From the collection of James W. Ellsworth, Esq.
MIDSUMMER.
By George Inness.
Such moods, perhaps, contributed to him more suggestion of spirituality and were more in harmony with the mysticism of his mind.
Not only had he the faculty of seizing the character of a scene and of portraying it in terms of eloquent suggestiveness, but he gave it the impress of his own fine way of seeing it. We remember the effect produced by viewing a large number of his pictures together, as at the Clarke and Evans’s sales. What a remarkable distinction pervaded the group! Not only was the manner that of a master, but of one whose accomplished technique was at the services of a high order of mind, evidencing, if one may say so, the gentleman’s way of approaching the mistress of his heart. His sentiment in no instance that I can recall sinks into sentimentality. It grew out of a devotion to nature which was deep enough to merge the personal feeling in an intense and active sensibility to the impression of the scene itself. So that, without any posture of mind or even, perhaps, any set purpose, he is poetical. Had his medium been words, he would have been nearer to Wordsworth than to Tennyson; satisfied to interpret nature rather than to use her for the setting of some thought of his own. In this way he was much nearer to Rousseau and Daubigny than to Corot.
II
JOHN LA FARGE
JOHN LA FARGE has given us two avenues of approach to his personality as an artist: one through his pictures, drawings, and decorations, the other through his writings. In the drama of his artistic doings the writings serve as the chorus, which from its platform in front of the actual stage interpolates a commentary on the main action, in language always illuminative, though sometimes of rather complex meaning. For it reflects, in fact, the complexity of its author’s personality, his life-long habit of contemplation and the wide horizon over which his study has roamed, embracing many objects of desire inside and outside his art, to none of which he can tolerate a short cut, but the interdependence of which and the relative interest of the paths thereto, even the inevitable oppositions and compromises, he has always realized and valued. As Paul Bourget happily says, La Farge’s “least words betray the seeker of a kind like Fromentin, who thinks out his sensations—a rare, a very rare power.”