Wyant up to the last ten years of his life painted much out of doors and directly from the model. From that he got exact knowledge of forms, lights, and colors, so that in after-years he was able to draw and paint largely from visual memory. Working directly from the model led him into much detail, and some of his earlier pictures are burdened with a multitude of facts, but when he worked from memory in the studio all that was changed. He simplified his composition to a few large masses, threw out detail, and depended for effect largely upon light, air, and diffused color. A little valley view with half a dozen beeches at the left, a clump of bushes with a ledge of rock at the right, a veiled distance—that was enough for him.
Occasionally in his pictures one sees a white cottage in the background, a road or a bridge; but these do not occur frequently, and I cannot remember any picture by him that shows man, woman, or child. The human interest was not his. He believed that nature was sufficient unto itself and needed no association with mankind to make it beautiful or interesting. So long had he looked at nature and studied her appearances, so long had he marvelled and brooded over her grandeur and beauty, so long had he loved the veiled mountain light, the blue air, and the forest shadow, that finally he came to have a way of seeing things, a point of view about nature that by its intensity and depth was perhaps abnormal. He saw not as we see but as an absorbed nature-lover sees. The disturbing prose of facts was no longer there. The poetry of light, air, and color alone remained.
In his first endeavors when he painted from the model he recited the beauty of the facts and perhaps thought they would be sufficient to carry the picture. Nature was beautiful in itself; if faithfully transcribed on canvas why would not the beauty carry on into the transcription? He found later on that it would not and could not, that the counterfeit presentment remained only a counterfeit presentment. Then he began to simplify his matter and broaden his method, seeking not to reproduce the original but to give merely the feeling or impression that the original had made upon him. The result was that peculiarly poetic quality of light, air, and color that we associate with such pictures as the “Broad Silent Valley.”
Of its kind no finer quality of pictorial poetry was ever produced than is shown in Wyant’s later landscapes. It is not exactly epic, though it has wonderful descriptive passages, sustained effect, and often very positive strength of utterance. Lyric is the term that describes it better. For it is a song rather than a recitation—a wood theme worthy of a Pan’s piping, though it gives no hint of the Old World, and belongs emphatically in this new Western land with its unbroken soil and virgin forests. In aim and effect it is not unlike the pæan in praise of light by Corot. They were both painter-poets—the one painting on the outskirts of Paris, the other gathering his material on the outskirts of civilization here in America.
Inness, Wyant, Homer Martin, Winslow Homer—no one ever questioned the Americanism of their art. They are our very own—the product of this new soil. Even their limitations recite our history. As for their aspirations, with their passionate love for the beauty of our own American landscape, may it not be fairly claimed that in these they are representative of the American people? In a large sense have they not been our pictorial spokesmen, saying in art what many of us have always felt but could not well express?
And Wyant—Wyant with the wood-thrush note—well, we shall not look upon his like again! For he and Martin were perhaps rarer spirits, finer souls, than either Inness or Homer. Their charm of mood, the serenity of their outlook, the loveliness of their vision will hardly be repeated in our art. They marked an epoch and belonged to a past that unfortunately is leaving no decided teaching or sequence in its wake. The trend in art to-day is not toward serenity but turbulence.
IV
HOMER MARTIN
The little aloofness of manner that prevented Wyant from being a pronounced social light was not a characteristic of Homer Martin. From his youth upward Martin was companionable, had in fact something of a genius for making friends. All through his life he maintained social relations with the wise and the witty of his time, moved in intellectual club circles, and both at home and abroad was accounted a man of mind, a rare raconteur and conversationalist, a most attractive personality. His droll comments and quick retorts are still told at his club, and form perhaps something of a contrast to his pictures hanging upon the walls near by.
For there was never anything amusing about Martin’s art. He indulged in no drollery of the brush, and no intelligent person ever got a smile out of his canvases. They are serious, almost solemn, affairs. Mrs. Martin, in her delightful reminiscences of her husband, quotes John R. Dennett as saying that “Martin’s landscapes look as if no one but God and himself had ever seen the places.” There is, indeed, nothing of human interest about them. A distant figure or a house is occasionally introduced as a light spot in a dark plane, or otherwise to help out the composition; but the figure always suggests a wraith or a spook, and the house is deserted or haunted. Says Mrs. Martin: