Part 3

That last statement of his about the civilized landscape is well worth noting, because that was the landscape he painted. His subjects are related to human life, and some of our interest in his pictures is due to the fact that he gives us thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are comprehensible by all. He tells things that every one may have thought but no one before him so well expressed. In other words, he brings our own familiar landscape home to us with new truth and beauty. This, it may be presumed, is the function of the poet and the painter in any land. It was the quality that made Burns and Wordsworth great and may account in measure for the fame of Rembrandt, Hobbema, Constable--yes, and Inness.

When he was young there were traditions of the Hudson River school in the air. The “mappy” landscape with its crude color and theatrical composition held the place of honor. Inness was probably captivated by it at first sight, but he soon discovered its emptiness. It had no basis in nature; it was not the landscape we see and know. The “Course of Empire” and the “Voyage of Youth” were only names for studio fabrications. The truly poetic landscape lay nearer home. This was what Inness called the “civilized landscape,” the familiar landscape, the _paysage intime_, the one we all see and know because it has always been before us--its very nearness perhaps blinding us to its beauty.

How hard it is to believe that the true poetry of the world lies close about us! We keep fancying that romance is not in our native village, but in Rome or Constantinople or Cairo; and that the poetic landscape is not that of the wood-lot behind the house, but that of Arden Forest or some Hesperidian garden far removed from us. Emerson has noted that at sea every ship looks romantic but the one we sail in. Yet there is plenty of romance in our ship if we have the eyes to see it; and there is abundance of beauty in the wood-lot if we have the intentness of purpose to study it out and understand it. Any one can admire the “view” from a mountain-top, but it takes some imagination to see beauty in the quiet meadow. And after you have seen it it requires a great deal of labor and skill to tell what you have seen. Wordsworth and Constable made more failures with it than successes. Just so with Inness. He shot wide of the mark innumerable times, but when he hit, it was with very decided effect.

A love of the familiar landscape would seem to have always been with Inness. After a period of following the Hudson River panorama of nature undefiled by man, he gave it up. While in Rome he produced some semiclassic landscapes, but he gave them up, too. Not so with the Fontainebleau-Barbizon landscape. Rousseau and his band had broken with the classic and were producing the _paysage intime_ to which Hobbema (not Constable, of whom they knew nothing) had called their attention through his pictures in the Louvre. They had done in France just what Inness had sought to do in America: they had abandoned the grandiloquent and put in its place the familiar. Inness was in sympathy with them almost from the moment he first saw their work. Had he been born in France, no doubt he would have been a member of the Rousseau-Dupré group.

Again it is worth noticing in passing that all of the so-called “men of 1830” were really provincial in what they produced. Corot painted Ville d’Avray, Rousseau, Dupré, and Diaz the Fontainebleau forest, Daubigny the Seine and the Marne. None of their work represents the south or the east of France, and none of it carries beyond France. It is localized about Paris. Just so with the work of Inness. It is emphatically American, but limited to the North Atlantic States. The appearances which he portrayed are peculiar to the region lying east of the Alleghanies. In his pictures the light and coloring, the forms and drift of clouds, the mists and hazes, the trees and hills, the swamps and meadows may be recognized as belonging to New Jersey or New York or New England, but none of them belongs to Minnesota or Louisiana or California. He pictured the American landscape perhaps more completely than any other painter before or since his time; but his “civilized landscape” was nevertheless limited as regards its geographical range.

Nor would we have it otherwise. All the masters of art have been provincial so far as subject goes. Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt never cared to go beyond their own bailiwicks for material. And Inness--though he may not rank with those just mentioned--found all the material he needed within fifty miles of New York. It was the discovery of this material, his point of view regarding it, what he did with it, and what he made us see in it, that perhaps gives him his high rank in American art.

The man and his impulsive nature never changed, though he kept shifting his methods and his point of view from year to year. He went his own pace and was always something of a recluse. The art movements about him interested him in only a slight way. The Academy of Design honored him with membership, but he cared little about it. The Society of American Artists elected him a member also, but he cared even less for the brilliant painting of the young men than for the weak performances of the academicians. He kept very much to himself and painted on in his own absorbed, impulsive fashion. His studio was only a bare barn of a room with a few crazy chairs in it. Wall-hangings, stuffs, screens, brass pots, shields, spears--the artistic plunder which one usually finds in a painter’s apartment--he regarded as so much trumpery. In his later days he came and went to his studio from Montclair, seeing landscapes out of the car-window, and in his mind’s eye seeing them upon his canvases. His art swayed him completely.

