I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do not or cannot know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.
These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit. They made no compromise, and their record is clear.
If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature. They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in the way of interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself. Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to the last in expressing them.
You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when, as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which "Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once; and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity, as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in Fuller.
They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that. It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which places them out of association among men of their time or of today, in the field of objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them with pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of landscape painters of all modern time. They would hold their own by the verity of feeling that is in them, and what they might lose in technical excellence, would be compensated for in uniqueness of personality. I should like well to see them placed beside artists like Maris and Marées, and even Courbet. It would surprise the casual appreciator much, I believe.
OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
I have for purely personal reasons chosen the two painters who formulate for me the conviction that there have been and are but two consistently convincing American impressionists. These gentlemen are John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. I cannot say precisely in what year Twachtman died but for purposes intended here this data is of no paramount consequence, save that it is always a matter of query as to just how long an artist must live, or have been dead, to be discovered in what is really his own time.
John H. Twachtman as artist is difficult to know even by artists; for his work is made difficult to see either by its scarcity as determined for himself or by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. It requires, however, but two or three of them to convince one that Twachtman has a something "plus" to contribute to his excursions into impressionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf blackness which permeates his earlier work his conversion to impressionism was as fortunate as it was sincere. Twachtman knew, as is evidenced everywhere in his work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism that is as convincing as it is authentic, you feel that there is a certain underlying spirit of resignation. He surely knew that a love of sunlight would save any man from pondering on the inflated importance of world issues.