In 1843 George Fuller wrote from his Deerfield farm to Henry Kirk Brown, then in Italy, “I have concluded to see nature for myself, through the eye of no one else.” It may have been a decision forced upon him by circumstances that denied familiarity with the visions of other painters, but it was no less a wise one and resulted eventually in his creating a kind of picture distinctively different from those with which the public was already acquainted. He may have underestimated the value of technic, for certainly time has made havoc with much that he did, but even when he wrote from Italy (whither he went in 1860 to study the old masters) that it pleased him “to see how the old fellows went at their subject to tell their story, and how scumbling, light and dark shadows, took care of themselves,” he added, “Yes, and drawing, too, not that these things are less important, but that something is.
The picture Winifred Dysart followed in 1881. Winifred Dysart is patently more pleasing in color, more satisfactory in technic, but notwithstanding less significant and therefore less impressive than either of the paintings mentioned. It is, however, a sufficiently interesting picture to arrest one’s attention anywhere and as likely as not to satisfy one quite as completely with its exquisite suggestion of the dreaming loveliness of maiden meditation. The figure is less mature even than the Nydia and a fraction more graceful, the pose simpler and finer, the drawing as good, and the idea perhaps only seemingly less perfectly embodied in the model because of the less dramatic quality of the conception. This girl is lyrical in her loveliness, the Nydia tragic in her trouble.
Picture Visit of the Mistress by American painter Winslow Homer
In a picture like The Bright Side, 1865, or The Visit of the Mistress by American painter Winslow Homer, 1876, at the National Gallery, Washington, there is no attempt to tell any story. But the happy abandon of the negro teamsters in the former is as infectious as the quiet contentment of the latter is satisfying to the observer. The individualities of the people pictured by American painter Winslow Homer are preserved in such a way as to convey to one an exact sense of their feelings, and it is because of this that the pictures appeal to us. They are notable examples of his ability to reproduce the sentiment as well as the appearance of a scene, and in their realism they compare with the best of his work in which the figure appears at all.
Picture Violin Girl of a Young Girl by American painter Arthur B. Davies
The picture Violin Girl of a Young Girl by American painter Arthur B. Davies, framed as a water-color in a wide paper mat when recently shown, is an early picture very different in execution and effect. A composition as convincing in its indication of actuality as the earlier picture of the Girl at the Fountain, the figure is drawn with extreme care and finished with a degree of precision that is unique in his art. The rich tonality of its depths of sensuous and satisfying color achieves an effect possible only to the medium as it produces the emotional equivalent of music in similar harmonies of sensitive interpretation. The pose, restricted as it is by the action, is relieved of any semblance of the commonplace by a conscientious elimination of all superfluous triviality of detail, and the picture is made really memorable by a subtle rendering of facial expression through which a definite realization of the emotion is communicated to the spectator. The work has something of the simplicity of design and of the elegance and refinement of color that one associates with Florentine painting of the Renaissance, without any suggestion of it, however, in the more obvious and essential characteristics of technic or intention. Color more eloquent than that in this picture one seldom encounters.
Several of artist Davies finer decorative panels with figures have something of the supreme refinement of the sculptured friezes of antiquity and as little relation to actual life. They are superlatively attractive representations of the immortal beauties of fable rather than of fact, and to admit that they continue to appeal to certain subconscious predilections for what one may term art for art’s sake long after one’s first enthusiasm over them has definitely passed, is to acknowledge an approximation to artistic perfection that becomes a patent and permanent interest upon fuller acquaintance.
Picture Vale of Tempe of a Young Girl by American painter Arthur B. Davies
The ingenuity of Mr. Arthur B. Davies invention invests his painting with unusual interest. His landscape presents many original and engaging patterns in which the imagination threads secret pathways of delight and his figure pieces delicately suggest in design ideas that are frequently as unsubstantial as dreams and as lovely. The eclecticism that is evident in his work in no wise interferes with the individual taste observable in its elaboration or the personal quality of its appeal. Many of later canvases by American painter Arthur B. Davies are attractive illustrations of moments of classic enchantment shepherds piping to their flocks upon the heights of Parnassus, nymphs dancing in the painting Vale of Tempe, or maybe a group of unicorns gravely regarding some unfamiliar vista of terrestrial grandeur. Keats’ description of the relief upon the Grecian Urn is the immortalization of that significant beauty one glimpses in his paintings. His earlier canvases are generally richer in color than his later works and embody a more humble and more human and therefore more understandable presentation of various manifestations of life illuminated with a touch of recognizable realism. Their spontaneity is too obvious to allow of their escaping attention and their rare simplicity too intriguing to permit of their being neglected for the more calculated and hence more compelling effectiveness of his subsequent creations.
