Part 1

BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE

=Art for Art’s Sake.= University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of Painting. With 24 Illustrations. 12mo.

=The Meaning of Pictures.= University Lectures at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. With 31 Illustrations. 12mo

=Studies in Pictures.= An Introduction to the Famous Galleries. With 40 Illustrations. 12mo

=What is Art?= Studies in the Technique and Criticism of Painting. 12mo

=Text Book of the History of Painting.= With 110 Illustrations. New Edition. 12mo

=Old Dutch and Flemish Masters.= With Timothy Cole’s Wood-Engravings. Superroyal 8vo

=Old English Masters.= With Timothy Cole’s Wood-Engravings. Superroyal 8vo

=Modern French Masters.= Written by American Artists and Edited by Prof. Van Dyke. With 66 Full-page Illustrations. Superroyal 8vo

=New Guides to Old Masters.= Critical Notes on the European Galleries, Arranged in Catalogue Order. Frontispieces. 12 volumes. Sold separately

=Nature for Its Own Sake.= First Studies in Natural Appearances. With Portrait. 12mo

=The Desert.= Further Studies in Natural Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo

=The Opal Sea.= Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo

=The Mountain.= Renewed Studies in Impressions and Appearances. With Frontispiece. 12mo

=The Money God.= Chapters of Heresy and Dissent concerning Business Methods and Mercenary Ideals in American Life. 12mo

=The New New York.= A Commentary on the Place and the People. With 125 Illustrations by Joseph Pennell.

AMERICAN PAINTING AND ITS TRADITION

AMERICAN PAINTING

AND ITS TRADITION

AS REPRESENTED BY INNESS, WYANT, MARTIN, HOMER, LA FARGE, WHISTLER, CHASE, ALEXANDER, SARGENT

BY

JOHN C. VAN DYKE

Author of “Art for Art’s Sake,” “The Meaning of Pictures,” “What is Art?” etc.

With Twenty-four Illustrations

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1919

_Copyright, 1919, by Charles Scribner’s Sons_ _Published October, 1919_

[Illustration]

PREFACE

The painters about whom these chapters are written helped to make up the period in American painting dating, generally, from about 1878 to, say, 1915. That period has practically closed in the sense that a newer generation with different aims and aspirations has come forward, and the men who broke ground years ago in the Society of American Artists have turned their furrow and had their day. Indeed, those I have chosen to write about herein, with the exception of Sargent, have passed on and passed out. Not only their period but their work has ended. We are now beginning to see them in something like historic perspective. Perhaps, then, the time is opportune for speaking of them as a group and of their influence upon American art.

Not all of the one-time “new movement” originated and died with these nine men. Dozens of painters became identified with American art just after the Centennial, and many of those who came back from Munich and Paris in the late seventies and the early eighties are still living and producing. But while the nine were by no means the whole count they were certainly representative of the movement, and their works speak for almost every phase of it. The value of the movement to American art can be rightly enough judged from them.

During their lives these nine did not lack for praise--some of it wise and some of it otherwise. They were much exploited in print. I myself joined in the chorus. I had more or less acquaintance with all of them, lived through the period with them, and from 1880 on wrote much about them. My opportunities for seeing and hearing were abundant, and perhaps such value as this book may possess comes from my having been a looker-on in Vienna during those years. To personal impressions I am now adding certain conclusions as to what the men on my list, taken as a body, have established. They wrought during a period of great material development--wrought in a common spirit, making an epoch in art history and leaving a tradition. The pathfinders in any period deserve well of their countrymen. And their trail is worth following, for eventually it may become a broad national highway.

J. C. V. D.

Rutgers College, 1919.

CONTENTS

PAGE I. THE ART TRADITION IN AMERICA 1

II. GEORGE INNESS 19

III. ALEXANDER H. WYANT 43

IV. HOMER MARTIN 65

V. WINSLOW HOMER 89

VI. JOHN LA FARGE 115

VII. JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER 147

VIII. WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE 185

IX. JOHN W. ALEXANDER 217

X. JOHN S. SARGENT 243

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE GEORGE INNESS, “Evening at Medfield” 32

GEORGE INNESS, “Sunset at Montclair” 34

Reproduced by the courtesy of F. F. Sherman, publisher of “George Inness,” by Elliott Daingerfield

GEORGE INNESS, “Hackensack Meadows” 38

ALEXANDER H. WYANT, “Mohawk Valley” 52

ALEXANDER H. WYANT, “Broad, Silent Valley” 58

HOMER D. MARTIN, “View on the Seine” 78

HOMER D. MARTIN, “Westchester Hills” 84

Reproduced by the courtesy of F. F. Sherman, publisher of “Homer Martin,” by Frank Jewett Mather

