American Masters of Painting / Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters

by Charles H. Caffin

With the artist’s personal development has come maturity of craftsmanship. His latest series of “Mother and Child” are marked by fluency of composition both in the lines and masses and in the colour schemes. But with the ripening of his powers has scarcely followed increase of individuality. He has freed himself from the hard, evenly lighted, rather tight character of Gérôme’s manner only to yield himself to the fascination of the old Italian style. It is a little surprising that one whose imagination is so individual should have failed to discover a really personal language of expression. It would seem as if the lack of facility was beyond his power to remedy, and that, feeling the need of broadening his method, and conscious that breadth with him would mean chiefly a larger kind of precision, he had found in the example of some of the Italian masters just that union of qualities. Then, too, if he were searching for precedents it is to the dignity and quietude of the Florentines that such a temperament as his would turn. And in these later pictures one is conscious of these qualities. They have an air of noble sweetness, serenity, and high and earnest purpose, creating, wherever they appear, an atmosphere of their own, pure and elevating as that of the upper air. Yet, as creative work, I think many will rank them lower than the promise of his early days. Their motive is a borrowed one—borrowed with their technique. True, it is one of beautiful human significance, but its representation, especially to one who is a husband and a father, makes a comparatively small demand upon the imaginative faculties. So that, if we feel the evidence of these faculties in painting to be the rare and superlative thing, the artist’s persistence upon a somewhat lower plane of endeavour must seem regretful. It is rather a merging of the artistic prepossession in the human.

And I wonder whether this may not be the explanation. In early manhood, while the impulse was from within, he sought the objective for it in the world outside, characteristically choosing those scenes which would least interfere with the seclusion of his own mind. In later years he has found the seclusion in his own home, yielding to the natural tendency, as the years grow upon one, to feel the world to be less and less, and those closest to one more and more. And, it must be remembered, the conditions of the world were never quite to his liking, while his home is what he has made it and would have it. Yet this, after all, represents the evolution of a man rather than of the artist—a yielding to circumstances, inclinations, conveniences, rather than a following of one’s star.

I write these words with hesitation, as it may be my own fault that I do not detect in these later works as much evidence of elevated imagination as in the Indian studies. If so, I would plead in extenuation my enthusiasm for those earlier pictures.

X
ALEXANDER H. WYANT

THERE is a species of ivy in England—I do not know if it exists in this country—that grows over old stone walls and towers. It is treelike in character and size. Probably it was never planted deliberately against the masonry, but reached its habitat by one of those romances of nature’s accidents. Finding the support that its young life needed, it clung and mounted; gradually, however, gaining independent strength until in the maturity of its growth it has its own boughs, so hardy that a man may climb by them, and puts forth bunchy masses of leaves and berries that disguise the original support in a luxuriance of independent growth.

Such is often the story of an artist’s development, and is that of Wyant’s. In the small town of Defiance, in Ohio, where he lived, there was little to suggest to the boy what pictures meant, and yet he had the picture-making faculty in himself: the observant eye and desire to translate into line the forms of things. He drew incessantly: the forms of stones, of banks, and tree roots, their stems and branches, and made studies of the leaves, separately and minutely, as well as in masses. I like to think of him as a child lying full length before the kitchen fire with a bit of burnt wood taken from it, drawing on the floor; and fancy that in that soft, suggestive medium of charcoal, and on the rough surface of his improvised panel, he may have got his first dim consciousness of the meaning of synthesis in landscape; the securing of character and tone, and the fascination of working in masses rather than in outline.

When he was old enough to be set to a trade, he was apprenticed to a harness maker, working in his leisure hours at sign painting. But all roads lead to Rome, and a youth might derive much skill in form, as well as breadth of manner, in this humble department of the fine arts. Somewhere about the fifties he found himself in Cincinnati, even then an oasis in the desert of western indifference to, or ignorance of, art. It was here, in a private collection, that he first discovered what painted pictures were like, and, with a rare instinct for one so young, it was Inness’s work that captured his imagination. A youth, passionate and eager as Wyant was, must have his god or goddess; a being infinitely above him, yet, perhaps, of infinite condescension, who will listen to his devotion. Some of us may have offered our heart and future to ladies nearly old enough to be our mothers; Wyant’s divinity was of the other sex, an Apollo at whose oracle he would inquire. He found the means to come to New York and lay his sketches before the master, and never forgot the kindly criticism which bid him be of good courage and persevere.

He was now about twenty years old, and nearly ten more years were to elapse before his own independent growth was to establish itself. Meanwhile its direction had been assured by the influence of Inness; its manner of growth was to be partly affected by the Norwegian painter, Hans Gude, who had graduated from Düsseldorf and was at this time working in Carlsruhe. He had been the pupil of Achenbach, who, as Muther says, had “taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour.” He had felt the influence, also, of Schirmer, whose fondness for the so-called Italian landscape had guided him to the “acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his pictures.” Such was Gude, to whom Wyant went for instruction. He spoke in after years of the kindness with which he had been received as almost one of the household by the painter and his good frau, and one may imagine that the student took much profit from the master’s emphasizing of form and construction, and also from the reposeful dignity, academic though it was, of his compositions. But when the older man passed from the teaching of principles to that of methods, and urged his pupil to imitate his particular manner of presenting the truths, Wyant’s independence rebelled. He had learned what could properly be taught, and recognizing that for the rest he must depend upon himself, returned to New York.