Picture Winifred Dysart by American painter George Fuller

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 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 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.

Picture Nydia by American painter George Fuller

According to Fuller’s way of thinking, “color in its highest sense is a delicate sense of gradation,” and as Mr. Howells informs us in his brief sketch of the artist’s life, “He preferred to remove the object of interest in his picture a degree into its atmosphere, believing that this gave a greater chance for expression,” just as one might say that the stage provides an atmosphere for the actor in whatever role he may appear that enables him to realize more effectually its possibilities. This atmosphere in Fuller’s canvases is adjusted always to that degree of definition he considered best suited to bring out the particular characteristics of the type pictured without discovering the obvious and inessential details of the mizzen scene. It is because of this that the Nydia is so much more than an imaginary portrait of Bulwer’s heroine. She is the personification of all the tragedy of the blind made doubly real and moving by her youth and beauty. There is nothing forced about the development of the meaning of such a calamity in the picture; rather is it apparently, though not actually, modified by his removal of the figure a degree into the atmosphere. It illustrates very forcibly, the logic of his theory. The painting Nydia came in 1882.
Every one of great works of Fuller’s was painted long after he had left the Deerfield farm where somehow he had found leisure to invent for himself a style that was eminently his own.

Picture And She was a Witch by American painter George Fuller

He produced immediately thereafter five other figure subjects similar in kind but not quite so fine, the Psyche, the Lorette and the Priscilla all in 1882, the Arethusa in ’83, and the Fidalma in ’84. With these dates to go by it is not difficult to determine his best period as beginning in 1877, when he made the first study of The Romany Girl. Especially as we know that this date is also that of the finest of his groups, And She was a Witch, a painting now unfortunately in a half-ruined condition and in immediate need of restoration. During his last years his reaction to the vicarious experiences of the creator of the beautiful, whose material is the emotional content of life, was less sure in itself, and his power to insinuate in the figures he portrayed anything like the same amount of feeling that is sensed in the presence of these figures is increasingly patent. He was able to visualize his ideas and the figures were expressive, but they never move us quite as those do that were painted just previously. Fuller once said to an artist friend, “It is often what you leave out that makes your picture.” He customarily left out a great deal, but he also put a great deal in, and it was as much what he put into his pictures as what he left out that made them. Into his figures he put reality and as much of individual emotion and of the intellectual attitude of specific types as one will find anywhere in the art of his day. A power possessed by some painters of almost every period, but by few of any time in such a high degree, it ranks him with the greatest of those who have essayed the portrayal of human character as it is affected by the dominant influences of life.