Copyright, 1899, by Curtis & Cameron.
THE SIMPLE GATHERER.
By George Fuller.
was only a part of the beautiful whole. So what seems to us such a tremendous sacrifice, to him may have been assuaged by the satisfaction of having the method in which his life should be lived so clearly set before him; and in this reading of his mind one pays, perhaps, the most honourable tribute to his character.
For fifteen years no picture by him was seen at the exhibitions, and only a few intimate friends knew that he still painted in the intervals of farm labour; at first in one of the rooms of his home, and later in an old carriage house, converted into a studio. His subjects were elaborations of the sketches made in Europe, small landscapes, and portraits of his children, relatives, and friends; often never finished, sometimes destroyed because they did not reach what he desired. Meanwhile his work on the farm was successful; many improvements were carried out, and tobacco culture was introduced with good results, until the fall of prices in 1875. This forced him into bankruptcy and restored him to art. During the ensuing winter he finished twelve canvases, which were exhibited at Boston, meeting with hearty praise and a ready sale. In 1878 appeared at the exhibition of the National Academy “By the Wayside” and “The Turkey Pasture in Kentucky,” followed in succeeding years by “The Romany Girl,” “And She was a Witch,” “The Quadroon,” and “Winifred Dysart.” Being elected a member of the Society of American Artists, he sent to its exhibitions “Evening—Lorette, Canada,” “Priscilla Fauntleroy,” and “Nydia.” Among his other works, exclusive of numerous portraits, especially of ladies and children, were “Psyche,” “The Bird Catcher,” “Girl and Calf,” “Fedalma,” and “Arethusa,” the last named being his single example of the nude. But this rich aftermath of creative work was all too short, lasting only eight years, for George Fuller died after a brief illness in March, 1884. He was buried at Deerfield, and a few weeks later a memorial exhibition was held in Boston comprising 175 paintings: an almost complete résumé of what existed of his art work, produced through forty years. Two years later the house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published a sumptuous memorial volume, containing appreciations by W. D. Howells, Frank D. Millet, Thomas Ball, W. J. Stillman, and J. J. Enneking; a sonnet by Whittier, and engravings by Closson, Kruell, and Cole.
It is useless to speculate upon what might have been if Fuller’s productivity had not been interrupted by those fifteen years upon the farm; but when he emerged from them it was with a style of painting very different from his early one. That had been hard in outline, minute and careful in finish; now it was immersed in atmosphere, tenderly elusive, quietly luminous, a revery of colour, reticently harmonious. It was no longer the work of an observation intent upon the outer world, but the outpouring of his innermost spirit, mellowed, chastened, become contemplative by time. One may believe that the outer world had become more and more identified with the necessities of his life, from which he sought a refuge within himself in his own dreams of spiritual beauty. For the names of his pictures count as little as the subjects. In all his best, notably in the “Winifred Dysart,” “Nydia,” “The Quadroon,” and in “The Romany Girl,” especially that example of the latter owned by J. J. Enneking, he is not concerned with portraying the individual but a type, and in giving to it especially a significance of spirit, investing it in each case with phases of what he had learned to realize as the spiritual quality of rarest, subtlest beauty. How could the essential fragrance and indefinable loveliness of maiden innocence as it appealed to the matured sympathies of his advanced years be expressed otherwise than he had felt it,—veiled in the romance of shadowed light, a thing too rarely delicate for sharp, decisive handling? And yet beneath this tender suggestiveness of method, what strong brush work is discernible! Not clever, truly, or facile and masterful; rather plodding, ay, tentative, as of compressed emotion striving patiently for expression. One has seen a dreamy, tender treatment of the female form, which had no such staunch underlying structure to support it, work which attracts by what we hastily style subtlety, and later find to be but an exquisite veneer to an unstable conception; the artistic affectation of men whose coarseness of character belies the exquisiteness, and, as one studies their pictures longer, leaves us unconvinced of their sincerity. But in the purity of Fuller’s conceptions the man himself and his deliberate, habitual conviction are embodied.
It is a remarkable feature of Fuller’s development that whereas in age he belonged to the earlier generation of American painters, he should have emerged from his fifteen years’ retreat and unaided communing with himself more truly modern in feeling than the younger men who were then returning from Paris. By very different ways he had reached an ideal not dissimilar to Whistler’s; not, to be sure, expressed with the latter’s inimitable, because so personal, finesse, but alike in its devotion to the abstract and in realization of the correspondence between painting and music, and not so unlike in its method of expression, so reticent and mysterious. Fuller also anticipated the motives of the still younger man, such as Le Sidaner and Duhem, to whom the inherent spirituality of the landscape or figure is the absorbing search, which they seek to embody in terms as intangible as possible. Wrapt from all contact with the distractions of the art world, he had with the prescience of sincerity put forth his hand toward the most interesting phase of the latest movements. I mean the search for the significance of things, as of higher and more abiding value than the things themselves.