The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

Unlike American music, American paintings are no longer strange to Europe. In the art division of the last Paris Exposition Americans took their share of the honours, and they are highly appreciated at most of the Berlin and Munich picture shows. Sargent and Whistler are the best known. Sargent, as the painter of elegant ladies, prosperous men, and interesting children, has undoubtedly the surest and most refined gift with his brush of any son of the New World. When, a few years ago, a large exhibition of his works was brought together in Boston, one felt on standing before that gathering of ultra-polite and almost living humanity, that in him the elegant world has found its most brilliant, though perhaps not its most flattering, transcriber. Whistler is doubtless the greater, the real sovereign. This most nervous of all artists has reproduced his human victims with positively uncanny perspicacity. Like Henry James, the novelist, he fathoms each human riddle, and expresses it intangibly, mysteriously. Everything is mood and suggestion, the dull and heavy is volatilized, the whole is a sceptical rendering in rich twilight tones.

America is proud of both artists, and still one may doubt whether the art of the New World would be justly represented if it sent across the ocean only these two pampered and somewhat whimsical artists. Firstly, in spite of much brilliant other work, they are both best known as portraitists, while it becomes plainer every day that landscape painting is the most typical American means of expression. The profound feeling for nature, which pervades American poetry and reflects the national life and struggle therewith, brings the American to study landscape. Many persons think even that if American artists were to send ever so many easel pictures across the ocean, the artistic public of Europe would still have no adequate judgment of American painting, because the best talent is busied with the larger pieces intended for wall decoration. The great number of monumental buildings, with their large wall surfaces and the desire for ambitious creations, attract the American to-day to wall-painting. And they try to strengthen the national character of this tendency by a democratic argument. The easel picture, it is said, is a luxury designed for the house of the wealthy and is, therefore, decadent, while the art of a nation which is working out a democracy must pertain to the people; and therefore just as early art adorned the temples and churches, this art must adorn the walls of public buildings, libraries, judicial chambers, legislatures, theatres, railway stations and city halls. And the more this comes to be the case, the less correct it is to judge the pinctile efforts of the time by the framed pictures that come into the exhibitions. Moreover, many of the more successful painters do not take the trouble to send any of their works across the ocean.

Sargent and Whistler also—and this is more important—speak a language which is not American, while the country has now developed its own grammar of painting, and the most representative artists are seldom seen in Europe. In painting, as in so many other branches, the United States has developed from the provincial to the cosmopolitan and from the cosmopolitan to the national, and is just now taking this last step. It is very characteristic that the untutored provincial has grown into the national only by passing through a cosmopolitan stage. The faltering powers of the beginner do not achieve a self-conscious expression of national individuality until they have first industriously and systematically imitated foreign methods, and so attained a complete mastery of the medium of expression.

At first the country, whose poor population was not able to pay much attention to pictures, turned entirely to England. West and Copley are the only pre-Revolutionary Americans whose pictures possess any value. The portraits of their predecessors—as, for instance, those in Memorial Hall at Harvard—are stiff, hard, and expressionless. Then came Gilbert Stuart at the end of the eighteenth century, whose portraits of George and Martha Washington are famous, and who showed himself an artistic genius and quite the equal of the great English portraitists. John Trumbull, an officer in the Revolutionary Army, who lived at the same time, was still more important for the national history by his war pictures, the best of which were considerably above contemporary productions. The historical wall-paintings which he made in 1817, for the Capitol at Washington, are in his later and inferior manner. They seem to-day, like everything which was done in the early part of the century to decorate the Capitol, hackneyed and tiresome. And if one goes from the Capitol to the Congressional Library, which shows the condition of art at the end of the nineteenth century, one feels how far the public taste of Trumbull’s time was from appreciating true art. Portraiture was the only art which attained tolerable excellence, where, besides Stuart, there were Peale, Wright, and Savage. Then came the day of the “American Titian,” Allston, whose Biblical pictures were greatly praised for their brilliant colouring.

Hitherto artists had gone to England to study or, indeed, sometimes to Italy. In the second third of the century they went to Düsseldorf; they painted American landscapes, American popular life, and historical pictures of American heroes, all in German fashion. They delighted in genre studies in the Düsseldorf manner, and painted the Hudson River all bathed in German moonlight. While the popular school was still painting the world in blackish brown, the artistic secession began at about the time of the Civil War. Then artists began to go to Paris and Munich, and American painting developed more freely. It was a time of earnest, profound, and independent study such as had so far never been. The artist learned to draw, learned to see values, and, in the end, to be natural. The number of artists now began to increase, and to-day Americans produce thousands of pictures each year, and one who sees the European exhibitions in summer and the American in winter does not feel that the latter are on a much lower level.

Since Allston’s time the leaders in landscape have been Cole, Bierstadt, Kensett, and Gifford; in genre, Leslie, Woodville, and particularly Mount; in historical painting, Lentze and White; and in portraiture, Inman and Elliott. The first who preached the new doctrine of individuality and colour was Hunt, and in the early seventies the new school just graduated from Paris and Munich was bravely at work. There are many well-known names in the last thirty years, and it is a matter rather of individual choice what pictures one prefers of all the large number. Yet no one would omit George Inness from the list, since he has seen American landscapes more individually than any one else. Besides his pictures every one knows the marines of Winslow Homer, the street scenes of Childe Hassam, the heads of Eaton, the autumn forests of Enneking, the apple trees in spring-time of Appleton Brown, the delicate landscapes of Weir and Tryon, the wall pictures of Abbey, Cox, and Low, Gaugengigl’s little figure paintings, Vedder’s ambitious symbolism, the brilliant portraits of Cecilia Beaux and Chase, the women’s heads of Tarbell, the ideal figures of Abbot Thayer, and the works of a hundred other American artists, not to mention those who are really more familiar in London, Paris, and Munich than in America itself.

Besides the oil pictures, there are excellent water-colours, pastelles, and etchings; and, perhaps most characteristic of all, there is the stained glass of La Farge, Lathrop, the late Mrs. Whitman, Goodhue, and others. The workers in pen-and-ink are highly accomplished, of whom the best known is Gibson, whose American women are not only artistic, but have been socially influential on American ideals and manners. His sketches for Life have been themselves models for real life. Nor should we forget Pennell, the master of atmosphere in pen-and-ink.

Sculpture has developed more slowly. It presupposes a higher understanding of art than does painting; and, besides that, the prudishness of the Puritan has affected it adversely. When John Brazee, the first American amateur sculptor, in the early part of the nineteenth century, asked advice of the president of the New York Academy of Arts, he was told that he would better wait a hundred years before practicing sculpture in America. The speech admirably showed the general lack of interest in plastic art. But the impetuous pressure toward self-perfection existing in the nation shortened the century into decades; people began to journey through Italy. The pioneers of sculpture were Greenough, Powers, Crawford, and Palmer, and their statues are still valued for their historical interest. The theatrical genre groups of John Rogers became very popular; and Randolph Rogers, who created the Columbus bronze doors of the Capitol, was really an artist. Then came Storey, Ball, Rinehart, Hosmer, Mead, and many others with works of greater maturity. Squares and public buildings were filled with monuments and busts which, to be sure, were generally more interesting politically than artistically, and which to-day wait patiently for a charitable earthquake. And yet they show how the taste for plastic art has slowly worked upward.

More recent movements, which are connected with the names of Ward, Warner, Partridge, French, MacMonnies, and St. Gaudens, have already left many beautiful examples of sculpture. Cities are jealously watchful now that only real works of art shall be erected, and that monuments which are to be seen by millions of people shall be really characteristic examples of good art. More than anything else, sculpture has at length come into a closer sympathy with architecture than perhaps it has in any other country. The admirable sculptural decorations of the Chicago World’s Fair, the effective Dewey Triumphal Arch and the permanent plastic decorations of the Congressional Library, the more restrained and distinguished decorations of the Court of Appeals in New York City, and of many similar buildings show clearly that American sculpture has ended its period of immaturity. Such a work as St. Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial in Boston is among the most beautiful examples of modern sculpture; and it is thoroughly American, not only because the negro regiment marches behind the mounted colonel, but because the American subject is handled in the American spirit. These men are depicted with striking vigour, and the young hero riding to his death is conceived with Puritan sobriety. Vigorous and mature is the American, in plastic art as well as in poetry.

The development of architecture has been a very different one. A people must be housed, and cannot stay out of doors until it has learned what is beautiful in architecture. People could wait for poetry, music, and painting while they were busy in keeping off the Indians and felling the forests; but they had to have houses at once. And since at that time they had no independent interests in art, they imitated forms with which they had been familiar, and everywhere perpetuated the architectural ideas of their mother country. But the builder is at a disadvantage beside the painter, the singer, and the poet, in that when he imitates he cannot even do that as he will, but is bound down by climate, by social requirements, and especially by his building material. And when he is placed in new surroundings, he is forced to strike out for himself.