WINSLOW HOMER, “Undertow” 102

WINSLOW HOMER, “Marine” 104

WINSLOW HOMER, “Fox and Crows” 108

JOHN LA FARGE, “Paradise Valley” 130

JOHN LA FARGE, “The Muse” 134

JOHN LA FARGE, “The Three Kings” 138

JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “Nocturne. Gray and Silver. Chelsea Embankment” 158

JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” 162

JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER, “The Yellow Buskin” 168

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “The Woman with the White Shawl” 202

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “Afternoon at Peconic” 204

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE, “Child Dancing” 212

JOHN W. ALEXANDER, “The Ring” 230

JOHN W. ALEXANDER, “Walt Whitman” 236

JOHN S. SARGENT, “Mrs. Pulitzer” 256

JOHN S. SARGENT, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose” 260

JOHN S. SARGENT, “Carmencita” 262

I

THE ART TRADITION IN AMERICA

During the Revolutionary Period, and immediately thereafter, art in America was something of sporadic growth, something not quite indigenous but rather transplanted from England. Painting was little more than portraiture, and the work was done after the English formula. America had no formula of its own. There was no native school of art, no tradition of the craft, no body of art knowledge handed down from one generation to another. West and Copley started out practically without predecessors. They were the beginners.

With Cole, Durand, and, later on, Kensett, that is about 1825, another kind of painting sprang up on American soil. It was the painting of landscape--landscape of the Hudson River variety--and, whatever its technical shortcomings, at least it had the merit of being original. Apparently nothing of artistic faith or of accumulated knowledge or art usage was handed down to the Hudson River men by the portrait-painters who had preceded them. The leaders worked from nature with little or no instruction. They were self-taught, and if any inkling of how work was carried on in the painting-rooms of Copley, Stuart, or Vanderlyn was given them, they turned a deaf ear to it or found it inapplicable to their landscape-work. If they knew of a tradition they ignored it.

This matter of tradition--the accumulated point of view and teaching of the craft--is of some importance in our inquiry. It has gone to the making of all the great art of the past. There were several hundred years of sculptors in Greece, with a continuous story, before Scopas and Praxiteles brought their art to final maturity; for centuries painters, with their craftsman-making guilds, had preceded Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian; countless “primitives” and “early men” went to the shades unsung before Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Holbein came to power. In America the Copley-Stuart contingent caught at, and in large measure grasped, the foreign teaching handed down by Reynolds and his school. Perhaps that accounts in some measure for their success. A generation later Cole and Durand started out to paint landscape without any teaching whatever. Does that account in any degree for their failure? They failed to produce any fine quality of art, but they had pupils and followers in whom the Hudson River school finally culminated. It became a school because Cole and Durand established with themselves a teaching, such as it was, and handed down to their pupils a point of view and a body of tradition. Perhaps again that explains, to some extent, the varied successes of such followers of the school as Inness, Wyant, Martin, Swain Gifford, Whittredge, McEntee.

But not entirely. Some of these last-named were influenced by European art, outgrew the teaching of their forerunners, and in middle life rather forsook their early love and faith. Yet it would be idle to contend that they had not received an inclination, even an inspiration, from contact with the older men. Short-lived though it was, and shallow as were its teachings, the Hudson River school, nevertheless, had weight with its followers. Even error is often helpful in establishing truth, and a feeble precedent is perhaps better than none at all. Some of the pupils--F. E. Church and Sandford Gifford, for examples--never outgrew their basic teaching. To the end they carried on the Cole-Durand tradition, improving and bettering it. They bettered it because they could add to their own view-point the observation and teaching of their masters. Three generations at least are supposed to be necessary to the making of the thorough gentleman. Is it possible to make the thorough artist in one?

But the Hudson River school was too frail inherently to carry great weight. Men like Inness, Wyant, and Martin soon began to see its weaknesses. Even before they went to Europe they had doubted and after their return to America they were openly heretical. They held allegiance only in the matter of the Catskill-Adirondack subject, and even that became modified to a virtual disappearance toward the end of their careers. Both aim and method changed with them. They saw deeper and painted freer, until finally they were wholly out of sympathy not only with the thin technique of the school but with its panoramic conception of nature.

