English Painters, with a Chapter on American Painters

by H. J. Wilmot-Buxton; S. R. Koehler

WASHINGTON ALLSTON (1779—1843) was a native of South Carolina, but was sent to New England at an early age, and graduated from Harvard College in 1800. The year following he went to England, to study under West, and thence to Italy, where he stayed four years, until his return to Boston in 1809. After a second absence in Europe of seven years' duration, he finally settled in Cambridge, near Boston. Allston's art covered a wide range, including Scripture history, portraiture, ideal heads, genre, landscape, and marine. It is difficult to understand to-day the enthusiasm which his works aroused, if not among the great public, at least within a limited circle of admiring friends. He was lauded for his poetic imagination, and called "the American Titian," on account of his colour; and this reputation has lasted down to our own time. The Allston Exhibition, however, which was held two years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has somewhat modified the opinions of calm observers. Allston was neither deep nor very original in his conceptions, nor was he a great colourist. One of his most pleasing pictures, The Two Sisters, is full of reminiscences of Titian, and it is well known that he painted it while engaged in the study of that master. In the case of an artist upon whose merits opinions are so widely divided, it may be well to cite the words of an acknowledged admirer, in speaking of what has been claimed to be his greatest work, the Jeremiah and the Scribe, in the Gallery of Yale College. Mrs. E. D. Cheney, in describing the impression made upon her by this picture after a lapse of forty years, says:—"I was forced to confess that either I had lost my sensibility to its expression, or I had overrated its value.... The figure of the Prophet is large and imposing, but I cannot find in it the spiritual grandeur and commanding nobility of Michel Angelo. He is conscious of his own presence, rather than lost in the revelation which is given through him. But the Scribe is a very beautiful figure, simple in action and expression, and entirely absorbed in his humble but important work. It reminds me of the young brother in Domenichino's Martyrdom of St. Jerome." The same lack of psychological power, here hinted at, is still more apparent in the artist's attempts to express the more violent manifestations of the soul. In The Dead Man revived by touching Elisha's Bones—for which he received a premium of 200 guineas from the British Institution, and which is now in the Pennsylvania Academy—the faces of the terrified spectators are so distorted as to have become caricatures. This is true, in a still higher degree, of the heads of the priests in the great unfinished Belshazzar's Feast, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The unnatural expression of these heads is generally explained by the condition in which the picture was left; but the black-and-white sketches, which may be examined in the same museum, show precisely the same character. The unhealthy direction of the artist's mind is apparent, furthermore, in his love of the terrible—shown in his early pictures of banditti, and in such later works as Saul and the Witch of Endor and Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand; while, on the contrary, it will be found, upon closer analysis, that the ideality and spirituality claimed for his female heads, such as Rosalie and Amy Robsart, resolve themselves into something very near akin to sweetness and lack of strength. In accordance with this absence of intellectual robustness, Allston's execution is hesitating and wanting in decision.

A somewhat similar spirit manifested itself in the works of John Vanderlyn (1776—1852), Rembrandt Peale (1787—1860), Samuel F. B. Morse (1791—1872), and Cornelius Ver Bryck (1813—1844).

JOHN VANDERLYN is best known by his Marius on the Ruins of Carthage, for which he received a medal at the Paris Salon of 1808, and his Ariadne, which forms part of the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy. Vanderlyn, as the choice of his subjects, coupled with his success in France, shows, was a very good classic painter, trained in the routine of the Academy. The Ariadne is a careful study of the nude, although somewhat red in the flesh, placed in a conventional landscape of high order. A large historic composition by him, The Landing of Columbus, finished in 1846, fills one of the panels in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington. As a portrait painter Vanderlyn was most unequal.

REMBRANDT PEALE—the son of Charles Wilson Peale, best known through his portraits—deserves mention here on account of his Court of Death, in the Crowe Art Museum of St. Louis, and The Roman Daughter, in the Boston Museum. Technically he stands considerably below his leading contemporaries.

S. F. B. Morse, whose fame as an artist has been eclipsed by his connection with the electric telegraph, was a painter of undoubted talent, but given somewhat to ostentation both in drawing and colour. Good specimens of his style are found in his Dying Hercules, Yale College, New Haven, and the rather theatrical portrait of Lafayette in the Governor's Room of the City Hall of New York. Morse essayed to paint national subjects, and selected for a theme the interior of the House of Representatives, with portraits of the members; but the public took no interest in the picture, although it is said to have been very clever, and the artist did not even cover his expenses by exhibiting it.

CORNELIUS VER BRYCK painted Bacchantes and Cavaliers, and a few historic pictures, with a decided feeling for colour, as evidenced by his Venetian Senator, owned by the New York Historical Society. He stands upon the borderland between an older and a newer generation, both of which, however, belong to the same period. Thus far the influence of Italy had been paramount; in the years immediately following Düsseldorf claims a share in shaping the historical art of the United States. The only names that can be mentioned here in accordance with the plan of this book, which excludes living artists, are Emmanuel Leutze (1816—1868), Edwin White (1817—1877), Henry Peters Gray (1819—1877), W. H. Powell (died 1879), Thomas Buchanan Read (1822—1872), and J. B. Irving (1826—1877).

LEUTZE was a German by birth, and his natural sympathies, although he had been brought to America as an infant, carried him to Düsseldorf. The eminence to which he rose in this school may be inferred from the fact that he was chosen Director of the Academy after he had returned to America, and almost at the moment of his death. Although of foreign parentage, he showed more love for American subjects than most of the native artists, but the trammels of the school in which he was taught made it impossible for him to become a thoroughly national painter. His most important works are Washington crossing the Delaware, Washington at the Battle of Monmouth, and Washington at Valley Forge; the two last named are at present in the possession of Mrs. Mark Hopkins of California. In the Capitol at Washington may be seen his Westward the Star of Empire takes its Way; The Landing of the Norsemen is in the Pennsylvania Academy; The Storming of a Teocalle, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

EDWIN WHITE, an extraordinarily prolific artist, who studied both at Paris and Düsseldorf, also painted a number of American historic pictures, among them Washington resigning his Commission, for the State of Maryland. The bulk of his work, however, weakly sentimental, deals with the past of Europe.