It is a force that compels attention and communicates its own strength to one’s self; and then succeeds an infinite suggestion of restfulness. The heavens may labour, but for man and oxen the appointed task is done, and they enter into their rest. And note that this suggestion is not arrived at by a process of the intellect, but by pure sensation.
Copyright, 1902, by N.E. Montrose, New York.
PLOUGHING IN ACADIA.
By Horatio Walker.
It is the colour scheme that conveys it; that note of blue, so clear and flute-like, against the sullen grayness of the sky; the sobering, complementary note of tawny brown, even the chromatic variations of the gray sky that vibrate like music. For all its menace, the sky is beautiful, and in union with the other notes of the scheme produces a throbbing tenderness of harmony that is irresistibly appealing. It is through his colour schemes that Walker tempers his force with persuasiveness. For he is one of that small band to whom colour is as essential a part of their expression as notes are to the singer. You may see pictures in which the colour is little more than tints to differentiate the objects; others in which it is merely an accurate rendering of the phenomena studied; then others, again, wherein the colour is as inseparable from the conception as fragrance from the rose. It is essential, interpenetrating the structure of the picture, complete and indivisible as the components of a passage in music; structurally, æsthetically, and intellectually essential. While one will find this true feeling for colour in all his work, it is only in the later ones, as one would expect, that it reaches its fullest subtlety of expression.
One of his early pictures is the “Milking,” a large canvas to which was awarded the gold medal, by the vote of exhibitors, at the exhibition of the American Art Association in 1887. The scene is a stable interior, with drab walls, in which a woman in a blue gown is milking a black and white cow, whose calf is standing near. The light enters by a window on the right, and percolates through the dim recesses of the stable. At first one is conscious of the quiet beast standing across the picture, turning its mild head toward us, and of the woman in half shadow, a strong-bodied form in the easy attitude of a habitual occupation; but by degrees the eye penetrates the surrounding gloom, and discovers another figure and other objects in the background. In this gradual evolving of the subject, art has followed nature, and one feels also the evidence of a dignified reserve, as of a man who does not wear his heart upon his sleeve or admit you hurriedly into the privacy of his thought, but assures himself first of your sympathy and then bit by bit unfolds to you his purpose. Another characteristic of this picture is its grandiose passivity, its suggestion of a liberal acquiescence in nature’s plan. We shall find this same large outlook, under various guises, in a great number of Walker’s pictures. Represented most differently, one meets with it in “Morning,” in which a flock of sheep have just emerged from a shed and are beginning to nose about the meadow, which stretches behind them, glistening with dew and bounded by a coppice of delicately branched trees, through which the morning sky, just quickening with light, is visible.
Here again is a suggestion of the routine in nature’s scheme: the awakening of day, the following on of the beasts to play their appointed part. And I think we shall be conscious also, for this is a later picture, penetrated with subtlety of manner and meaning, of an extraordinary suggestion of the remoteness of nature at this silent, undisturbed hour. It is a repetition of an occurrence as old as any time we wot of, and it links this modern scene in our imagination with Virgil’s “Eclogues,” with Homer’s “Odyssey” and the Hebrew Laban’s flocks, forming a link in the endless chain of pastoral recollection, at once the most enduring and most lovable of all our impressions of nature. Nor let us omit to notice the remarkable technical skill involved in the painting of this stretch of meadow, the exquisite gradations of tone in the silvered greens as they recede from the eye, the delicate stir of animation in the grass, and also in the painting of the sky, which is kept so surely behind the trees, while its gathering volume of light steals gently through them. So complete is the unity of the picture, so musical its vibration, that from the whole scene there seems to exhale a delicate sigh that floats through the fragrant soundlessness of awakening nature.
Such technical accomplishment is the outcome of Walker’s penetrating earnestness. Like most of the best landscape painters of every country, he is entirely self-taught. The appeal of nature, to one who is a true lover of it, is so personal that no other man’s method will avail to express what he feels. He is compelled to discover his own way of utterance, conforming in its individuality to the particular quality of his sincerity. With Walker the sincerity is characterized not only by a determination to reach the truth, but by an instinct for the larger kinds of truth, those which need no enforcing, but make their own significance slowly and surely recognized. Nothing is more conspicuous in his best work than the reserve with which everything is stated. He puts forth his strength with calculated orderliness, gradually letting one into the heart of his meaning, continually stimulating and rewarding by further study, and leaving one at last with the consciousness that he has held back part of what he had in mind. He leads one, indeed, to the dim border land where one says good-by to facts and yields only to the imagination. In this respect he is nearer to Israels than to Millet in his attitude toward peasant life. The peasant of Gruchy was so profoundly impressed with the pitifulness of the peasant’s life that his story of labour with all its force is a restricted one. He missed its nobler aspect in relation to the universal scheme, and feels only its heavy fatalism. Israels has a wider sympathy, which can discover beauty in the monotonous routine, the beauty of little observances well and faithfully done, and the quiet intervals of rest and homely joy that intervene. But while Walker is akin to the Dutch artist in the embracing tenderness of his vision, he excels him in breadth and force. Israels continually invites you to look in; Walker, to look in also, but to look around as well.