American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

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 passed 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 competition so fierce that he was unable to make a living; but, determining to be an artist at any cost, he returned to Philadelphia and passed 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 passed principally 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.