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 The Glastonbury Meadows by American painter Dwight Wyant Tryon

There is an earlier phase of Dwight Wyant Tryon’s work in which there is more of the fact and less of the significance of nature. It ends practically as soon as he has mastered his forms and settled upon his composition. After that he is busy with light and shadow, values and quality, in which he finds a more efficient means for the expression of the emotional content of his theme. In the sense, however, that these earlier works are a more literal transcript of familiar rather than unfamiliar aspects of nature, more direct in their construction and less calculated in their elaboration, they correspond more closely to historic standards and satisfy more generally that large portion of the public which remains conservative in its appraisal of artistic merit. As few of us have yet outgrown entirely conservative tendencies, it follows that practically all find in them much to admire. Only our recent and enthusiastic interest in, and knowledge of, the newer and finer developments of landscape painting enables us to appreciate the subtleties of his later work and to see in it a more notable achievement. Several of the early pictures are of foreign subjects, the results of his student days in France. They are naturally not so convincing as the New England canvases in their characterization of locality.
The Glastonbury Meadows of 1881 illustrates the early phase of his art. The former is as literal in the exactitude with which it reproduces the topographical features of the country as it is lovely in its rendering of the pleasant quiet of a sunny summer’s day. The scene is singularly satisfying in its familiarity and the fine simplicity of the composition emphasizes its peculiar charm. It is a masterpiece of the better sort of realism.

Picture The Early Morning September by American painter Dwight Wyant Tryon

The development of American landscape has been singularly steady and consistent. That of Inness, Wyant, and Martin is obviously founded upon that of Bierstadt, Durand, and Kensett, and that of Tryon and Murphy is no less plainly the outcome of theirs. It has been a case at each step forward of the younger artist taking up the formula of his immediate predecessor, refining upon it and adapting it more perfectly to the emotional significance of the subject. Bierstadt is grandiose, but undisturbed by the human element that obstructs the grandeur of Cole; Martin and Inness discard the panoramic and the photographic, and in their lifetime our landscape first becomes truly significant in that it embodies feeling as well as representation. With Tryon it assumes a new intimacy through a harmonious emphasis of certain subtleties. Tryon’s landscape, besides being intimate, which it might be without necessarily being in any sense significant, is very poetic. Its poetry is that of an acknowledged precision, but it is no less authentic on that account and patently more perfect. The poetry of earth is evident in his pictures, but not any great portion of it, just a small measure of the minor poetry a thin strain but no less sweet, whether it throb with the ecstasy of the spring, sparkle with the starlight of a summer’s night, or shimmer with the silvery mists of morn. His eye is trained to envisioning the most transitory and the most elusive of atmospheric phenomena and this enables him to simulate them in the ethereal envelopment that serves a distinct purpose in accentuating the poignancy of his point of view.

With a few pictorial motifs he has contrived the evolution of an exquisite and alluring type of landscape, as accurate in its essential truth to nature as it is individual in its variation from other familiar types. If he is conscious of the limitations of a sort of fixed compositional form, which is characteristic, it is evident that he finds room therein for expressing very adequately whatever he has to say. This may be because he is contented never to try to say too much.

The Early Morning September of 1904 is representative example of this period.

Picture The Cernay La Ville by American painter Dwight Wyant Tryon

American Landscape of today is remarkable rather for fineness than for largeness of vision, for quality rather than for strength. A result of more careful study of the technic of pictorial art, it manifests itself in a facility unknown to the craftsmen of the Hudson River school, and in a tendency toward specialization in choice of subject which, with the possible exception of Wyant, was as foreign to practitioners of the period immediately following as it was to them. There ensues a measurable diminution of virility, together with an appreciable increase in subtlety of expression.

The painter of today is more proficient than his predecessor and therefore his landscape is more precious and more precise in its interpretation of particular phases of nature. He lacks, however, the understanding that enabled a man like Inness, for instance, to visualize not alone one or two but many of her moods. It is a natural consequence of a more perfect technical training, the earlier artist, self-taught, inventing an imperfect method to express the big thing that powerfully moved him; the later, equipped with a superior style, intrigued by the elusiveness of certain lovely effects which he never tires of trying to transfer to his canvas. In the first instance the painter tries for a technic worthy of his subject, in the second for a subject worthy of his technic. Whatever the material basis of his landscape, however true it may be in its portrayal of any actual area of the earth, the interest that absorbs the spectator’s attention in it is almost invariably centred in the sky. His pictures are not so much remarkable as representations of the world in which we live as they are illuminating as expressions of something of the infinity of beauty that like a halo surrounds the earth.

The Cernay La Ville of 1881 by American painter Dwight Wyant Tryon illustrates the early phase of his art. The picture is one of the finer of his French landscapes, full of an admirable sincerity. It has about it the air of an actual scene translated by the touch of art into a vision of measurable beauty.