In this respect he reminds one of Troyon, whose magnificent landscapes and grand cattle are big with nature’s fecundity and strength. There is not a little of these two men in Walker; of Israels’ tenderness and Troyon’s breadth. Even in so stirring a subject as the large “Ploughing in Acadia,” painted about 1887, there is this infusion of tenderness. The three horses straining abreast are full of vigour; they tug with a sustained effort in which the continuity of the movement is finely expressed; the high gear above their saddles, covered with sheepskin, tosses in the air over their shaggy arched necks; the old man at the plough tail is stocky and hale; lusty green weeds have their roots in the strong earth, and the sky is full of bracing weather. Through and through it is a sturdy picture; but note, also, the affectionateness with which the head of the nearest horse is rendered. He is of the Normandy breed, the most willing of servants, the most intelligent of animal companions. His eye is bright, the nostril inflated; he is rejoicing in his strength; and later on, when labour is over, he will nose into his master’s jacket and both will feel like friends to one another. This is the wholesome, natural view of the peasant’s labour, when it is really close to the soil and uncorrupted by a cheap press; man and the animals going about their appointed task until the day is done, and finding companionship with one another and with nature; and it is not without a quiet happiness of its own.
This ploughing scene reminds me of a later one, painted a few years ago, of two oxen coming up the furrow with their massive, leisurely movement, while behind them the light is mounting up in floods of crimson, that overflow upon the broad backs of the beasts and lap the cool, glistening earth. It represents the first moments in nature’s daily awakening to life and in man’s daily routine of labour. Both in the sky and on the earth there is the steady gathering of force; not a burst of energy, but that massing of energy that will not readily expend itself. I have heard it remarked that the oxen look tired already, and the men likewise; but perhaps it is rather a passivity of feeling that is conveyed, that slow, unquestioning resignation, that is at once so pathetic and heroic in the true peasant.
And in another way many of these canvases of Walker’s involve this heroic suggestion. While close studies of pastoral and agricultural life in a portion of this continent to-day, they have a more universal significance and set one’s imagination back in the Old World that we call Homeric; times of spaciousness and simplicity, when we fancy that man’s strength was in closest affinity with nature’s; times of wholesomeness and poise of mind and body, when man lived by nature’s rule, and labour was loving.
This universal suggestion is the product of the force, united with persuasiveness, that one marked at the outset as characteristic of Walker and his work. It comes of the large seriousness with which he thinks and works, of the true perspective through which he views his subject, wherein facts and sentiment take their due place not only in the foreground, but in their relation to a distant horizon. These risings and settings of the sun, that he loves so much, have run their course through ages; not a little of his love for them no doubt is due to their suggestion of infinity in relation to the life of man; and that life, too, he prefers to view as itself a heritage of the ages.
For many of us life is now a complicated affair, with much whirring of human machinery within ourselves and around us; yet it still has elemental facts and emotions. The painter who can express these with their personal, local significance, and show, as well, their relation to the universal, is one whose work will be likely to endure.
XIII
GILBERT STUART
“ANOTHER King arose which knew not Joseph,” and so it goes still. Most American children are familiar with the so-called “Athenæum Portrait of George Washington,” yet probably very few, even of their parents, know the name of the artist, Gilbert Stuart. We have got into the habit of dating the growth of modern American painting from 1875, and with some reasonableness, for that was the period at which students began to arrive home from Munich and Paris in sufficient numbers to make their arrival felt. Yet twenty-five years earlier, about the time that George Inness was starting for Europe, William M. Hunt had returned, bringing with him pictures of the Barbizon painters and introducing their principles of nature study. We are apt to dismiss the painting of the previous half-century as representing only the draggled ends of the English influence rudely severed by the Revolution; forgetting that the period is linked on to the Augustan age of English painting, to Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the somewhat later Constable. For Gilbert Stuart was a contemporary of all three, and to some extent a rival of Reynolds, even in London, and was born also within the lifetime of the first of the great Englishmen, William Hogarth. Stuart, moreover, was not a follower of others, but a distinct and forceful individuality that played a leading rôle in the stirring drama of his times. He was, with little doubt, the first of American masters of painting.
There is a romance in every life, however gray and level, but in Stuart’s the romance foamed upon the surface. Perhaps he had inherited it; for his father, a native of Perth, in Scotland, reached this country shortly after the battle of Culloden Moor, that shattered the prospects of the Pretender; and there is more than a suspicion that his espousal of a lost cause had made it well to put the ocean between himself and his past. However that may be, he built himself a little mill with a gambrel roof, at the head of the Petaquamscott Pond, in Narragansett county, R.I., and settled down to the quiet occupation of grinding snuff. He had married, and in 1755, after several other children, came a boy, who received the name of his father, and was duly entered in the baptismal registry as “son of the snuff grinder.” But in time the mill proved unprofitable, and the family migrated to Newport, where the mother superintended the boy’s education, the Rev. Mr. Bissert instructing him in Latin. He seems to have been quick at learning but averse to study, being of a frolicsome disposition and addicted also to drawing. None remains of Stuart’s early sketches, but one day some of them were seen by Dr. William Hunter, as he was paying a professional visit to the family. The kind and discriminating physician invited the boy to call upon him, and when he came presented to him a box of paints and brushes,—a day of days in the child’s life, to be marked with red, and to be looked back upon in the after years with thanksgiving.