John C. Van Dyke

“ But the impression is somewhat misleading. Every stroke is calmly calculated, every touch is coolly designed. If the effect looks labored, the palette-knife is used to clean the canvas and the work is done over again. Infinite pains are taken that infinite pains shall not appear. There is no excitement or feverish haste, however swift the brush may seem to travel. The nimble hand obeys a well-trained mind, and if the work is easily and accurately done, it is not through any burst of inspiration or preternatural facility of the moment, but through long and careful training. ”

“ But quality is not precisely either melody or harmony, though it is the difference between music and mere sound. It is the difference also between silk and gingham, between an air blue and a baby-blue, between a luminous shadow and gray paint, between a forceful, telling line and a halting, rambling one. Quality is the badge of distinction—that something which puts a cachet of authority upon a work of art and places it among the masterpieces of all time. Did Chase have it? ”

“ The slight inclination of a head, the shyness of a glance, the mobility of a mouth, the uneasiness of a hand, the nervous strain of a gesture are all turned to account in the ultimate result. Every tone of color in itself and in its relation to the other tones, every light in its relation to its shadow and to the other lights, every melting contour in contrast with every accented contour, and every texture in relation to every other texture—all are caught within the angle of the painter’s focus. ”

“ The arrangement is large, big in simplicity of masses. The color is the usual gray-blue, but there is a fine note about it, with a light and an air that would count for little in reproduction but are very effective in the picture itself. The canvas comes precious near being a great affair of form, light, and air. It is as sharp in drawing and as flat and dull in its surface painting as his other works. The naïve simplicity of the brush-work is astonishing. Homer knows no tricks of handling, and will resort to no glazes, scumbles, or stipples. ”

“ A distribution and pigeonholing of our nine American painters as regards aim and tendency would perhaps place Inness, Wyant, and Martin among the most intelligent and sympathetic of the earlier men; Homer, La Farge, and Whistler the most detached and self-sufficient of the middle men, and Chase, Alexander, and Sargent the most facile and best trained of the younger men. The last three may, indeed, stand as epitomizing the art movement which took form and gave tongue in the Society of American Artists. ”

“ In taking up portraiture as the field of his endeavor Sargent was perhaps wise as well as fortunate, for it requires the keen, cool observer, the man who can record the fact without romance, to make a good portrait-painter; and Sargent has proved himself an observer above all. He is not a poet in paint, nor does he indulge in sentiment, feeling, or emotion. He records the fact. If I apprehend him rightly, such theory of art as he possesses is founded in observation. ”

“ He did not wholly achieve art, for some of it was born to him and some of it, perhaps, was thrust upon him. He came to it early, grew up in its atmosphere, and was under its spell at an impressionable age. Which is to say that he is not a self-made painter in the Inness-Wyant sense, but something of a traditional painter in the La Farge sense. Training started him aright, but his great success is, of course, not wholly due to that. Genius alone can account for the remarkable content of his work. ”

“ What are the significant and permanent features in landscape? Well, above all is light—the first of created things, and to this latest day the most beautiful of nature’s manifestations. Corot spent his life painting it and even on his deathbed was raving about it in delirium. No wonder Martin was a great admirer of Corot, for he, too, was devoted to the splendor of light. In all of his later pictures it is a leading feature, and the eye is inevitably drawn at once to this beauty of the sky. ”

“ Enthusiasm is usually impatient of delay or restraint; it is always eager for action. Yet one cannot fully understand even so obvious an object as the model on the stand without reflection. It must be seen and thought over and contemplated before one takes up the brush. Nothing very great comes from dashing down on canvas something seen for an instant only. But Chase, in spite of his talk, was not one who reflected long or had the contemplative mind. ”

“ He is just as frankly dealing with the surface as Whistler, with the mere difference that Whistler asks us to regard him decoratively and Chase desires to be looked at technically, as one might consider a Stevens, a Vollon, a Fortuny, or a Boldini. We surely are not so narrow in outlook as to deny admiration and high rank to such masters of the brush as these. They are artists in the narrow sense that they deal with art alone and consider painting only from the æsthetic point of view, but who shall say they are not precisely and exactly right? ”

“ Homer is an excellent illustration of what a man cannot do entirely by himself. With his initial force and his keen vision he could make a very powerful report. Had he been educated, taught restraint and method, given a sense of style, schooled in decorative value, he might have risen to the great gods of art. But perhaps not. Even pedagogues, in their late years, begin to doubt the worth of training. It might have ruined Winslow Homer. Yet, nevertheless, it is the thing that his admirers always feel the lack of in his pictures. ”

“ They are merely appearances of form, color, and light presented with astonishing breadth, force, and simplicity. Sargent has never evidenced any liking for things queer. He is too intelligent for fads and fancies, too sane for mad movements in art. There is not the slightest indication of impressionism, futurism, or cubism in his work. The fashions have never interested him; but style—the best way of presenting a thought or theme—has no doubt been in his thought since boyhood. ”