Picture The Twilight by American painter Dwight Wyant Tryon
The Twilight of 1912 by American painter Dwight Wyant Tryon shows the development of his art. In it one discerns an individual type of landscape and the evidences of a rare technic which he has all but perfected. It is, of course, not new, but it is very personal, and it helps to Dwight Wyant Tryon to re-create in delicate gradations of light and of shadow subtle atmospheric effects that are the visible signs of the moods of nature just as smiles and tears are the visible signs of human emotion. However lovely the face of nature, it is always her feelings that he is interested in interpreting, one might say, and it is this characteristic of his landscape that makes it interesting to us. One may estimate quite accurately the worth of any of his later works by the measure of one’s realization of its emotional significance. The objective world, its primitive and elemental grandeur, the naked truth of nature, as we see it in the works of other artists, concerns him not at all. Dwight Wyant Tryon’s art is subjective and his interest is in the spiritual significance of the visible world as it is made intelligible in immaterial beauty. His pictures are poetic but lyric, not epic in their intention. His landscape has a firm foundation, for it is based upon a real knowledge of the topography of a section of the country with which he has been in close contact almost continuously. It is a real, not an imaginary landscape, though it may often seem unreal in its unaccustomed beauty, as his effects approximate the unearthly splendor of those rare and exquisite moments he pictures. Singularly simple in its graphic portrayal of actual appearances, it is variously expressive of a considerable range of feeling which finds embodiment in the sensitive record of definite atmospheric conditions. As the weather affects us in real life, so it does in his art, where the mood of nature is the most important factor and informs the landscape with real meaning. In other words, it is the immaterial rather than the material evidence of nature that interests us in his landscape, just as in human nature it is character rather than personal appearance that interests us.
Picture Twilight by American painter John Francis Murphy
There size of itself has little or nothing to do with the greatness of any work of art, and yet many amateurs of today, especially in this country, persist in thinking and speaking only of large paintings as important pictures. Small as well as large paintings are sometimes important, and whoever habitually overlooks them necessarily misses a considerable measure of what is best in pictorial art. Among our native landscape painters J. Francis Murphy has to his credit a sufficient number of landscapes in miniature of various periods to constitute a little gallery as representative as any that could be formed by gathering together a similar number of his large canvases. Quality, which is a very attractive element in his big pictures, painter John Francis Murphy’s smaller works possess in a superlative degree. The natural intimacy of their appeal, however, is in no sense encompassed at the expense of any sacrifice of spatial design or atmospheric envelopment which have so much to do with the authority as well as the beauty of his interpretation of nature. The best of his large pictures have their counterparts in miniature little canvases that are just as truly and unmistakably masterpieces of landscape painting. One may study in them the characteristic technic of the artist, his sensitive subordination of insistent though inharmonious passages of color, and his discrimination and discretion in deliberately emphasizing the larger and finer aspects of linear design and chiaroscuro. In other words the best of these little landscapes are in every way as truly great pictures as the best of his large canvases. Artist John Francis Murphy is, as Blakelock was, always at his best in his smallest and his largest pictures. The intermediate sizes seem not to afford area enough for his biggest efforts and yet to be too large to permit of his achieving in them that intimate touch which so sensibly enhances the charm of the smaller sizes. His little landscapes are more definitely representative and more truly expressive of nature herself, while his large landscapes oftener than not impress one as embodying rather his own feeling as he reacts to whatever mood it is he has chosen to interpret.
The painting Twilight of approximately six by twelve inches, dated 1884, is exquisite example of the early period. The picture Twilight is a similar composition, the chief interest, however, being a fine rendering of the glamour of the afterglow. It is a sensitive interpretation, full of that subtlety of refinement which is so much a part of the artist’s great gift as a landscape painter.
Picture The Quadroon by American painter George Fuller
The something to which George Fuller alluded was unquestionably the idea, the subject of the picture, which to him as to all of us constitutes its real significance and which, to borrow a phrase from the idiom of the theatre, an artist must “get over,” or make the observer fully realize, if his work is to serve any useful purpose in the world. Whatever criticism may be properly applied to his method of painting, it cannot be denied that he did just that and with a manner comparable only to that of a great actor who impersonates characters upon the stage with such a semblance of life as to stir us to unaccustomed manifestations of feeling.
