In a country vast as ours, there must needs be diversity in different parts, so there cannot be any one character of landscape distinctively American; but, in their faithful rendering of the local character, all may be distinguishable from those of other countries. And this expression on the countenance of nature is not unlike that on the face of a man or woman; the painter may suggest it perfunctorily, or he may render it with a completeness of sympathy and understanding, products of alert sensibility and interested acquaintanceship. It is the evidence of these qualities that gives enduring charm to Tryon’s landscapes.
No one who knows his work will need to be told that he is a New Englander. His landscapes show an intimacy of knowledge of that locality, and an affectionate sympathy with its particular phases of expression, that could only result from the painter having grown up in that part, the boy’s associations gradually maturing into the man’s convictions. His home was in Hartford, Conn., where he was born in 1849. He entered upon life as a stationer’s assistant, and pursued the occupation until he had accumulated sufficient means to visit Paris, all the while spending his leisure time in studying from nature and in discovering for himself how to represent his ideas in paint. There is evidence in this of sanity as well as earnestness, of a fine poise of character, qualities later to appear in his landscapes.
Above all, there is the perfectly natural process of a painter’s evolution; I mean, the antecedent love of nature, the clear apprehension of the kind of nature that he aimed to paint, the love of it and the knowledge preceding the final acquisition of technique; meanwhile, the gradual upbuilding of personal character by the discipline of postponing his ideals. So, when he reached Paris, it was not as a raw, enthusiastic student whose subsequent career spun suspended upon a mere cobweb of his fancy. He had married, and took his wife with him, establishing a little home and having clear plans in view, being, in fact, a man. He painted under Harpignies and Daubigny, an excellent combination of influences, mutually complementary: the one so sound and methodical, if a little prosaic; the other so captivating in the perennial boyishness of his mind, so lovable a student of the simple loveliness of rural scenes. What a happy antidote was Daubigny to the excessive earnestness of a typical New England character; how persuasively suggestive must his landscapes have been to one whose heart was implanted in the austerer charms of his New England home. The influence of his two masters served on the one hand to send the roots of his growth farther down and to stiffen the trunk, and on the other to encourage a more abundant leafage and the added fragrance of blossom. From both, also, he must have gained a store of technical principles; but of direct influence in his manner of painting there is no trace. His own special problem was one different from theirs, and he had to find his own way of solving it.
Even in one of his earliest landscapes painted about 1881, after his return from Paris, from studies made abroad, there is a decisively individual note. It is a scene of ploughing, owned by Mr. Montross—a stretch of dark rich soil, with man and horses pushing the furrow toward a clear, cool horizon. There is a larger feeling than Daubigny would have portrayed; a sterner one, if you will, certainly one more bracing in its suggestion of vigorous earth and breezy sky, and more distinctly inspired than Harpignies could have made it, with the sentiment of the soil and sky in their relation to the life of man. Still, the motive of the picture is so far a borrowed one that, although it has the feeling of a New England scene, it has not its local characteristics of atmosphere or of soil colour, lacking the more sensitive quality of the one, and the tenderer hues of the other. While, then, this picture is without the subtle qualities that mark the later ones, it has a clear, strong note of vigorous earnestness, strongly felt and strongly realized. Indeed, it seems entirely characteristic of the strength of purpose and sturdy qualities which are the foundation of Tryon’s equipment, both as a man and a painter. He seems to have grown up with the smell of the soil in his nostrils as Millet did, though without the latter’s saddened associations; to have been nourished with the brisk New England air, and to have gathered muscle over its ploughed and grassy uplands. The keen stimulus of nature went through and through him early and has stayed with him, so that his art partakes of its strength. In his pictures, one finds, I think, a stronger foundation than only that of good drawing and construction; an earnest, wholesome delight in the strength of nature as being something in which he himself shares; which, indeed, has so grown into his mind and life that its expression in his work is but a matter of course. It is a part of his most serious convictions, so that his rendering of it is convincing.
Put into words, the distinction may seem a little fine drawn; but I feel sure that our experience of pictures gives it substance. How often, for example, in the work of the French classicists we may see illustrations of human vigour, on which good drawing and construction have been expended, and yet their suggestion of vigour is only an affectation; a quality aimed at by the painter, but not vitalized by strong, earnest convictions of his own. What a protestation of strength there is in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes, and how little real convincingness! And, coming to the landscapes of our own time, it would be easy to quote examples of strong drawing and construction from which,
From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq.
SPRING BLOSSOMS.
By Dwight W. Tryon.