THE FINE ARTS.
Exhibition of Huntington’s Works.—One of the halls of the Art Union Building in New York, has been occupied for some time by an exhibition of the collected works of Mr. Huntington. They are about one hundred and twenty in number. Some of them are his very earliest efforts, necessarily crude, having been executed in his college days, when his incipient passion for art, interfered materially with his progress in the classics. But as the artist himself observes, “the early blundering attempts of beginners in art, are not as painful as those of musical performers, or as insipid as the stammerings of incipient poets. The lamest groupings of a young painter are often amusing, and sometimes show what Inman used to call ‘good intentions.’ ” It appears to us a very interesting feature in this exhibition, that we are able to trace the progress and development of Mr. Huntington’s talent. Thus we have “Ichabod Crane flogging a Scholar,” his first attempt at composition in 1834, which we may contrast with “Mercy’s Dream,” or the “Christiana and Children” the two paintings upon which his fame most securely rests. The gradual formation of his present pure style may be distinctly traced through his successive works.
We find in the collection more landscapes than we thought Mr. H. had painted, but he explains the matter by stating that during his early professional career, while engaged as an assistant to a portrait painter, “putting in back grounds,” he was seized upon by an enthusiastic speculator who was about to erect a city on the Hudson river, at Verplanck’s Point, then a wooded retreat of great beauty. This enthusiast was a generous lover of art, and kept Huntington during an entire summer, in that vicinity, taking views, and in his close study of nature was then fostered a love for landscape, which he has never forgotten. The artist himself says, of his subsequent works of this kind, that they will not bear the test of a close comparison with nature. They are rather hints and dreams of situations and effects, which he beseeches the visitor to look at lazily and listlessly, through the half-closed eye, and not to expect that truth and reality, which should be found in the works of the professed landscape painter. We cannot agree with the modest artist in his criticism upon himself—on the contrary, we think there is much of that marvelous force and brightness which rivets the attention to Cole’s paintings; of the freshness and atmosphere in which lie the fertile meadows—far stretching distances—the sturdy oaks and beeches, with rich masses of foliage, in Durand’s calm, expansive compositions, and all of the silvery lightness in moving clouds and transparent running brooks, which the veteran Doughty would magically call into being on the canvas.
We think the true passion of boyish love and first devotedness pervades all the occasional outbreaks which have led him from the dull routine of portraits to the green fields, the blue skies, and the silvery streams. The Rondout Scenes, painted three or four years after the modern Cecrops, would have carried art, learning, letters, and men to Verplanck’s Point, and the two elegant Ramapo views (most unfortunately not in the collection when we saw it, but in the possession of James Ross, Esq. of New Orleans) are living evidences of this. And then the “Moon Light and Fire Light,” drawn in an annual distribution of the Art Union, by the late much lamented Dr. James Milnor, is one of the most fanciful and artistic combinations of light and shade that could be imagined. Under these circumstances we will not allow Mr. Huntington to escape the charge of being a very admirable and forcible landscape painter.
But it is in historical and allegorical painting that Huntington has made the reputation which will live the longest; although he says, the class of pictures which were painted with the greatest interest are those which were meant to convey a moral lesson, and were ideally treated, such as the “Sacred Lesson,” “Alms Giving,” “Piety and Folly,” “Faith,” “Hope,” etc. This we can very easily imagine; for it must be to the spirit of a painter, like the enlargement of a caged bird, to escape the confines of buckram, broadcloth, and modern costume, and feel that “no pent up Utica” confines the powers, and they can range from the trammels of the real to the delicious abandon of the ideal. To transfer to canvas the feelings of our nature, and embody, as it were, the moral sentiments must indeed be a triumph to the artist, and we think it has been achieved by Huntington.
The picture which has acquired the most extended reputation for this artist, is by no means his best or even one of his best. It has become popularized by having been engraved for the American Art Union two years since, and is the “Signing of the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey.” We think it fortunate that the lovers of art in our country, who do not enjoy the privilege of visiting the large collections in our cities, are to have a better specimen of Huntington’s talent, and his peculiar ideality of composition in the engraving of his “Mercy’s Dream,” by the Philadelphia Art Union. This will, we think, be one of the most popular plates ever distributed.
To enter upon a critical analysis of Huntington’s style would be but a historical sketch of his artistic career; for his advancement in finish, and his impressiveness in composition, are marked and graded on each succeeding painting which he has started from the canvas. There is “no retiring ebb” to his genius—he always improves upon himself, as the result of close attention and indefatigable study. So happy is he in his historical, dramatic, and allegorical subjects, that they associate themselves with the very facts they intend to delineate, to the exclusion almost of the records of the past—his ideality takes the place of the written chronicle; and it seems as if the olden tradition glowed beneath his pencil. Huntington is as graphic on historic canvas, as Macaulay is on the historic page. We must accord to him a high rank, for he has merited it. In every department of his art, from the dull routine of portrait painting to the study of the Florentine Sybil, or to his latest inspirations, “St. John the Evangelist,” and the “Marys at the Sepulchre,” there is the same loveliness of composition, boldness of handling, and delicacy of conception.
We should feel great gratification in referring minutely to some of the more elaborate and important works in this collection, but our purpose, at the outset, was to make only a general notice, and call attention to the interesting fact, that nearly all Huntington’s works can now be seen in one gallery, collated as they have been from every quarter of the Union. The success which has attended the exhibitions of the labors of Alston, Inman and Huntington, will, we trust, lead to subsequent efforts among our other artists to get up corresponding displays of their works. By producing emulation it will have a good effect, and these galleries opened with such attractiveness, will lead to the formation of a taste for art, which will soon direct itself to the encouragement of artists through many private channels of munificence.