The most touching and the most telling of George Fuller’s figure pictures, however, are The Quadroon. The Quadroon is of 1880. Again it is a girl he chooses to interpret his idea, and, young as she is, he manages to invest her with the definite appearance of a comprehension of the sorrows of her inheritance, overwhelming if unconvincing to her troubled heart. In her he has contrived a graphic presentation of the bitter wrong mankind has worked upon man since time began, and has driven its meaning home by the look of weary despair that clouds her childish face. Few modern pictures as perfect of the kind and they are numbered among the supreme masterpieces of the art of the nineteenth century: works like Whistler’s portrait of his mother and Millet’s Man with the Hoe. They are the present-day equivalents of such things as Caravaggio’s Homer and Rembrandt’s Saul listening to David playing the Harp. A certain indescribable but no less unmistakable and miraculous similitude of life differentiates them from other canvases of their kind.
Picture The Life Line by American painter Winslow Homer
Circumstance effectually precluded the possibility of painter Winslow Homer’s ever posing his models so as actually to paint from observation such pictures as The Life Line and The Undertow, and he had no sufficient knowledge of the figure to enable him to visualize, so as to paint from mental projections, the actual appearance of such scenes. Homer himself said that when he had selected a subject he painted it exactly as it appeared, and the sense in which this may have been true is indicated very clearly, by the measure in which he failed in some of his later works to picture the figure with any sort of convincing approximation to that realism in which it generally appears in his earlier canvases. Certainly the fact that a picture tells a story in no way prevents its being perhaps a great work of art, and in an exact ratio to the importance of the story a picture tells it may or may not be a masterpiece as an artist succeeds or fails in his presentation of whatever the subject may be. The common criticism of painter Homer is that he is an illustrator, not an artist; it is based upon an incomplete knowledge of his work and practically ignores the best of it those great marines that tell no stories and that have no meanings other than those that are inseparably associated with our thought of the sea, its power and its immensity. As a matter of fact, he was an illustrator and a very able one, and furthermore he was a great artist; he became a great artist whenever he gave up painting stories of the sea to paint the sea itself, as will be evident enough, to any one who contemplates such canvases as the Northeaster, and the Early Morning after a Storm at Sea. It is worth while to remark that, precisely because Homer painted a subject exactly as it appeared, his pictures of the sea are the greatest of our time, for they are above all else masterpieces of realism.
Picture Song of the Lark by American painter Winslow Homer
None of Winslow Homer’s canvases of early period are numbered among those which justify the preeminence of his position as an American painter is due more, perhaps, to the insistent dramatic quality of his later product than to any degree of artistic superiority in it sufficient to account for the prevailing neglect of the very notable compositions of his youth. If he eventually concluded that the native farmhand was an inartistic subject, it was not before he had painted one or two pictures of him that are fine enough in themselves to hold their own, in every sense save that of mere size, with some of the more pretentious of his later works. The figures in his early paintings not merely more convincing in construction but more satisfying in their individuality. They may not be so heroic in form, but neither are they so wooden in structure as those that follow in his great marines.
His early pictures also are eminently realistic and exact in their interpretation of everyday life, and very often as void of any literary meaning as the finest of his later works. They have always a human interest, however, associated with our knowledge of life, which suffices to arrest and hold the attention, and oftener than not they are really inviting in their coloring. Song of the Lark, 1876 (an idea which he used again, many years afterward, in the large canvas at Milwaukee), is excellent example of the finer sort of realism one finds in his farmyard pictures. Here all is simplicity and the figure has all the accustomed value of its actual importance in the scene no more, no less. They have generally more reality in their obvious relation to their surroundings than the figures he uses to illustrate his stories of the sea. Probably the very fact that at first he aimed at nothing more than a truthful rendering of what he found interesting in life, instead of endeavoring to produce instantaneous records of its dramatic moments, is sufficient to account for the sense of reality in these earlier and miss in his later productions.
Picture The Romany Girl by American painter George Fuller
In picture The Romany Girl the characterization of the type is confined to a very sensitive interpretation of facial expression, and most of all one senses it in the gypsy light within her eyes. Of the vivid scarves and kerchiefs we associate with the wandering tribes the artist has made no use and, except for the extraordinary head-dress and the sheaf of grain in her hand, there is nothing other than her look to indicate who or what she is. How fine was painter George Fuller’s perception of spiritual as distinguished from physical evidence of individuality is nowhere more apparent than in this canvas, where it is relied upon entirely to acquaint us with the character. Picture The Romany Girl romantic in her relation to life as we see from her glance. Picture The Romany Girl, which was the first in order of their inception, was begun in 1877.
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