A Text-Book of the History of Painting

by John C. Van Dyke

FIG. 105.—EASTMAN JOHNSON. CHURNING.

PORTRAIT, HISTORY, AND GENRE-PAINTERS: Contemporary with the early landscapists were a number of figure-painters, most of them self-taught, or taught badly by foreign or native artists, and yet men who produced creditable work. Chester Harding (1792-1866) was one of the early portrait-painters of this century who achieved enough celebrity in Boston to be the subject of what was called "the Harding craze." Elliott (1812-1868) was a pupil of Trumbull, and a man of considerable reputation, as was also Inman (1801-1846), a portrait and genre-painter with a smooth, detailed brush. Page (1811-1885), Baker (1821-1880), Huntington (1816-), the third President of the Academy of Design; Healy (1808-[22]), a portrait-painter of more than average excellence; Mount (1807-1868), one of the earliest of American genre-painters, were all men of note in this middle period.

[22] Died 1894.

Leutze (1816-1868) was a German by birth but an American by adoption, who painted many large historical scenes of the American Revolution, such as Washington Crossing the Delaware, besides many scenes taken from European history. He was a pupil of Lessing at Dusseldorf, and had something to do with introducing Dusseldorf methods into America. He was a painter of ability, if at times hot in color and dry in handling. Occasionally he did a fine portrait, like the Seward in the Union League Club, New York.

During this period, in addition to the influence of Dusseldorf and Rome upon American art, there came the influence of French art with Hicks (1823-1890) and Hunt (1824-1879), both of them pupils of Couture at Paris, and Hunt also of Millet at Barbizon. Hunt was the real introducer of Millet and the Barbizon-Fontainebleau artists to the American people. In 1855 he established himself at Boston, had a large number of pupils, and met with great success as a teacher. He was a painter of ability, but perhaps his greatest influence was as a teacher and an instructor in what was good art as distinguished from what was false and meretricious. He certainly was the first painter in America who taught catholicity of taste, truth and sincerity in art, and art in the artist rather than in the subject. Contemporary with Hunt lived George Fuller (1822-1884), a unique man in American art for the sentiment he conveyed in his pictures by means of color and atmosphere. Though never proficient in the grammar of art he managed by blendings of color to suggest certain sentiments regarding light and air that have been rightly esteemed poetic.

FIG. 106.—INNESS. LANDSCAPE.

THE THIRD PERIOD in American art began immediately after the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. Undoubtedly the display of art, both foreign and domestic, at that time, together with the national prosperity and great growth of the United States had much to do with stimulating activity in painting. Many young men at the beginning of this period went to Europe to study in the studios at Munich, and later on at Paris. Before 1880 some of them had returned to the United States, bringing with them knowledge of the technical side of art, which they immediately began to give out to many pupils. Gradually the influence of the young men from Munich and Paris spread. The Art Students' League, founded in 1875, was incorporated in 1878, and the Society of American Artists was established in the same year. Societies and painters began to spring up all over the country, and as a result there is in the United States to-day an artist body technically as well trained and in spirit as progressive as in almost any country of Europe. The late influence shown in painting has been largely a French influence, and the American artists have been accused from time to time of echoing French methods. The accusation is true in part. Paris is the centre of all art-teaching to-day, and the Americans, in common with the European nations, accept French methods, not because they are French, but because they are the best extant. In subjects and motives, however, the American school is as original as any school can be in this cosmopolitan age.

PORTRAIT, FIGURE, AND GENRE PAINTERS (1878-1894): It must not be inferred that the painters now prominent in American art are all young men schooled since 1876. On the contrary, some of the best of them are men past middle life who began painting long before 1876, and have by dint of observation and prolonged study continued with the modern spirit. For example, Winslow Homer (1836-) is one of the strongest and most original of all the American artists, a man who never had the advantage of the highest technical training, yet possesses a feeling for color, a dash and verve in execution, an originality in subject, and an individuality of conception that are unsurpassed. Eastman Johnson (1824-) is one of the older portrait and figure-painters who stands among the younger generations without jostling, because he has in measure kept himself informed with modern thought and method. He is a good, conservative painter, possessed of taste, judgment, and technical ability. Elihu Vedder (1836-) is more of a draughtsman than a brushman. His color-sense is not acute nor his handling free, but he has an imagination which, if somewhat more literary than pictorial, is nevertheless very effective. John La Farge (1835-) and Albert Ryder (1847-) are both colorists, and La Farge in artistic feeling is a man of much power. Almost all of his pictures have fine decorative quality in line and color and are thoroughly pictorial.