So it was that in 1876 when the United States held its first national art exhibition--the Centennial, at Philadelphia--the painting of the country was in something of an anomalous condition. The Hudson River school was practically at the end of its rope. The older portrait-painters had been succeeded by Harding, Alexander, Neagle, Elliott, Inman, Page, Healy--each of them more or less going his own way. The German Leutze had been here and had blazed a brimstone trail of Düsseldorf method, along which some painters followed. Hicks and Hunt at Boston had introduced the French art of Couture and Millet, and they also had a following. Quite apart from all of them stood some independent personalities like La Farge and Winslow Homer, who seemed to say, “a plague on all your houses.” And they, too, went their own ways. There was no school unity.

No wonder then with these conflicting individualities, and with all traditions obsolete or unknown, there was no such thing as an American school of painting at the Centennial Exhibition. The visitor in Memorial Hall wandered hither and yon among the pictures and vainly strove to grasp a consensus of art opinion or even an art tendency. The exhibition was more or less of a hodgepodge. As a result both painter and public went away in a somewhat bemuddled condition. Perhaps the only thing about the exhibition that impressed one strongly was the general incompetence and inconsequence of it.

Just at this time there entered upon the scene another generation, a younger group of American painters. Many of them had seen the exhibition at the Centennial and had, perhaps, been unwarrantably influenced by it. They brought away from it a longing to paint; but they realized that such art as that at Philadelphia was not what they wished to produce, and if American teaching was responsible for it, so much the worse for the teaching. They would have none of it. Once more there was a sharp break with everything that might resemble a school view or a school method. The younger group left the country and sought instruction in European studios believing that nothing of good could come out of the Nazareth of America.

Some of this later generation had gone abroad for study just before 1876. Shirlaw, Chase, and Duveneck were at Munich; Maynard, Minor, and Millet at Antwerp; Blashfield, Bridgman, Beckwith, Thayer, Alden Weir, Low, Wyatt Eaton at Paris. After 1876 the exodus was greater and Paris was the goal. A few years later some of these students were homeward bound, having finished a more or less advanced course of instruction under competent masters. 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. This was regarded as unspeakably outrageous, and swift action followed. In 1877 there was a call for the establishment of a new art body, and out of it came the Society of American Artists, with twenty-two initial members.

The younger men had not invited the academicians as a body to join them, but they had recognized the talent of certain men, who, though members of the Academy, were not in full sympathy with it. In other words, the aloof element of the Academy was elected to membership in the Society. These men--La Farge, Inness, Martin, Moran, Tiffany, Colman, Swain Gifford--joined the new without abandoning the old, and the Society quickly got under way, with its declaration of independence nailed to the masthead. In ten years the Society had grown in membership to over a hundred, had held yearly exhibitions from 1878 on, and had achieved a substantial success--a success of technique, if nothing more.

It is worth noting just here that this departure was a third violent break in the American art tradition. The young men in the Society practically proclaimed that they would start all over again and build a more worthy mansion than their predecessors. Had they not gone to Europe and received the best of technical training? Did they not know how to draw and paint? For the first time in its history America might congratulate itself upon possessing a body of painters that understood the technique of their craft. American art would now begin.

Lest progressive craftsmanship should die out new students continued to go abroad, and the Art Students League was started for those stopping at home. This new institution was not bound by any conventionalities; its existence was a protest against them. It had no century-old precedents to live up to; it was free to stickle for good workmanship alone. It was the training-school for no peculiar kind of art; it stood ready and eager to adopt any new method or medium or material that was offered. It was progressive to the last degree--progressive to the extent of burning every bridge behind it and starting out _de novo_ to produce technicians (and consequent art) worthy of the name.

Well, the men, and the institutions, and the movement have been under way for forty years. 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; but has what they have said proclaimed American ideals and reflected American life, or has it repeated the conventions and _atelier_ methods of Europe? Has not the manner of saying with them been more in evidence than the thing said? Is their foreign-based art entirely satisfactory or representative of America?

From a Whistlerian point of view this matter of tradition is, of course, great nonsense. Art just “happens” in _Ten O’Clock_, and the artist is that one in the multitude whom the gods see fit to strike with divine fire. He is called to service by inspiration as were the prophets of old. All of which no doubt explains the anointing of Whistler but does not account for the high-priesthood of Velasquez, of Rembrandt, of Raphael, or of Rubens. To say that three centuries of guild-teaching in the best way to grind color, or lay a gesso ground, or draw a figure, or fill a given space, is not better than the intuition of any one man of a period is equivalent to saying that the accumulated knowledge of the world is worthless, and each new generation should discard it and begin all over again. That is substantially what Mr. Whistler advocated. And, further, that the artist should stand aloof and create independently of time, place, or people.

