By Alexander H. Wyant.
by the faintly luminous sky. They defy analysis and are triumphs of impressionism. Impressionism of the true kind, I mean, pregnant with suggestion and divested of aught that would clog its directness; exhibiting, not knowledge, but the fruit of knowledge, and especially its tact of omission. To the careless and commonplace eye his landscapes have “nothing to them”; approached with a little understanding they mean so much, and the measure of their meaning is the technical knowledge involved. If there were any doubt of this, it could be disposed of by an examination of his earlier work, in which he lets one into the secret of his love of form and construction. Admirably sure and full of character is the drawing of the ground and its features, bit by bit receiving its due share of individuality; so also with the trees and their anatomy of trunk and branches, and with the structure of the sky. Everything has been studied, so that later out of the abundance of his technical skill he could be significantly spontaneous. Yet increase of facility did not lessen the self-exacting conscientiousness of his work. Some of his most impressionistic pictures were the result of trying to reach a fuller exactness of expression; when, finding confusion growing, he would seize another canvas and return to the simplicity of his original thought and let it form itself. Few painters are better represented in their extant works. The fumbled canvas, or the one that, however sketchily, did not attain to his intention, never left the studio, and after his death, Mrs. Wyant, with a fine regard for his memory and with honour to herself, destroyed them. So the real Wyants—for I am told there are sham ones on the market—are invariably worthy.
So truly did he retain the spirit of the student that it was not until a little before his death that he allowed himself to feel that he had mastered the grammar of his technique. Then, with the consciousness of his end before him, he would exclaim, “Had I but five years more in which to paint, even one year, I think I could do the thing that I long to.” Brave, modest soul! What he might then have done we shall never know; but what he did do we know to be very good. For another nature poet of our race, of like simplicity and singleness of love for nature, of as choice and elevated a spirit, and as lyrical in expression, we must go back to Wordsworth, who also in his communings with nature found her message—
“Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,
And melancholy fear subdued by faith,
Of blessed consolations in distress,
Of moral strength and intellectual power,
Of joy in widest commonalty spread.”
XI
DWIGHT W. TRYON
IF we wished to introduce a foreigner to what is most distinctively American in our painting, we should show him, I think, the work of some of our marine and landscape painters. He would be least likely in these to detect the influence of Europe. The point of view he would recognize, no doubt, as the one common to all nature students since the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century; but in regard to the technique he could not attribute its character to the influence of this or the other master abroad, for our landscape painters, like most other true students of nature, have found, each for himself, their own necessary and inevitable language of expression. Necessary because it originated in their own peculiar need, and inevitable because it grew out of the particular character of the portion of nature that they studied. And in most cases it is some phase of the American landscape that has engaged the American painter, which accounts in no slight degree for the individuality of his work.
For do we pay enough heed to the essential differences that nature presents in different localities? At the moment I am not thinking of the variations in construction, forms, and configuration, as, for example, between the aspects of mountains and of simple pastoral regions, nor even of the separateness of impress set upon the landscape by man in the character of his buildings or of his farming occupations, but of that more subtle difference produced by varying kinds of atmosphere. The great landscape painters, we may have noticed, all belong to northern countries, who have lived, comparatively speaking, within the same degrees of latitude; and yet the landscapes of Holland, France, Scotland, England, Norway, and America can never be mistaken for one another. Apart from local conditions of man’s handiwork, each varies in the local quality of its atmosphere—its degree of clarity or humidity, of briskness or caressingness.