“ It is the fine humanity of it—the eternal womanly—that catches the fancy. It is the portrait of a sensitive, refined American woman—in a way the ideal of a type that every American has seen or at some time has known about. Chase, with all his talk about dealing with surfaces only, sometimes talked the other way and expanded on character. He knew the paint-brush could go beneath the surface, for his own brush occasionally brought up astonishing results. ”

“ Precision in drawing immediately begins to evaporate when one starts to knead or overlay the surface; and to weaken Sargent’s accuracy in drawing would be to imperil his authority and dispel such a thing as conviction. One cannot imagine it. If he should now deliberately try for subtlety or depth of color or seek to obtain a mysterious or illusory or enamelled surface, his friends in art would immediately declare him in decline and roll their eyes heavenward in despair. ”

“ The general public usually regards any breadth of brush-work whatever as a sign of impressionism. The term in its present meaning, or lack of meaning, covers a multitude of stupidities. Every one who paints gives an impression because he cannot give anything else. Realism is a misnomer. The real is nature itself, and art is the report about the real made by the painter. If it is a minute report of surface detail that can be seen through a magnifying-glass the public immediately dubs it realistic ”

“ He is not American in the sense of knowing the land and the people and reflecting our life and civilization. Just as little has his birth in Italy made him Italian or his residence in France and England made him French or English. No country can claim him, no people can appropriate him, for in reality he is a citizen of the world at large—the manner of man we sometimes call a cosmopolite. If there is one place above another that he can be traced to and said to emanate from it is Paris; and Paris is no longer merely the first city of France. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great landscapists have usually regarded a tree as more important in its shadow masses and volume than in its leaves, a rock as more impressive in its weight than its veins or stains, a bar of sunlight more striking in its luminosity than in its [Pg 60] sharp-cut edges. Seeing and painting that way it is easy to comprehend how they should be set down as impressionists when in a large sense they are making more faithful record than the men who see only the surface glitter. Such men were Corot, Constable, Inness, Wyant, not to mention Manet or Monet. ”

“ Living much to himself, something of a hermit in his mountain home, weighed down by misfortunes and disappointments, the wonder grows that he not only kept up and improved his technique to the end, but that he preserved his serenity of mood and purity of outlook through it all. He must have been a man with fortitude of soul beyond the average. It is not every painter that can turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones. ”

“ They immediately set up studios in New York, and, with the enthusiasm and assurance of youth, began to impart information to the effect that the only painting of importance was that of Europe. As for the native American art, it was not worth reckoning with. The Academy of Design was merely the abiding-place of the ossified, and, of course, it would be surrendered on the demand of the younger men. But the Academy, after a battle of words, declined to give up the fort, and a little later declined even to hang some of the pictures of the gifted. ”

“ There is no contradiction of character in these two phases of Martin’s mentality. They argue merely versatility. He was exceedingly fond of the silent, even melancholy, beauty of nature, as he was of the solemn seriousness of fine poetry; but these were not themes for talk at the club. Mrs. Martin says she never heard him “talk shop” and that, with several notable exceptions such as La Farge and Winslow Homer, most of his close friends were people in other professions than painting. He never tabooed art as a topic of conversation, but he could talk on other themes quite as well. ”

“ In the final analysis Whistler’s fame must rest upon his pictures, though a certain amount of notoriety will probably always be given his sayings and a proper admiration accompany his writings. As a painter and an etcher he has a now-unquestioned place and he will hold it. Nothing in nineteenth-century art is quite of a kind with his. It stands alone in its aim and purpose, belongs to no art movement of the time, proclaims the ideals of no race or people. As for the usual motives of painting, Whistler scorned them or denied them. ”

“ To my mind, one of the simplest explanations of this matter of technique is to say that it is the eloquence of art. When a speaker has the gift of fine oratory we hang upon his words and gestures, we are spellbound by his intensity and his style, no matter on what subject he chooses to address us. I fear some people confuse technique with the use of a slashing brush and big rough strokes of paint. ”

“ Much paint has been spread on canvas in that time and hundreds of hands have been busy producing pictures. The “young men” have become old men and many of them have dropped out. The movement itself no longer moves, though some of its best men are still painting. But what is the net result of these forty years? Have the European-trained, after all, succeeded in producing in their one generation, sans tradition, an American art? No one will question for a moment that they have produced many exceptionally good works, even masterpieces; that they are a competent, even learned, body of artists ”

“ There are always two sides to a quarrel, and there are several sides to art. It may be a symphony of color as Whistler insisted, an arrangement of line or a matter of facile workmanship as Alexander and Chase contended. No one will deny that. In fact there is a modern disposition to locate the art of a picture strictly within the limits of craftsmanship. But a picture may express something more than the skill of the painter. Many of the craft have shown that it is a means of expressing moods, passions, feelings, sentiments, emotions ”

“ It is rigid in its outlines and stony in its texture, as though reinforced for purposes of mechanical reproduction. The man is little more than so much tackle and line, so ropelike is his treatment, and the enormous hollow of the sea is merely a perilous background. As for color, the picture is gray and would lose none of its fetching quality if done in black-and-white. There is no love for color as color nor for painting as painting here. The handling was evidently as little pleasure to the painter as it is to us. ”