But out of nothing nothing comes, and psychology assures us that there is no such thing as originality save by a combination of things already known. The old is added to and makes the new. The old is the tradition of the craft; the new is the revised point of view and method plus the old. It was so with Whistler notwithstanding his pretty argument around the clock. He was beholden to Gleyre, Ingres, Boucher, Velasquez, Courbet, Albert Moore, Hokusai, and helped himself to them when, where, and how he could. He would have been the last one to deny it. Had there been more continuity and stability in his training, had he followed the teaching of the craft more intently, he would not have been worried all his life as to whether his people stood well upon their feet, and he might have produced art with the calmness and poise of his great Velasquez. His misfortune was that he had no thorough schooling, inherited no body of taste, and practically stood alone in art. That he succeeded was owing to exceptional genius. That he was never in the class with Velasquez or Titian or Rembrandt was perhaps due to the fact that they had the training and the tradition and he had not.

The Whistler type is not infrequently met in American life--the type that seeks to scale Olympus without the preliminary of antecedent preparation. In art he usually has half a dozen strings to his bow, and paints, lectures, writes, speaks, carries on a business in Wall Street or elsewhere. He is glib in many things, has great facility, is astonishingly clever; but somehow he never gets beyond the superficial. He has not depth or poise or great seriousness. There is no hard training or long tradition or intellectual heritage behind him. He is not to the manner born.

Every writer in America knows that present-day American literature, with some precious exceptions, does not reach up to contemporary English literature; that poetry or romance or criticism with us has not the form, the substance, or the technical accomplishment of the same work in France. Every architect in America must realize that with all the get-learned-quick of his foreign study, with all his appropriations from the Gothic or the Renaissance or the Georgian, with all his cleverness in solving business needs and doing building stunts under peculiar circumstances, there is something lacking in his productions; that they are not so monumental as he could wish for; that they are not firm set in the ground and do not belong to the soil and remain a part of the land and the people in the sense of contemporary French or even English architecture. Every musician with us must have a similar feeling about our music. As with architecture and painting, there have been some remarkable compositions put forth by our composers. Europe compliments us by playing them and nods approval at the endeavor, but again they do not reach up to corresponding work in Paris or Berlin or Munich. Why not? Have we not as good brains and fiddles in New York as in Vienna? What is it we lack?

Surely we are not wanting in energy, in resource, in materials. Is it perhaps the restraint of these that we need? Time and patience are very necessary factors in all of the arts. Attitude of mind, a sense of proportion--a style, in short--cannot be attained in a few years of schooling. To the training of a lifetime must be added a something that has been more or less inherited. That something handed down from father to son, from master to pupil, from generation to generation, is what I have called tradition. It is not technique alone, but a mental outlook, added to the body of belief and experience of those who have gone before. The skilled hand of a Kreisler, a Sargent, a MacMonnies is perhaps possible of attainment in a decade, but the mental attitude--its poise and its restraint--is that something which is inherited as taste, and many decades may go to its formation. In this latter respect, perhaps, Kreisler has had the advantage of both Sargent and MacMonnies.

Coming back, therefore, to the men of the Society of American Artists, we cannot say that they failed in skill or were wanting in endeavor, or had no intelligence. They had all of these, but, unfortunately, they were not of artistic descent, and inherited no patrimony of style. Instead they tried to adopt in a few years the long story of French style, and attained only that part of it relating to technique. They were of the third generation in American art, but each one of these generations had denied and forsworn its predecessor, had flung its mess of pottage, such as it was, out of the window, and had left the ancestral roof never to return. The third generation then had nothing by descent, not even a pictorial or a plastic mind that could see the world in images. It went forth empty-handed into the highways and byways of Europe, became proficient in craftsmanship, and relied upon that for success.

This is not merely figure of speech, but statement of fact. None of the American painters spoken of in these pages, with the exception of La Farge, came from what might be called an artistic family, or had æsthetic antecedents. They were boys on a farm or grew up in the atmosphere of trade or profession, and came to art at twenty or thereabouts. They then learned the technique of painting quickly, and with much facility, but their mental attitude toward art was untrained and remained undetermined. Long after they knew _how_ to paint they knew not _what_ to paint or how to think. Their point of view was superficial or commonplace, or otherwise negligible. I have excepted La Farge, for, as we shall see hereafter, he did have an æsthetic legend behind him. Is that why he is now placed as the one Olympian of the period? I would also partly except Inness, Wyant, and Martin, who did know and follow at one time the rather feeble Hudson River school tradition. I ask again is that why they remain, even to this day, the best of our rather long line of landscape-painters?