By Alexander H. Wyant.
to the work of Wyant that we know best, let us not lose sight of the force of will-power that was involved in the making of it. “Yes, he had been in hell!” exclaims Carlyle of Dante; and while suffering may not be the only road to highest effort, it is one of them, and the man who passes along it like a man, even if he cannot tread it, but must be carried, as in Wyant’s case, is very apt to produce something more than ordinarily appealing to the hearts of other men. While Wyant recovered the use of his body, though obliged ever after to paint with his left hand, he was never really free from some bodily discomfort; and I wonder whether this may not have had some influence upon his notable preference for depicting nature at the hush and restfulness of twilight. To one whose days were, more or less, days of weariness, constantly sensible of the afflictions of the body, with what a benediction the evening would come, full of spiritual refreshment! Out of the cool cisterns of the night his spirit would drink repose.
For many years he made his summer home in the Adirondacks; then, fearing that he was getting too much into a groove in his way of seeing nature, he transferred his study to the Catskills. The move is characteristic of his alert sensitiveness to nature’s impressions. His temperament was like an Æolian harp, delicately attuned to nature’s breath, responsive to its faintest sigh; but he dreaded lest the melody might become too uniform, too much a merely passive expression. There was a similar mingling of purpose and of surrender in his relations with his fellows. To a few friends, among them always Inness, he gave a welcome, and no little of his time and means in constant acts of kindness to those who needed help; but from social or official functions he kept, as far as possible, clear. He had so much that in his heart he longed to do, had begun his life’s work comparatively so late, and knew the years left to do it in were few. It was only by unremitting application that he could realize his ideal.
This concentration of endeavour affected his ideal, limiting the range of moods of nature that he strove to represent. Such versatility as Inness’s and that painter’s alacrity of impression to constantly differing phases of nature were impossible to his temperament and circumstances. Drawn by both to isolate himself, he heard in the silence of his own heart the still small voice of nature, listened for it always, and strove to woo it. The echo of it is felt, I think, in all his landscapes. We may recall some of his large woodland pictures, in which sturdy trees are gripping the rocks with their roots. Strength and stability and the evidences of time confront us, just as they would in the forest itself; but like cathedral architecture when music is pulsing through it, they are for the moment secondary to the spiritual impression of the voice. Wyant heard it in the movement of the tree-tops, and in the stir of weeds and ferns that nestled in the hollows, and it whispered to him of peace, a quiescence that stirs the soul to gentle activity, gladsome by turns or subdued in the alternate sun and shadow, that inexhaustible mystery of nature’s peace that passeth man’s understanding. We have all felt it and know how far it is from our everyday lives, and we look to word-poets and to poet-painters to create an illusion of it. Surely no American painter has done this more irresistibly than Wyant. Nor is there wanting to the peace of his pictures at times a more solemn suggestion. While so many of his twilights breathe simply the ineffable loveliness of quiet, others are astir with persuasion to spiritual reflection, with the gentle admonition to sadness that itself is purifying, or with deeper, fuller suggestion of the infinite mystery of nature’s recurring sleep that swallows up the littleness of man in its immensity. I remember, too, a little picture of darkened earth and rather turbulent dark sky in which a large boulder alone glistens in the fading light—a rock of illumination and strength in the surrounding uncertainty of gathering night. Brimming over with the suggestion of an elevated melancholy sustained by faith, and painted with an extraordinary earnestness of simple and direct conviction, it seems like a symbol of Wyant’s own art life.
But almost everything that he painted is expressive of some phase, at least, of himself. His work is more than ordinarily personal; perhaps, for the reason already mentioned, that he so deliberately concentrated his motives. And the quality of his poetry was lyrical. I have seen it called idyllic, but that is to miss its higher and deeper qualities. The idyl, Tennyson notwithstanding, is too much identified with the little pastoral poem, that breathes the simple gladsomeness of the meadows; but a more serious strain is interwoven with the gentleness and lovableness of Wyant’s muse. He was passionately fond of music and, before his illness, could play the violin, not learnedly, but with true feeling. And the music of his painting is that of the violin; tenderly vibrating, searching home to one’s heart, by turns lightsome, melancholy, caressing, impetuous, but with a tenderness in all. He did not play on many colours, but reaches a subtlety of tone, often as bewildering as it is soothing. The bewilderment will be aroused as much by his shadowed foregrounds as
From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.
MOONLIGHT AND FROST.