William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

by John Coleman Adams

by that imperceptible increment which is merely the self, the personal temperament of the artist, lighting up his subject. His memory furnished the anatomy of his subject, and his imagination infused it with life. It was the thing as it was, and something more. Because it was the thing as he saw it. His view of the function of the sketch, and, indeed, his theory of art, condensed into small compass, is well put by himself, in a paragraph from “The Squirrel’s Highway”:

“Humility is the only attitude that wins the heart of nature. It yields the glow that lights the vision of the ‘inward eye,’ beside which all other eyes are blind. Audacity and impressionism have their importance and place in art, but they are not its pinnacle; the one yields helpful courage for the encounter, the other is the useful short-hand system which often comes to the artist’s rescue, and without whose aid many of nature’s most rare and subtle expressions would elude him, and be lost. But its function is realized in the sketch or motive, which is rarely a picture, but more often a rough draft, a hieroglyph, a stenographic note, which like others of its class is fully intelligible alone to its author, and whose only rational excuse for being is in its latent possibilities of ultimate translation and perfection.”

That was the method of the artist; and it grew naturally and logically from the nature of the man. He agreed at bottom with the impressionists, because he painted and drew only what he saw. His point of difference with them was that he painted and drew far more than they would sanction, because he saw so much more. If the canon of the impressionists is admitted, they must be prepared frequently to see it apparently violated by some man who, while painting only what he actually sees, and getting “broad effects” and “values,” sees so much more than the average observer, and notes as “values” so many things which even the ordinary trained eye slips over as insignificant, that he seems to be “descending” to details. Gibson could never have painted to suit this class, because he saw and felt so much more than they did. Yet he was as true as the most orthodox of them to the very method he seemed to defy. He had been speaking (“Highways and Byways,” p. 68) of the seed-pods of the fireweed, and their hidden floss, “a warp of woven sunshine, with a woof of ether,” and reasons thus about it:

“It is always awe-inspiring and wonderful to me; it is beautiful beyond description; and when I see those snowy forms take wing and fly heavenward, it is more than beautiful, it is divine. And yet it would seem that there are those among her students who are above the influence of such a revelation as this in Nature. Disciples of a rampant superficial school of art, who in seeking to portray Nature ‘in her breadth’ would feel that they can put the straight jacket upon her and readily ignore so small and trivial a thing as this. The landscape to their half-blind and unsympathetic eyes resolves itself into a map, a relative opposition of so many ‘masses’ and ‘values’ of form and color. In the mastery of these lies their end and aim while Nature in her ‘detail’ is worthy only of the scientist and ‘has no place in art.’

. . . . . .

“That Nature’s landscape does, to those who seek therefor, resolve itself into so-called masses and values, is an important truth; but equally and more deeply true are the infinity and spirit of her breadth. The value of the broad gray mass of yonder sloping meadow will find its truest interpreter (assuming an equality of technical skill) in him who knows by heart its elements of life and color, who has seen its ‘violet by a mossy stone,’ who has plucked its grasses from their purple maze and knows the scent of those endless subtle variations of tender russets, greys, and greens, and cloudy films of smoky color that spread among its herbage. The true significance and ‘value’ of that massive bank of oaks will be most deeply felt and understood, and therefore most truly rendered, by him who has learned the beauty of its vernal buds of scarlet velvet, its swinging catkins, and the contour of its perfect leaf; who has stood beside its boughs, and seen the blue of sky and gray of passing cloud in turn reflected from the polished foliage.

“The impress of that knowledge and the sympathy and companionship it implies will send its impulse quivering to his brush-tip, in a spontaneous enthusiasm that shall subdue the pigment to a medium for thought, and shall hold it in its place as the means rather than the end. And while the misguided apostle of the new school who shows us ‘Nature in her breadth’ shall revel in his values of turpentine, and paint and brush-marks, the transcript of his more humble brother-worker, while not less broad, shall palpitate with life and feeling, and through some secret intangible testimony of its own, shall conjure up in the beholder the heart-memories of Nature, and shall breathe her spirit from the canvas.”

Perhaps it is worth while just here to rescue from oblivion the exceedingly funny account of some newspaper writer, whose story of Mr. Gibson’s methods is widely at variance with that we are telling, and what Gibson himself told, but which has a certain weird charm of its own. Commenting upon the “marvelous skill” ascribed to Gibson, he proceeds to say that nothing could be simpler than his method. “When Mr. Gibson sets out on a walk he always takes a camera with him, and when an especially interesting twig or fern attracts his attention, he promptly snaps at it. On his return home the plates are sent to the nearest photographer to be developed and from the negatives thus obtained, ‘bleach prints’ are made. Mr. Gibson then proceeds to draw very carefully on these prints, following of course the outline, shading, etc., of the photograph. After the drawings are finished, all traces of the photograph are quickly bleached out by immersing them in a simple solution of chemicals, leaving only the drawings on white paper.” After such a graphic and veracious account of the way in which the foremost American illustrator made his pictures, one is not surprised to have the writer add the brave statement that “it may be said without fear of contradiction that whatever excellence may exist in Mr. Gibson’s published work, is due to the careful work of the photographer and the engraver.” Such is the sort of stuff which some metropolitan newspapers serve up as “art criticism.” The writer might indeed declare that he spoke without fear of contradiction; for nobody would take the trouble to contradict an account so ridiculous. How refreshing, after such a tissue of absurdities, to read the letter of Henry Marsh, foremost among the wood-engravers of his day, the estimate, by a real artist, of another artist:

“Pomfret Centre, Conn., March 8th.

“Dear Sir: