Wyant was the typical barefoot boy of the near West in the days before the Civil War. He was born in 1836 at Evans Creek, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and his boyhood and early youth were far removed from anything like the madding crowd. His parents were Americans of the soil, his father being a farmer and carpenter of Pennsylvania extraction, and his mother of Dutch-Irish descent. They were nomadic, after the manner of border people, and soon left Evans Creek to live in or near Defiance, where Wyant learned his three R’s in the village school. There were less than one thousand people in the town at that time, and what Wyant got out of it by way of enlightenment or encouragement must have been meagre. As a boy he, no doubt, roamed the woods, fished the streams, and trailed along the Ohio hilltops; and at this time, unconsciously perhaps, he was storing up visual memories of appearances that were to be of service to him later on.
That he had an eye and was an observer from the start comes to us in the tales told of his boyish sketches on the floor made with charcoal from the wood-fire. At least they showed an inclination that was afterward to develop into a passion. But the inclination found no immediate outlet. After leaving school the youth served as an apprentice in a harness-shop, but he did not care for harness-making. He preferred to paint photographs, cards, signs—almost anything that could be done with a brush. At twenty-one he went to Cincinnati and for the first time saw some paintings in oil. Before that his ideas of art had been bounded by book illustration and the omnipresent chromo. It is said that among the pictures he saw at Cincinnati was something by Inness. The young man was impressed by it, or by the reports about Inness, for he took the train to New York to consult that master about art as a vocation.
He found Inness at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy. How long he stopped there and what was said we do not know, but the master was encouraging, and the young man went back to Cincinnati determined to be a painter. He had a right instinct about art at that early time or he never would have chosen Inness for a counsellor. The famous landscape-painters then were Kensett and Church. Inness was the most progressive, the most ultra-modern of the time, and had not yet won universal applause. He did not paint enough in detail for the man in the street, and evidently he must have given Wyant his argument for breadth of view over detail, for, as we shall presently see, Wyant had it almost from the start. But perhaps the most and the best that he got from Inness was inspiration.
Back in Cincinnati and painting pictures after his own formula, Wyant found a purchaser and a patron in Nicholas Longworth. It became possible for him shortly thereafter to move to New York. There, in 1863, he saw a large exhibition of Düsseldorf pictures that probably stirred his imagination. Pictures in America at that time were rather scarce, and any exhibition of foreign work would be more impressive then than now. The next year he exhibited at the National Academy of Design for the first time, and in 1865 he went to Europe on a Düsseldorf pilgrimage, impelled thereto by a mountain-and-waterfall landscape of Gude which he had seen in New York.
He went straight to Gude at Carlsruhe and put himself under his tutelage. Gude was a Norwegian painter, influenced by Dahl, and imbued with the Düsseldorf method and point of view. The grand landscape—panoramic in extent and mountainous in height, with a hot sun in the heavens—was then in vogue, and Achenbach was its prophet. From Wyant’s short stay with Gude it seems that his enthusiasm was soon chilled down to zero. In after-life he often referred to the great kindness of Gude and his wife, but he seemed to think that his instruction in art had been fundamentally wrong. His pupil, Bruce Crane, says that he spoke of his art environment there as being “a miserable one,” and Wyant believed that “environment played the greater part in the making of a painter for good or bad.”
He left Gude and started back to America, but stopped on the way in England and Ireland, where he studied pictures and painted some of his own. The old masters in the National Gallery apparently did not make a strong appeal to him. His work shows no sign of Claude, Salvator, Poussin, Ruysdael, Hobbema, or Cuyp. Even Gainsborough and the ascendant Turner seem to have left him cold. But Constable he liked very much. Here at last was a man seeing things in a large way and doing them with breadth of brush. Moreover, he was doing simple transcripts of nature, not the panorama of blazing perspective. In America Wyant had inherited something of the spectacular from his Hudson River predecessors; Düsseldorf had aided the conception, and Turner had abetted it; but Constable seemed to be against it. Wyant was inclined to renounce it. Constable produced the broad realistic look, and at that time Wyant had probably not arrived at any other conception of art than as a large transcript of nature. Ruskin’s doctrine of fidelity to fact was in the air, and the landscape as emotional expression, or as a symphony, or even as a decorative pattern, was little known either in the studios or the critic’s den. There was, however, plenty of controversy going on. And yet fresh from varying theories and impressions, Wyant went over to Ireland and painted pictures that bore no earmark of any painter or any school.
In the Metropolitan Museum there is an Irish landscape by him done in 1866—“View in County Kerry, Ireland.” There are gray mountains at the back, a green foreground with a pool of water, a gray-blue and whitish sky, a gray atmosphere. At the right middle distance is a white cottage. The rest is treeless upland running into mountain heights that are lost in haze and cloud. The picture is not only remarkable for its simplicity of composition but its absence of small objects or distracting details. Though a mountain landscape, it is broadly seen, largely and simply massed, and painted with a broad flat brush. It may have been repainted in later years, but I am willing to believe from the breadth of its composition that it was painted broadly to correspond, and is to-day substantially as when originally done.
This picture is in somewhat violent contrast with another Wyant landscape hanging in the same gallery and dated in the same year—1866. I refer to the large “Mohawk Valley” landscape—an excellent picture, though evidencing limitations perhaps peculiar to America. It is a huge valley view with a gorge and stream in the foreground running down to a fall from which mist is rising. The stream as a pool is seen again emerging in the middle distance. A half-lighted sky with falling rain at the left and warm grays of clouds and blues of distance make up the background, while in the foreground a tall tree at the left is balanced by a group of lesser trees at the right. The whole color-tone is warm (probably from underbasing), especially in the foreground, which shows in grays and browns. It is a symmetrical composition with a central point of sight, and in its detailed elaboration gives no hint of selection or sacrifice. The trees, the ledges of rock in the foreground, the water, the clouds are all exactly drawn and realized to the last item, each one having quite as much importance as its fellow. As for the painting, it is thin, kept thin to allow the underbasing to show through; but it is flatly painted, not stippled. In the latter respect it is an advance on, say, Church’s panorama, “Heart of the Andes,” in the same gallery, where the stippling with white paint produces a glittering, bedizened surface, and the minute drawing of leaves in the foreground runs into petty niggling.
Now, the “Mohawk Valley” was probably completed just before Wyant went to Europe; at least in method it antedates the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape of the same year.[1] It is a very important picture and represents the culmination of Wyant’s early style—a beautiful picture for any place or period or painter to have produced. It shows Wyant’s original point of view, with some of the influences that must have come to him from the Hudson River school, from Inness, from various unknown American sources. But the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape shows a departure, a widening, and a broadening of both brush and vision which were to increase and expand thereafter into a second style—the style of Wyant’s later and nobler canvases. To this style Wyant was undoubtedly helped at first by what he saw abroad, especially by the pictures of Constable.
[1] “In regard to the two pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, ‘View in County Kerry, Ireland,’ and the ‘Mohawk Valley,’ I never could reconcile myself to the idea that they were both painted in 1866. There is no doubt about the ‘Mohawk Valley’ because its manner is so much like the many canvases of that period which Wyant often showed me and which Mrs. Wyant destroyed after his death. The ‘View in County Kerry, Ireland,’ marks a new period in his art and the widely different handling as well as view-point are too much to have been acquired in one year. There is certainly some mistake in the date—I should say a difference of ten years. At some time that picture has been cleaned and the restorer accidentally destroying the date restored it incorrectly.”—(Bruce Crane in a letter to the writer, December 13, 1917.)