American Masters of Painting / Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters

by Charles H. Caffin

But in alluding to the topographical character of Cole’s landscapes, I am very far from wishing to belittle the essential greatness of that painter. While his means of expression were comparatively inadequate, while he may even have mistaken the true province of landscape painting, his conception of nature was unquestionably an exalted one, and likely to be acceptable to a spirit so eagerly aspiring as Inness’s. Moreover—and this is often overlooked—it was the natural result of the time and environment. To a young people, with its growing consciousness of free and independent nationality, surrounded by the vastness of nature as yet scarcely altered by man, what could have been more attractive than this sense of nature’s grandeur? In their attitude toward the nature around them they may have been nearer to the truth than we give them credit for. We must not forget that our estimate of the functions of landscape painting comes to us from Holland, a country of limited horizons, through France, whose soil is highly cultivated and studded with the charming intimacy of rural life. Finding this paysage intime true to nature and intrinsically lovely, while the so-called classic landscape was grandiloquently superficial, we have assumed that the former is the true and only satisfactory representative of pictorial landscape. Perhaps too rashly; for even as painting has been able to compass the solemnities of religion, so a painter may arise who will join to technical ability sufficient force of mind to compass the solemnities of nature. Meanwhile, we should at least remember that Cole drew his inspiration from American scenery, which the modern painter is studying through spectacles borrowed from France and Holland.

Where Inness showed himself superior to the American painters of his early life was in the comprehensive control which he exercised over his view of nature; a control assisted by his close study of nature’s forms, and of their relative significances. He was, in fact, the father of the naturalistic movement in American landscape; for it seems clear that he fully realized the trend of his studies before he had found them indorsed by the Barbizon painters. And this separate and independent offshoot of the naturalistic movement, appearing almost simultaneously in the New World, is a very curious and interesting problem. In the case of the Barbizon painters the logic of the movement can be readily traced: in the general dissatisfaction with classicism; in the immediate influence of Constable and the tradition of the Dutch; and, finally, in a sort of compromise between the realism of Courbet and the poetic rage of the Romanticists. But that, unprompted by outside suggestion, a yearning for nature study and for a poetic interpretation of landscape should have arisen at about the same time in a young man on the banks of the American Hudson, points to that wider logic which thinkers have detected in the evolution of man—that the identical phases of evolution may appear sporadically, independent of transmitted causes, the individual man or nation having reached a period of personal development at which the next step becomes inevitable.

Inness was of religious temperament; highly imaginative and at the same time questioning, argumentative, as befitted his Scotch origin. Applying these qualities to his art, he was unremitting in the investigation of truth, while regarding nature in a spirit of elevated poetry. For he seems to have had always an alert consciousness of the simultaneous claims of the spirit and of the senses. He found an interdependence between the two. External beauty was the expression of an inward beauty of spirit. In this way landscape painting to some orders of mind becomes veritably a form of religious painting. It would seem to have been so to Inness, as, in his way, it was to Corot. It was with the latter of all the Barbizon painters that Inness appears to have had most sympathy, though he was appreciative also of Rousseau and Daubigny.

A man may be gauged to some extent by the company he chooses, and Inness’s predilection for these three may afford additional evidence of his own personal feeling toward his art. Toward Rousseau he was attracted, no doubt, by the master’s magnificent sincerity, the tireless analysis that resulted in such a comprehension of nature’s forms, within which he, too, felt the existence of a spirituality that led him in time to nature-worship, into a sort of vague pantheism. This spiritual “underlay” in Rousseau’s work must have been very fascinating to Inness, while its concentrated intensity would strike a sympathetic chord in his own ardent temperament. Not, however, so as to lead him in the direction of Rousseau’s sternness. His sympathies were more akin to the tender spirituality of Corot. He missed in the latter’s work the mastery of tangible form and found his range of colour narrow, but was charmed with the exquisite serenity, childlike freshness of soul, and perpetually gracious bonhommie of Corot’s manner,—all qualities that one associates with the classic style, and that make the introduction of nymphs into his naturalistic landscapes seem altogether reasonable.

And in this predilection for Corot there is interest, since we are accustomed to hear Inness called “an impetuous and passionate painter.” Yet in his work there is very little of stress and storm. We remember him most affectionately, and seem to find him most characteristically represented in works of such benign repose as “Winter Morning, Montclair,” “The Wood Gatherers,” “The Clouded Sun,” and “Summer Silence.” I do not forget that many of his earlier pictures could be described as passionate; but their turbulence of emotion is seldom associated with any disturbance in nature. The turbulence is in the manner of feeling and painting rather than in the subject, in the interpretation, for example, of a flaming sunset sky over an earth sinking peacefully to slumber. The passion is in the painter himself; and, as he matured, ardour yielded to intensity, to the white heat of concentrated energy. The progress of his art was steadily in the direction of serenity, that highest quality of calm which is the flux of passion.

Here again becomes evident the essentially religious character of his art and its point of contact with the religiosity of Rousseau and Corot; Rousseau’s attained through suffering, Corot’s preserving to the end the naïve, painless faith of the child. Inness would be drawn to one by sympathy, to the other by wonder and love. Whence, then, his admiration of Daubigny? The latter had little intensity and less spirituality; an easy man, the lockers of whose houseboat contained good creature comforts. He makes you realize the smile of the earth, and limits his poetry to the quiet comfortableness of the inhabited and cultivated banks of his beloved rivers. Partly it was the perennial boyishness of Daubigny’s heart that, no doubt, captivated Inness. His own soul was quick and eager to the end, undimmed or worsted up to close on seventy years, and its sweet freshness was a triumph over the debilitating effects of frail health, unremitting toil, and protracted struggle. So the genial, simple lovableness of Daubigny’s character may well have brought him encouragement and refreshment. But we may suspect another link of fascination. While Rousseau and Corot were painters of nature, Daubigny was the painter of the country, of the landscape in its intimate relation to the life of man. It is not that he introduces figures, for he seldom does, yet the spirit of mankind broods over almost all his landscapes; and the normal progress of all of us in our love of nature is apt to be from wonderland to the land of intimate affection. A child will be attracted by a gorgeous sunset, and we most of us begin by admiring nature’s grandeur, nor are disinclined to lose ourselves in her infinity. But later comes the more seeing eye, which finds infinite suggestion in little things and a suggestion, also, of infinity, if the mind craves for it. And then comes, too, a craving to be personally something in the midst of this infinity, to attach one’s self to one’s surroundings and share in the common life; so more and more we grow to value those aspects of nature which recall our intimate relation to her, and the simple landscape of the countryside is found to be most companionable. As soon as his circumstances permitted, Inness established himself in a country home at Montclair, N.J., and thenceforth the simple charms of his surroundings afford him all the inspiration that he needs.

To us as well as to himself this is the most beautiful period of his art, representing the maturity both of his method and ideal. Years of study and experiment have given his hand assurance and facility. It obeys the brain implicitly and with a readiness that does not put any drag upon the full, free play of the imagination. Its ideography is entirely personal, the brush work having been refined until in the most succinct and pregnant way it expresses precisely its author’s point of view. So personal is it that one may with equal certainty deduce the point of view from the method or trace back the method to the point of view. Ampleness and simplicity are the characteristics of each. The ampleness, however, is no longer of space but of significance; the vision, instead of being long-sighted, has become more penetrating and embracing; the artist is more thoroughly possessed of his subject. So, too, the simplicity involves no meagreness of thought, but a thought fully realized and clarified of everything that might detract from or confuse its meaning, having also a large suggestiveness, an expression of the artist’s imagination which invites the exercise of ours. At least such is the character of the brush work in his best pictures, for there are others in which the expanses of slightly broken colour, enlivened only by a few accents, are inclined to be a little uninteresting; succinct, in fact, without being also pregnant of meaning. If, however, they seem to be slight and sketchy, it is not because they were done without heart or care, but because Inness was constantly experimenting in the direction of more complete synthesis, wherein form for its own sake is less and less insisted on, and the great motive aimed at is the character of the scene, and the spirituality which it embodies—a motive, in fact, of interpretive impressionism.

In view of Inness’s impressionistic tendency that is a curious statement which has been credited to him, “While pre-Raphaelism is like a measure worm trying to compass the infinite circumference, impressionism is the sloth enveloped in its own eternal dulness.” If the remark was really made by him, it proves that he could be intolerant of others without trying to understand their motives. Both movements are naturalistic, and for that reason alone, if for no other, Inness might have tried to understand them; pre-Raphaelism, moreover, added to its devotion to the truth of form a profound spirituality, with which quality, at least, he should have felt some sympathy. Its motive, moreover, was in a measure humble. It certainly never tried to “compass the infinite circumference”; on the contrary, it limited itself to fragments and exaggerated their importance, pictorially speaking, in the general scheme. Even more misjudged is the application of a sloth to the analytical refinement and indefatigable study of the most eminent impressionists. It could not have been their search for the fugitive effects in nature or for the precise character of some phase of nature at a certain time that annoyed Inness, perhaps hardly the secondary place that they sometimes give to form. More likely it was their choice of a subject without due reference to the accepted conventions of pictorial composition and, I suspect, still more to their disregard of that other pictorial convention, tone. I am using the word “tone” to express the prevalence of some one colour in a picture to which all other hues are subordinated, and not in that other use of the word which involves the setting of all objects, lights, and colours in a picture in due relation to one another, within an enveloppe of atmosphere. We have become inclined to regard “tonality” as a fetich, forgetting that it is after all only one of many admirable pictorial conventions, which, like other pictorial conventions, has no absolutely true counterpart in nature. No one can affirm conclusively that any one convention has a prescriptive superiority over all others. It is a matter to be adjusted by the temperament of the individual. In the neighbourhood of the Hudson we have days when the atmosphere is extraordinarily brilliant and the light clear white. I cannot recall any adequate expression of this in Inness’s pictures. He was drawn rather to early mornings, to evenings, to quiet afternoons, or the golden glow of summer and autumn, when the atmosphere is caressing.