicate Church's success, but with very indifferent result. They were Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. The former sought the Rocky Mountains for his subjects; the latter, the Yosemite and the Yellowstone; but neither of them succeeded in transferring to canvas more than a pale and unconvincing presentment of the wonders of those regions.

Durand also had a disciple, more famous than Cole's, in Frederick Kensett, the best known of the so-called Hudson River school. He was a close follower of Durand in believing that nature should be literally rendered, but he missed the truth of the older man by working in his studio from drawings and sketches, instead of in the open air direct from his subject. So he got into the habit of painting all shadows a transparent brown, and of making his rocks and trees brilliant by touching in high-lights where he thought they ought to be instead of where they actually should have been. He surpa.s.sed Durand, however, in his range of subject, for all hours and seasons had their charm for him, while Durand was really at home only in the full light of a summer day.

On this foundation a loftier structure was soon built and the builders were George Inness, Alexander Wyant and Homer D. Martin. Inness was the oldest of the three, having been born in 1825, and was contemporary with some of the most arbitrary and hide-bound of the nature copyists.

But he felt the weakness of the method and himself attained a much fuller and completer art. He seems to have dabbled with paint and brushes from his youth, but had little regular instruction, studying, for the most part, from prints of old pictures, and finally, in 1847, getting a chance to see the original when a friend offered to send him to Europe. He pa.s.sed fifteen months in Rome, and afterwards a year at Paris.

A long period of a.s.similation followed, in which he developed a theory of art and struggled to transfer it to canvas. It was a sound and true theory, and is worth setting down here for its own sake. "The purpose of the painter," Inness held, "is to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene had made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect or to the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion. It must be a single emotion, if the work has unity, as every such work should have, and the true beauty of the work consists in the beauty of the sentiment or emotion which it inspires. Its real greatness consists in the quality and force of this emotion."

To the very last, Inness's work was changing and developing to fit this theory. He steadily gained mastery of tone and breadth of handling, of true harmony, and it is his crowning merit that he does to some extent succeed in "reproducing in other minds the impression which the scene made upon him."

Alexander H. Wyant was a pupil of Inness, journeying from the little Ohio town where he was born to see him and to ask for advice and aid, which Inness freely gave. Wyant's boyhood had been the American artist's usual one--an early fondness for drawing, a little practice, and then setting up as a painter. In 1873 he joined an expedition to Arizona and New Mexico. The hardships which he endured resulted in a stroke of paralysis and he was never again able to use his right hand. With an inspiring patience, he set to work to learn to use his left hand, and grew to be more skillful with it than he had been with his right.

But even at his best, Wyant's appeal is more limited than Inness's. He learned to paint a typical picture, a glimpse of rolling country seen between the trunks of tall and slender birches or maples, and was content to paint variations of it over and over. That he sometimes did it superbly cannot be denied, and he possessed a certain delicate refinement, an ability to throw upon his pictures the silvery shimmer of summer sunshine, in which no other American artist has ever surpa.s.sed him.

The third, and in some respects the most interesting member of the group is Homer D. Martin. Born in Albany in 1838, he turned naturally to painting and began to produce pictures after only two weeks'

instruction. At first, he was a disciple of Kensett, with brown shadows and artificial high-lights, but study of nature soon cured these mannerisms, and he grew steadily in skill and power, until he succeeded in imparting to his pictures the deep, grave and sobering sentiment, which is the keynote of his work. His coast views, with their swirl and almost audible thunder of billow, are considered his crowning achievements.

This culmination of the Hudson River school brings us fairly to our own times and to the work of men still living, for the period just preceding and following the Civil War was marked by no new impulse in American art and by no work which demands attention. But in the early seventies, there were a number of Americans studying at home or in Europe who have since won a wide reputation for inspiring achievement.

Foremost among these is Elihu Vedder, born in New York City in 1836, and following, in his manhood, the manifest bent of his childish years. He went to Paris before he was of age, and from there to Rome, where he spent five years. The five succeeding years were spent in America, and finally, in 1866, he settled in Rome and has since made it his home. He represents a revival of the cla.s.sical quality of Raphael or Michael Angelo, though he belongs to no school, and his work has from the very first possessed a distinct originality. He has held to the old simplicity, which minimized detail and exalted the subject. General recognition came to him in 1884, when he published his ill.u.s.trations to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam--the most sympathetic and beautiful pictorial comment which has ever been given any book of poetry. Since then he has executed much decorative work of a high order, though the mastery in this branch of the art is held by another.

