Samuel Isham

“ This education has greatly raised the average of our art; but a few men of the older time had strength and feeling to work out a training for themselves more personal and perhaps as permanent as that of the later day. Time tests all things, and its verdict cannot be foreseen; but it is doubtful if it will place any of our modern landscape artists before Martin or Inness. Among these modern landscape painters are men of such talent as H. W. Ranger, Bruce Crane, and J. Francis Murphy, without mention of whom no article on American landscape painters would be complete. ”

“ Then, during a few years in Italy, the glorious landscapes, the historic traditions, the art of old masters, all combined to develop in the artist, who was then but a young man, that quality of imagination which was needed to make him a genius. ”

“ In contrast to these men, who sought to give interest and dignity to their work by choosing imaginative or strange, far-sought subjects, may be placed those whose interest was rather in the familiar native landscape that lay about them, who found in it beauty sufficient for their needs if only they could fully express the emotions with which it inspired them. ”

“ As the settlements developed and the amenities of life increased better men came, and native painters were found, until about the end of the eighteenth century a portrait school of surprising merit arose, founded on the contemporary English school, and developed men like Copley, Stuart, and Sully. The other branches of painting, however,—history, allegory, genre, still life, landscape, and the rest,—were rarely attempted, and usually with unsatisfactory results. ”

“ They were mostly sincere, hard-working painters, and very charming, worthy men personally. They won for themselves a social position in the old New York of the ’60’s and ’70’s greater and more important than any other artistic group has enjoyed in this country. Their paintings were also admired and bought for handsome prices, and as a whole they were prosperous. Time has dealt rather hardly with their fame. Though all of the men whose names have just been cited left works that may still be seen with pleasure, yet as a rule the pictures of the school were thin, laborious, and timid. ”

“ Like many other early American artists, he was self-taught. His father, a carpenter in Albany, New York, was not easily persuaded to let the boy follow up a natural talent for painting. Martin first tried carpentering, shopkeeping, and architecture. In each case his desire to draw pictures was too strong for him,—boards, paper, blank walls, were decorated with landscapes,—until his employers found it necessary to discharge the young artist. ”

“ AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTERS
A. H. Wyant THREE
Many a great artist has begun life in some distasteful branch of trade. Wyant worked for a harness maker. He was born and brought up at Port Washington, Ohio, and though he is said to have sketched flowers and leaves on the kitchen floor during his childhood, and later to have used his spare time in sign painting, he had no real opportunity either of showing his own talent or of seeing pictures by other artists until he was nearly twenty. ”

“ Thomas Moran was apprenticed to a wood engraver, whose art he mastered before starting to work in color. Engraving has in fact occupied a considerable part of his life ever since, and his etchings are among the best that have been done in America. ”

“ AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTERS
Frederick Edwin Church SIX
Many people like to find something unusual or striking in a picture. To these the paintings of Frederick Edwin Church make a special appeal. The range of Church’s art is wide, and covers subjects chosen from many parts of the world. ”

“ It is more vital and more subtle; but all of Inness’s work except his very earliest reflects the inner nature of the man. It has none of the dignified melancholy of Martin, which has also at times its note of revolt. Inness is never trivial: he keeps his seriousness; but he is never sad. Nature is to him always beautiful, always kindly.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
ACROSS THE FIELDS, BY D. W. TRYON
American Art Annual
D. W. TRYON
With Wyant, Martin, and Inness our early landscape school reached its culmination. ”

“ He was a sensitive, delicate youth, who suffered much in his wanderings while trying to support himself, at first by his trade of wood engraving, but most of all after the chance meeting with an itinerant portrait painter led him to take up art. ”

“ While he showed no desire to imitate the mystic subjects of his master, Church cared little for the common world immediately around him. He seems to have thought that the nobler the subject the nobler the picture, and he ransacked the whole earth for its beautiful, strange, or impressive scenes. ”

“ The budding artists were no longer willing to pick up their art by their own exertions, aided by occasional counsel from their elders or such inadequate schools as the country then furnished, but departed in ever increasing numbers to the famous schools of Europe. ”