A. Hearn; and a “Winter Evening” and “Early Spring,” the property of Mr. N. E. Montross.
These are masterpieces,—and the list is incomplete,—pictures that you may study from the strictest standpoint of technical excellence, and that exert an influence upon the imagination which one may believe will be felt by those who come after us as fully as by ourselves.
In considering American landscapes, there is more than a little tendency to dwell upon the names of the painters who are dead, regardless of the fact that the traditions which they established are being maintained. Among those who are maintaining them, Tryon is conspicuous, and in a way that is, perhaps, more distinctive than theirs. He represents much more closely the kind of contribution that the American temperament may be expected to make to the progress of painting. For unless painting can continue to reflect the evolution of human progress, it is, after all, only a “dead language.” But it is landscapes such as Tryon’s that prove its vitality. They represent the combination of qualities that differentiate American civilization in its worthiest form from that of other countries and of past times. They combine a largeness of outlook with alert sensibility to impressions; being, at once, big in character and minutely subtle.
XII
HORATIO WALKER
UPON his first appearance last year as a contributor to the exhibition of the British Institute of Water Colours, Horatio Walker’s picture, “The Potato Pickers,” was prominently hung, and he himself was elected a member. Considering the fine record of the Institute and its high rank among water colour societies, such instant recognition of a newcomer was very notable.
But it is just the way in which an artist of Walker’s calibre is likely to make his impression—at once and authoritatively; for he is a painter of unusual personal force, and of a persuasiveness quite as remarkable, qualities not always found in combination, but, when united, irresistible. And these artistic qualities are the counterparts of similar elements in his character as a man. His is a forceful personality of moral as well as mental force. How much this means! There is a kind of forceful person who slaps you on the back in the street, and you probably consider him a nuisance; and there is a kind of painter who would violently arrest your attention by the bravery of his brush strokes or some surprising crash of colour scheme or chiaroscuro.
In such forcefulness there is a certain effrontery that one resents at once; or which, if it arouse a little momentary curiosity or even interest, will in the long run be followed by intolerable weariness. For it is almost entirely a mere display of manual gymnastics, an exploitation of self. There may be a little mind behind it, but it will be the quality of mind that is simply of the active kind, enamoured of its own activity. It is not regulated by the moral sense, responsible to self-control, contributory to some serious and absorbing purpose, involving a realization of the intense meaningfulness of nature and life. This is the foundation quality of what is big in life and art: a noble seriousness that penetrates the facts, and lifts them upon the elevation of its own spirit to the dignity of what is grandest and most abiding in the universal scheme.
Painters who possess this faculty are apt to concentrate their sympathy and force upon some particular phase of life, and Walker has found the pivot point for his in the island of Orleans, in the St. Lawrence, some twenty miles northeast of Quebec. Here the descendants of the early French settlers still retain the simple faith and habits and fine ingenuousness of the peasants of northern France; a sturdy race, close to the soil, and drawing dignity as well as nourishment therefrom, perpetuating their origin even in their belongings: the domestic utensils, the farm implements, in the racial characteristics of their clever little horses and oxen, and in the very fashioning of their harness. Nor was the singling out of this Acadia merely the happy discovery of a painter in search of the picturesque. It was a harking back to the associations of his boyhood; for, though Walker’s later youth was spent in Rochester, N.Y., he is a Canadian by birth, the son of an English army officer.