“Mohawk Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(click image to enlarge)
This was a time of rapid production with Wyant and he was always afire with his theme. The recognition of artists was coming to him if not the large patronage of the public. His picture of a “View on the Susquehanna” resulted in his being elected an associate of the National Academy in 1868, and he was named a full academician in 1869. But ill-health was with him, and in the hope of improving his physical condition and at the same time gathering material for his art, he joined in 1873 a government expedition to New Mexico and Arizona. There were many hardships on the trip, and Wyant’s never very robust constitution broke down under the strain. He was put on the train and sent back East. It is said that on the way East he passed his home town of Defiance, but would not get off. Ill as he was, with few friends and less money, he determined to go on to New York and fight it out. The fine courage of all that becomes more marked when we understand that the illness was so severe that it had resulted at Fort Wingate in paralysis of his right hand and arm. He was never to paint with his right hand again. It was a crippled painter coming back to New York—crippled in a vital spot—but he had determined that his left hand should be trained to service. And it was.
The West not only maimed him physically but apparently taught him nothing artistically. The deserts that he crossed with their red porphyry mountains, dull-yellow sands, and gas-blue air—the most wonderful landscapes in the world in their definition of form and their quality of color—seem to have made no impression whatever upon him. This is understandable only by considering the inheritance of tradition and environment. In Wyant’s time a handsome landscape meant a mountain-valley with forests, rocks, waterfalls, and the variegated foliage of summer or autumn. The desert was unknown and remained for a later generation of painters to discover; the plains were unpainted and thought unpaintable; even the marsh and the meadow, which Corot loved, were considered too slight for art. The grand-view conception in landscape-painting died hard. In Wyant’s time it was very much alive. Naturally enough, he was impressed by it, and though in later life he did many small intimate bits of nature, he never got away entirely from the wide mountain-valley theme.
He was, in fact, always a mountain lover. After his return to New York he spent much of his summer-time in the Adirondacks. He was then deeply interested in the pictures of the Barbizon-Fontainebleau painters which were coming into the United States. So outspoken was his admiration for Rousseau that he sent a picture to the Academy with the title “In the Spirit of Rousseau.” His own style was growing broader and simpler each year, and, strange enough, the public was buying his pictures. He became measurably prosperous, had a studio in the Y.M.C.A. Building in Twenty-third Street, and received a number of pupils. One of his pupils, a Miss Locke, he married in 1880.
After his marriage much time was spent in the Keene Valley, and in 1889 he moved to Arkville in the Catskills, where with a fine sweeping outlook from his porch upon woods, valleys, and hills he found enough material to last him the rest of his life. He saw little of the town thereafter. He had never mingled freely with his fellow man. The Society of American Artists had honored him with membership in 1878, he was a founder of the American Water-Color Society, and a member of the Century Association, but he always held somewhat aloof from them. Friendly enough with painters and people who sought him, he was, nevertheless, a little shy, which perhaps gave him the reputation of being gruff. He seemed less fitted to the city street than the aisle of the forest. It was in his mountain home on the forest edge that he died in 1892, having suffered much physical pain before his going.[2]
[2] “I met Wyant in 1876; his right arm was then practically useless. Later on his right side was affected, and the last six years he was compelled to walk sideways. Yet through all these years of suffering he worked day and night, and during the last six years, when his suffering was the worst, he recorded on canvas some of the beautiful things that survive him.”—(Bruce Crane, ibid.)
Like many another painter, Wyant doubtless knew infinite regrets that he could not live to complete his art. For he never believed in his having reached a final goal, and was always changing, experimenting, trying to better his work. My first meeting with him must have been in 1882. I seem to remember him seated before a picture with his palette fastened to the easel, his right arm hanging rather limp, and his left hand holding a brush. There was nothing noteworthy about the meeting except that his first words were a request that I should tell him what was wrong with the picture on the easel. He was so anxious to get a new view-point that he was quite willing to listen to a stranger, whether he spoke with authority or not. Of course I did not venture to say anything other than in praise of the canvas, though as I now remember it the picture was bothering him and looked a little tortured in its surface.
He worried a good deal over many of his pictures. When Inness came in to see him he relieved the strain in his impetuous way by taking up Wyant’s palette and brushes to add a touch here and there. The result usually was that the canvas grew into an Inness before the acquiescent Wyant’s eyes. There was so much of this that Mrs. Wyant finally forbade Inness her husband’s studio—at least that is the story told by the Inness family. But Wyant would do anything, submit to anything, for the love of painting. Bruce Crane writes me: