Charles H. Caffin

“ Again, I am not speaking of the craftsmanship, but of the spirit that animates the artist. So long as he confines himself to fragments from the scenes and to subordinate persons, or to those whose character is very simple and direct, his old charm remains; but when he attempts a complex character, as that of Portia, he necessarily cannot please all comers; and when he essays to build up scenes, the old spontaneity of imagination seems to dwindle. It is as if the foliage of a tree were beginning to lose its freshness and twinkle of artless movement ”

“ While Rousseau and Corot were painters of nature, Daubigny was the painter of the country, of the landscape in its intimate relation to the life of man. It is not that he introduces figures, for he seldom does, yet the spirit of mankind broods over almost all his landscapes;{11} and the normal progress of all of us in our love of nature is apt to be from wonderland to the land of intimate affection. A child will be attracted by a gorgeous sunset, and we most of us begin by admiring nature’s grandeur, nor are disinclined to lose ourselves in her infinity. ”

“ But in the hands of a true artist, who thinks in colour, and has a store of gathered observations backed with scientific assurance, it permits the fullest scope to his imagination, and the opportunity of realizing the most diverse and complex schemes of colour, allowing him to reproduce much of the mystery that time has wrought into the mediæval stained glass, and to add to the latter’s chantlike simplicity of colour and structure the complicated harmonies of modern music. It is an art, indeed, that brings the decorator within measurable distance of the musical composer. ”

“ Strength and stability{149} and the evidences of time confront us, just as they would in the forest itself; but like cathedral architecture when music is pulsing through it, they are for the moment secondary to the spiritual impression of the voice. Wyant heard it in the movement of the tree-tops, and in the stir of weeds and ferns that nestled in the hollows, and it whispered to him of peace, a quiescence that stirs the soul to gentle activity, gladsome by turns or subdued in the alternate sun and shadow, that inexhaustible mystery of nature’s peace that passeth man’s understanding. ”

“ Ampleness and simplicity are the characteristics of each. The ampleness, however, is no longer of space but of significance; the vision, instead of being long-sighted, has become more penetrating and embracing; the artist is more thoroughly possessed of his subject. So, too, the simplicity involves no meagreness of thought, but a thought fully realized and clarified of everything that might detract from or confuse its meaning, having also a large suggestiveness, an expression of the artist’s imagination which invites the exercise of ours. ”

“ Probably every true artist has within him a little world of his own, an island in the ocean of the world around him, a little spot of fact, on which flourish the trees and flowers and personages of his imagination. He is happy if circumstances permit him to work in it, and still more happy if his world of fancy has some correspondence to the actual world about him. Such was Abbey’s happiness in having his footsteps directed through rural England. ”

“ While Whistler as a man, in his attitude toward the world, has been the Beau Brummel of this nineteenth-century modernity, he has kept his art in a beautiful isolation, selecting for it{39} only the choicest contributions of the spirit of the age and impressing upon them the fine distinction of his unique personality. Thus, while some of his contemporaries in the search for new sensations pushed their analysis into the gutter, his work has been invariably fragrant and pure. He has been a consistent apostle of beauty, of the sane and normal type of it. ”

“ Like a true painter, he sees a picture in everything he studies. Perhaps it would be truer to say that he sees the picture, the one which for the time being has taken possession of his imagination and to which he is willing to sacrifice even truth, or at least some portion of truth, rather than to permit the integrity of his mental picture to be impaired. This pictorial sense is one of the sources of the greatness and of the less than greatness in his work. It gives to each of his canvases a distinct æsthetic charm ”

“ And how distressingly elusive, tame, and profitless in pictures are ideas unbased on actuality—the landscape, for example, that makes for sentiment without support of drawing and construction. In pictures of the human figure an inspired control of colour may fill us with enthusiasm, but cannot wholly stifle our regret if the drawing is inadequate; for the beauty of nature is the beauty of its forms and of the coloured raiment that clothes the forms without disguising them, while in the world of spiritual ideas the beauty depends upon their association with or analogy to the world of matter. ”

“ One has seen a dreamy, tender treatment of the female form, which had no such staunch underlying structure to support it, work which attracts by what we hastily style subtlety, and later find to be but an exquisite veneer to an unstable conception; the artistic affectation of men whose coarseness of character belies the exquisiteness, and, as one studies their pictures longer, leaves us unconvinced of their sincerity. But in the purity of Fuller’s conceptions the man himself and his deliberate, habitual conviction are embodied. ”

“ Notwithstanding his enormous expenses and the embarrassments to which they frequently led, he kept his artistic conscience intact from the smudge of mere money-making, and confined himself to those sitters who appealed to his particular temperament and afforded him the best opportunity of making a good picture. So he was willing to throw up all the golden opportunities which Europe presented, that he might have the privilege and satisfaction of painting the one man whose heroic qualities had most fascinated his imagination. ”

“ The home life was penetrated with refinement;{56} a good classical and modern education came in due course, and all around him were the dignity and beauty of Florence, its tender beauty of atmosphere and colour and the noble memorials of its galleries and streets. Perhaps no city in the world has so distinctive a spirit, at once stimulating to the intellect and refining to the senses. ”