That other is John LaFarge, admittedly the greatest mural painter the world has seen in recent years. His life was a fortunate one. His father, an officer of the French marine, came to this country in 1806, married, and purchased a great plantation in Louisiana, from which he derived a large revenue. His son, born in 1835, grew up in an artistic atmosphere of books and pictures, and was early taught to draw. When, after some study of law, he visited Paris, his father advised him to take up the study of art as an accomplishment, and he entered one of the studios, merely as an amateur, at the same time gaining admittance, through his family connections, to the inner artistic circles of the capital. For some years he studied art, not to become a painter, but because he wished to understand and appreciate great work, and at the end of that time, he returned to New York and entered a lawyer's office.

But he was ill at ease there, and finally definitely decided upon an artistic career, went to Newport and worked under the guidance of William Morris Hunt, painting everything, but turning in the end to decorative work, and afterwards to stained gla.s.s. In these he has had no equal, and his high achievement, as well as the wide appreciation his work has won, is peculiarly grateful to Americans, since LaFarge's career has been characteristically American. He had little actual study in Europe, and yet possesses certain great traditions of the masters to a degree unequalled by any compatriot.

Of his work as a whole, it is difficult to speak adequately. Perhaps its most striking characteristic is the thought that is lavished upon it, so that the artist gives us the very spirit of his subjects. In inspiration, in handling, in drawing, and in color, LaFarge stands alone. No man of his generation has equalled him in the power to lift the spectator out of himself and into an enchanted world by the consummate harmony of strong, pure color. This feeling for color culminated in his stained-gla.s.s work--probably the richest color creations that have ever been fashioned on this earth. In all his varied ma.s.s of production there is nothing that lacks interest and charm.

We have referred to LaFarge's study under William Morris Hunt, and we must pause for a moment to speak of the older artist. His artistic career was in some respects an accident, for, developing a tendency to consumption in his late boyhood, his mother took him to Rome and remained there long enough to enable him to imbibe some of the artistic traditions of the Eternal City and to begin work with H. K. Brown, the sculptor. He found the work so congenial that he persuaded his mother to omit the course at Harvard which had been expected of him, and to permit him to devote his life to art.

For five or six years thereafter, he studied at Rome and Paris, then for three years he was with Millet at Barbizon. Finally, in 1855, he returned to America, settling first at Newport and afterwards at Boston.

He painted many portraits and figure pieces, and was an active social and artistic influence to the day of his death. As an artist, he lacked training, and remained to the end an amateur of great promise, which was never quite fulfilled.

And this brings us to the most eccentric, the most striking, and in some respects the greatest artist of his time--James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Whistler was born at Lowell, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1834. His grandfather, of an English family long settled in Ireland, had been a member of Burgoyne's invading army, but afterwards joined the American service, and, after the close of the Revolution, settled at Lowell. His father was a distinguished engineer, and major in the army, and after his death in 1849, it was natural that young Whistler should turn to the army as a career. He entered West Point in 1851, remained there three years, and was finally dropped for deficiency in chemistry.

There was one study, however, in which he had distinguished himself, and that was drawing; and after his dismissal he went to Paris, where he studied for two or three years. Then he removed to London, where most of the remainder of his life was spent. His work, striking and original, was at first utterly misunderstood by the public. The most famous piece of hostile criticism to which he was subjected was Ruskin's remark, after looking at "The Falling Rocket" in 1877, that here was a fellow with the effrontery to charge a hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. Some further years of abuse followed, and then the pendulum swung the other way, and the eccentric artist became a sort of cult. In the end, he won a wide reputation, and before his death was recognized as one of the leading painters of his time.

And this reputation was deserved, for his work possesses a rare and delicate beauty, individual to it. His portraits of his mother and of Thomas Carlyle are admirable in their simplicity and quiet dignity; and many of his "harmonies," as he liked to call them, are so complete and flawless that they are works of pure delight. Whistler always declared that he had no desire to reproduce external nature, but only beautiful combinations of pattern, and tone; what he meant, probably, was that he sought, not external realities, but the spirit which underlies them.

That, of course, has been the quest of every great painter.

If Whistler was a law unto himself, so, in another sense, is Winslow Homer, who has worked out for himself an individual point of view and method of expression. Born in Boston in 1836, and early developing a taste for drawing, he entered a lithographer's shop at the age of nineteen and two years later set up for himself. During the Civil War he acted as correspondent and artist for _Harper's Weekly_, and, when peace came, began his paintings with a series of army scenes. After that he tried his hand at landscape, and finally found his real vocation as a painter of the sea. From the first, his pictures possessed obvious sincerity. More than that, they convince by their absolute veracity, as a reproduction of the thing seen--seen, be it understood, by the eyes of the artist--and so they have lived and been remembered where more ambitious work would have been forgotten. Again, he chooses his subjects with a fine disregard of what other men have done or decided that it was impossible to do, and painted them in a manner wholly independent and original. No other artist has so conveyed on canvas the weight and buoyancy and enormous force of water; no one else approaches his as an interpreter of the power of the sea.

