From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq.
EARLY SPRING, NEW ENGLAND.
By Dwight W. Tryon.
however, the spirit of strength is lacking. They are the work of men who mean strongly, but are not themselves strong men. So surely does personal character, or lack of it, show in a painter’s work, not the mere robustiousness of personal force, but the settled, earnest, habitual convictions that are the elements of character. And quite as evident to our experience in pictures is the distinction between the real and the false in refinement. Mere subtlety of brush work, while it may create for a while an illusion of refinement, will not satisfy us in the long run.
Many of Tryon’s landscapes reach a pitch of delicate suggestion in the rendering of soft air, caressing atmosphere, and shrouded light that is unsurpassed by any painter in this country; for the impression is much deeper than that of an entrancing skill in the management of the pigments. The spirit of the landscape stole into his heart when a boy, and has abided with him in his manhood; he is so much a child of New England, sweetened by its tenderer influences as well as nurtured on its hardihood, that, sharing its strength and refinement, he gives expression to himself when he reproduces these qualities in his pictures. Hence, in both directions, their complete convincingness. A fact, too, which helps to justify this appreciation is that his pictures show an interest in so many moods of the landscape, and the degree of force or of subtlety with which he renders each is regulated by the demand of the occasion. You cannot divide the past twenty years of his productiveness into special periods of style; any attempt to do so will bring you up against the insurmountable objection of finding that two canvases of very different feeling and manner of painting are dated the same year. Development, necessarily, there has been in style; increased acquisition of facility and the power to render more penetratingly the mood of nature he is studying. But evolution of motive you will scarcely find. That from the first has been realistic; in the sense that the landscape, as it appears to him to be, affords primarily sufficient incentive to his study.
In the presence of nature he makes studies, intent for the time being solely on recording what he sees; later, in his New York studio, the poetic suggestion of these studies will come to him, and he composes a picture. But the process is from realism to poetry, and not contrariwise, as one suspects to be the case in the poetical landscapes of some painters. Tryon’s way is not unlike a man’s regard for a good mother. In the days of his habitual intercourse with her, it is her dignity and sweetness that grow into his life, the changes of expression in her face and voice that win upon his devotion, her beautiful reasonableness that is accepted as quite a natural thing. It is only when the son’s life is drawn apart from the habit of her presence that the sentiment of a mother’s love is realized. So Tryon’s withdrawals to city life allow the poetry of nature to steal in upon his imagination; when he resumes his face-to-face communing with it, the life habit of absorbed regard comes back to him. The result of this is that the sentiment of his pictures grows out of the actual, and represents the soul of a fact. One finds one’s self admiring the extraordinary truth of the visual impression, and then often surprised that material so homely should yield such abundance of poetic suggestion; forgetting, for the moment, that poetry is not an element of nature, but a quality of the painter’s mind, representing the degree of sincerity and elevation of purpose with which he has approached his subject. Tryon’s poetry comes of the associations garnered through a life of affectionate intimacy with the country of his birth. It is as true and spontaneous as filial love.
His technical skill has secured the respect and admiration of his fellow-painters. They assign him that final title of approval, “a painter’s painter;” meaning that only those who know by practical experience the difficulties and trials of technique can properly appreciate his ability and resourcefulness, and certainly not implying, as is sometimes the case when this expression is used, that the admirable qualities in the picture are primarily and solely technical ones.