A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

Crossing the Brook. J. M. W. Turner.

until a hundred years later, namely at the end of the Eighteenth Century, that an English artist, Constable, revived the naturalistic style of landscape. He was a miller’s son, whose boyhood had been spent amid the simple loveliness of nature. Later he went to London and studied painting; but while he worked in the big city, his heart was in the country, and he suddenly made up his mind to go back to the old scenes, and paint what he knew and loved. He had seen some of the landscapes of the old Dutchmen, and resolved that he would do what they had done. In his own words, he would be a “natural painter.”

It was not long before the example of Constable led some of the younger French artists to study the old Dutch pictures in the Louvre. They were dissatisfied with the methods of painting upheld by the older artists. It seemed to them a waste of time to set up a model in a studio, and then, instead of drawing it as they saw it, to correct it according to some standard of perfection. Nor did they find any interest in putting a number of such figures into artificial groups, in order to build up some grand composition, supposed to represent some classical subject or story of the old time. They were full of interest in the life of their own time, which was the period following the Revolution, when France felt young again and vigorous, and the young artists and poets and fiction-writers were eager to express in their work their joy in the reality of life. When life was so real and so full of promise, why should they look back to the times of the great Italians and occupy themselves with the artificial and make-believe?

Among these younger men was one, Theodore Rousseau. He was not only independent in character and determined to see things with his own eyes and to represent them as he saw them and felt them, but he had a great love of nature. This led him away from the city into the country; where he studied the skies and the trees, and all the objects of the landscape with an ever increasing love and knowledge, until he came to know nature, as few have done, and to feel toward it, as a man feels toward that which he loves best in all the world. His favorite spot in nature was that which surrounds the Palace of Fontainebleau, an ancient residence some thirty miles from Paris, of the kings of France. It is a rolling tract of ground, broken up with rocky glens and thick with forest trees, especially the oak. On the outskirts of this enchanting garden of wildness, in the little village of Barbizon, Rousseau made his home, and around him gathered other artists, fascinated by the beauty of nature. Among them was the Jean François Millet whose picture, The Sower, we have already studied. He for the most part painted the peasants, working in the fields or tending their flocks; but the others, among them Dupré, Corot, and Diaz, painted the landscape, while Troyon introduced cows into his pictures and Jacque, sheep. With all of them the motive was to represent nature as they saw and felt it. They are known as the Fontainebleau-Barbizon group of artists, and their example has had very great influence on modern art. I shall speak of it presently; meanwhile will continue the story of naturalistic landscape.

It is a very interesting fact that while these French artists were going straight to nature for their subjects and inspiration, some American artists, knowing nothing of the Frenchmen, were doing the same thing. A similar love of nature and longing to paint it as they saw and felt it drew them from the city to the beautiful spots that border on the Hudson River. Their leader was Thomas Cole, who made his headquarters among the hills and valleys, the waterfalls and luxuriant vegetation of the romantic Catskills. Other names are those of Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett. Sometimes they painted the grander aspects of the scenery; the broad Hudson sweeping past its headlands, or the lakes with their girdle of mountains; but quite as often the simpler loveliness of smiling meadows and cosy farms. But always with the sincere wish to represent, as faithfully as they could, the natural beauty that they loved.

Gradually, however, as the country expanded Westward and the pioneer spirit of the nation was aroused, American artists began to attempt bigger subjects. Church, Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran attacked the colossal wonders of the Yellowstone and the Rockies. It was no longer the beauty of nature that inspired them, so much as its marvelousness and immensity. As many people believe, they tried to do something that is beyond the power of painting to express. For on the comparatively tiny space of their canvasses they did succeed in expressing some of the appearances of nature’s grandeur, but they hardly made you feel it. I believe myself it is impossible that they should; for an artist can only make you feel in his picture something of what he himself has felt; and he must have thoroughly mastered his own feeling before he can express it. But in the presence of the stupendous works of nature, as far as my experience goes, the feeling masters ourselves. Amid the vastness of the height and depth and breadth and the grandeur and glory and marvel of it all, our spirit is swept out of us. We see the mighty volume of water coming over Niagara and hear the roar of its might; but not as we gaze into the face of a friend and listen to the voice that we have learned to know and love so well. In the one case our feeling is all brought to a center of attraction, in the other it is caught away and carried beyond our comprehension. We can only lose ourselves in wonder.

Well, artists discovered the truth of this. Constable and Rousseau lead the way, and now it is the usual habit of the landscape artists to study nature as one studies the face and form, the expression and action of a friend. One cannot know a number of friends as intimately as one or two. So they have confined their pictures to the few and simple aspects of nature; one little fragment at a time, studied with loving intimacy and represented with the faithfulness of sincere and thorough knowledge. In doing so, they have learned like Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch artists of the Seventeenth Century, that much of the beauty and almost all the expression on the face of nature are due to the effects of natural light. Light has become the special study of the modern painters of the naturalistic landscape. And they have carried it further than the other artists did. Helped by the scientific men, who have examined into the color of light, the modern artist has found out how to represent a great variety of the effects of light: cool or warm light, the light at a particular hour of the day, at a particular season of the year, and in a particular kind of weather. In fact, the light that he represents in his pictures is a faithful rendering of some one of the countless conditions of natural light.