“ It is not the vastness of distance, for the evening sky is wrapping with greenish gray the sand hillocks, which are separated from us{126} only by a belt of warm green-brown grass and a strip of golden-brown scrub. But it is the character of the scene that is vast in suggestion. We do not feel the sky to be a quilt of softness, but an abyss of tenderness, assuaging the desolation of the spot,—a desolation that has the feeling of primeval loneliness. ”

“ The turbulence is in the manner of feeling and painting rather than in the subject, in the interpretation, for example, of a flaming sunset sky over an earth sinking peacefully to slumber. The passion is in the painter himself; and, as he matured, ardour yielded to intensity, to the white heat of concentrated energy. ”

“ Yet it is a little disconcerting to notice how much the less favoured children made of their meagre opportunities; and we may begin to wonder whether education—the leading of the child step by step to a fuller and fuller consciousness of the realities of life—and instruction—the laying of brick upon brick to build an edifice of character—may not be a thing outside of systems, and to be looked for rather in the daily contact of the child’s expanding personality with good wholesome personalities around it. ”

“ Tryon’s way is not unlike a man’s regard for a good mother. In the days of his habitual intercourse with her, it is her dignity and sweetness that{163} grow into his life, the changes of expression in her face and voice that win upon his devotion, her beautiful reasonableness that is accepted as quite a natural thing. It is only when the son’s life is drawn apart from the habit of her presence that the sentiment of a mother’s love is realized. So Tryon’s withdrawals to city life allow the poetry of nature to steal in upon his imagination ”

“ While so many of his twilights breathe simply the ineffable loveliness of quiet, others are astir with persuasion to spiritual reflection, with the gentle admonition to sadness that itself is purifying, or with deeper, fuller suggestion of the infinite mystery of nature’s recurring sleep that swallows up the littleness of man in its immensity. I remember, too, a little picture of darkened earth and rather turbulent dark sky in which a large boulder alone glistens in the fading light—a rock of illumination{150} and strength in the surrounding uncertainty of gathering night. ”

“ HOMER D. MARTIN has been called the first of American impressionists—doubtless not with reference to his manner of painting, but to the way in which he formulated his conception of the landscape. He was not concerned so much with its obvious phenomena as with the impression that it aroused in his own imagination.
The distinction is a very general one. Everywhere there are those to whom the obvious appeals with undisturbed frankness; they have an instinct for facts, and for confronting them singly and directly; always, too, there are others to whom the facts are but a basis of suggestion. ”

“ Wrapt from all contact with the distractions of the art world, he had with the prescience of sincerity put forth his hand toward the most interesting phase of the latest movements. I mean the search for the significance of things, as of higher and more abiding value than the things themselves.
Fuller’s life was a romance of more than usual human import, characterized by a singular unity of purpose. He is not to be considered, on the one hand as a man, and on the other as an artist, with qualities, as is not unusual, respectively dissimilar and conflicting. ”

“ Like most of the best landscape painters of every country, he is entirely self-taught. The appeal of nature, to one who is a true lover of it, is so personal that no other man’s method will avail to express what he feels. He is compelled to discover his own way of utterance, conforming in its individuality to the particular quality of his sincerity. With Walker the sincerity is characterized not only by a determination to reach the truth, but by an instinct for the larger kinds of truth, those which need no enforcing, but make their own significance slowly and surely recognized. ”

“ For all its menace, the sky is beautiful, and in union with the other notes of the scheme produces a throbbing tenderness of harmony that is irresistibly appealing. It is through his colour schemes that Walker tempers his force with persuasiveness. For he is one of that small band to whom colour is as essential a part of their expression as notes are to the singer. You may see pictures in which the colour is little more than tints to differentiate the objects; others in which it is merely an accurate rendering of the phenomena studied ”

“ One fails to find a rhythmic continuity or periodic emphasis of movement and colour, they vary conspicuously in size and colour and in character of composition and motive, and make their impression separately, instead of being in consecutive accord.
But if from a decorative standpoint these canvases are open to adverse criticism, let it not divert attention from their essential merit. Such big and serious effort is none too usual in painting—the opportunity for it, one must add in fairness, too infrequently occurs—so that, when one meets it, one’s heart goes out in appreciative acknowledgment. ”

“ To his decorations at the Boston Public Library much of what one has said of the Shakespeare paintings is applicable. They are not dramatic; their impressiveness is of a quiet and tempered sort. As one becomes familiar with these pictures, their power to make one feel the reasonableness and the beauty of the old thought; to feel it, too, not as something entirely strange, but as of present interest, grows and grows upon one. The intellect that has conceived them is not of the kind that leaps to an inspired result. ”

“ And in another way many of these canvases of Walker’s involve this heroic suggestion. While close studies of pastoral and agricultural life in a portion of this continent to-day, they have a more universal significance and set one’s imagination back in the Old World that we call Homeric; times of spaciousness and simplicity, when we fancy that man’s strength was in closest affinity with nature’s; times of wholesomeness and poise of mind and body, when man lived by nature’s rule, and labour was loving. ”

“ In later years he has found the seclusion in his own home, yielding to the natural tendency, as the years grow upon one, to feel the world to be less and less, and those closest to one more and more. And, it must be remembered, the conditions of the world were never quite to his liking, while his home is{140} what he has made it and would have it. Yet this, after all, represents the evolution of a man rather than of the artist—a yielding to circumstances, inclinations, conveniences, rather than a following of one’s star. ”