Lineal successor of Inness is Dwight William Tryon, not that his work resembles the older man's, but because both paint the American landscape with a deep personal feeling and with a superb technique. Tryon has not yet developed into so commanding a figure as Inness, but there is no telling what the future holds for him, for his work seems as full of poetry and emotion as the older man's, with a spirit more delicate and a foundation more firm.

The work of Francis D. Millet has attracted wide attention and is also full of promise and inspiration. Millet has the American versatility--he has been a war-correspondent, an ill.u.s.trator, has written travels, criticism, and even fiction, has acted as an expert on old pictures, raised carnations, and even, in time of need, performed surgical operations on wounded soldiers--all of it, not as an amateur, but as a professional asking no odds of anyone. In addition to which, he has been a painter, and a painter whose work has shown no sign of haste or distraction. The quiet, human side of English life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is what has most appealed to him, the country parlors and white-washed kitchens, peopled with travellers and buxom serving-maids, and these groups are unusually attractive and well executed.

Allied with Millet in taste and viewpoint, and with a much wider popularity, is Edwin A. Abbey. Beginning his career as an ill.u.s.trator, he soon reached the front rank in that profession, especially with his ill.u.s.trations of cla.s.sic English poems, into whose spirit he has entered so completely that he might better be called their interpreter than their ill.u.s.trator. From pen-and-ink work, he progressed naturally to oil, and here, too, he has achieved some notable triumphs--so notable, indeed, that, though American, he was chosen by the English government to paint the official picture of the coronation of King Edward VII. It is a curious coincidence that the official picture of the coronation of Queen Victoria was also painted by an American, C. R. Leslie.

More important than Abbey, and perhaps the greatest American artist alive to-day is John Singer Sargent, whose nationality has occasioned no little controversy. Born in Florence of American parents, receiving his artistic training in Paris, residing since in England, though with much travelling through Europe and only two or three trips to the land of his allegiance, he may still be held an American, if descent counts for anything. His paintings have been shown wherever pictures are to be seen and he has received for them all honors that a painter can receive.

Before the freedom and certainty of Sargent's art criticism stands abashed. His portraits have a wonderful effect of vitality, and a purity and brilliancy of color which have never been surpa.s.sed; but most noteworthy of all, he achieves the supreme triumph of the portrait painter by comprehending and displaying character. He shows the very soul of his sitter, without malice but also without mercy. Only towards children does he show tenderness, and then he paints with a wonderful and varied charm. Not only of people but of places does he give the character--a room takes on personality; silks, velvets, furniture, bric-a-brac are all eloquent. On the whole, his qualities are such that he may rightly be considered the greatest portrait painter since Reynolds and Gainsborough. The portrait of Edwin Booth, at the beginning of the chapter dealing with the stage, is an excellent specimen of his work.

Sargent's portraits have placed him among the masters of all time, but perhaps he is most widely known by his remarkable decorations in the Boston Public Library, which in the original and in photographic reproductions, have given the keenest delight to thousands and thousands of persons. It is impossible to give any detailed description here of these masterpieces of decorative art, so perfect technically that they might almost serve as a canon to decorative painters.

American painting may be said to have reached its culmination in Sargent, yet there are two other painters, who, if they fall below him in sheer genius, possess a charm and originality all their own. One of these is George de Forest Brush, who, somewhat after the fashion of Holbein, looks for a beauty of spirit independent of form or feature. He paints mothers and children not as young G.o.ddesses rollicking with cherubs, but as grave and tender women, who have sacrificed without regret something of their health and youthful freshness to the children they hold in their arms. In such groups there is a note of penetrating peace, a delicate distinction, which give Brush a position by himself.

The other is John W. Alexander, whose work is interesting as introducing a certain new element into art--a concentration of energy on the originality of the first general effect, including nothing that does not interest, and yet giving the effect of completeness. In Alexander's portraits there is nothing to distract the interest from the personality of the sitter, and he usually achieves a delineation of character direct and truthful.

Here this short review of the great personalities of American art must end. There are many other painters alive to-day whose work is full of promise, and who may yet achieve great places in the world's Pantheon.

Indeed, it would almost seem that a renascence of American art is at hand. The country has emerged from the crudities of its first years, and from the mediocre conventionality of its middle period, without having lost the freshness and enthusiasm conducive to high achievement.

Its face is toward the sunrise.

SUMMARY

COPLEY, JOHN SINGLETON. Born at Boston, July 3, 1737; went to Europe, 1771, and spent the remainder of his life there, princ.i.p.ally in London; a.s.sociate of Royal Academy, 1771; full member, 1773; died at London, September 9, 1815.

WEST, BENJAMIN. Born at Springfield, Chester County, Pennsylvania, October 10, 1738; studied in Italy, 1760-63; settled in London, 1763; became court historical painter, 1772; president of the Royal Academy for many years; died at London, March 11, 1820.