[Illustration: “Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.]

He had no pupils, though he corrected, advised, and instructed many young painters after his own method. It was a decidedly arbitrary teaching. Elliott Daingerfield tells a story of one of his own landscapes in which a rail fence was running down into the foreground. When Inness was asked in to criticise the canvas, he objected to the fence and said it should be taken out.

“Why can’t I have the fence there if I want it?” Daingerfield protested. To which Inness replied:

“You can if you want to be an idiot.”

His criticism of older painters and pictures was just as unqualified. And in matters outside of art, where he spoke with no peculiar authority, his vehemence was no less. Crossing on the _Arizona_ in 1887, he talked every one out of the smoking-room on the Single Tax question, so a friend informs me. In 1894, when I happened to be crossing with him, he was as positive as ever about his religious, socialistic, and political convictions. His interest and enthusiasm were in no degree abated. In the mornings he sat on deck wrapped up in rugs under the lee of a life-boat, and amused himself doing examples in vulgar fractions out of an ordinary school arithmetic; but in the afternoon he liked to talk, and I was a willing listener, though I had heard him discourse many times.

Every one remembers his caustic criticism of Turner’s “Slave Ship.” He always had a kick for Turner, though at heart he admired him, and in many respects his own methods were very like that master. They both worked from visual memory, Turner putting in what pleased him in architecture, people, and boats; and Inness putting in cows or bridges or wagons, as pleased him. Neither painter resorted to the model or to a sketch for these accessories. They painted them out of their heads, and sometimes they were vague in drawing or false in lighting. The only difference was that Turner took more liberties with his text than Inness, and often lost truth of tone. This gave Inness his chance to say that Turner was a painter of claptrap--his detail was spotty, he could paint figures in a boat, but he couldn’t paint a boat with figures.

For Gainsborough he had some admiration, and in his early days rather followed him, but he outgrew the brown-fiddle tone of Gainsborough’s foliage and came to think his work lacking in color. Constable, too, he admired, perhaps because he painted the greens of foliage very frankly; but his light and color were cold. Turner’s heat and Constable’s cold he did not believe could both come out of England, except through subjective distortion. The pictures of Watts, he insisted, looked as though dipped in a sewer, so unhealthy and morbid were they in color. This referred to the later pictures of Watts which Inness had seen in a loan collection exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. He was fond of brilliant color himself, and evidently he had never studied the earlier and middle-period pictures of Watts. Wilson he liked, though recognizing that he was merely a reviser of the old classic formula of landscape. But Wilson knew how to handle his sky and could tie things together with atmosphere.

Corot was a very pretty painter--and by “pretty,” Inness meant clever. He wagged his head in saying it and smiled as though the statement were incontestable. The sentiment of light and air with Corot was something that Inness thoroughly understood. And he greatly fancied Corot’s composition. At one time he painted pictures that have a Corotesque arrangement--notably the “Wood Gatherers,” formerly in the Clarke Collection. What he did not understand was Corot’s monotony of color, or, as other painters expressed it, Corot’s refinement of color. Millet was wonderful, especially in his landscape-work, which had attracted so little attention. Delacroix was one of the great gods for his wonderful gamut of color, if nothing else. And so on.

The steamer trip in 1894 was the last one that Inness made. He died that summer at the Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His funeral was held in the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Swedenborgian minister who officiated, in the course of his eulogy, said: “Those of you who knew George Inness knew how intense a man he was.” “Intense” is exactly descriptive of the man. He was keyed up all his life and worked with feverish intensity. But the word does not describe his art, for that has no feeling of stress or strain about it. Sometimes one is conscious of its vagueness, as though the painter were groping a way out toward the light--a vagueness that holds the mystery of things half seen, a beautiful glimpse of half-revealed impressions. But usually his pictures are serene, hushed, and yet radiant with the glow of eternal sun-fires from sky or cloud.

They were lofty and poetic impressions, and the loftier they were the more intense the painter’s effort to reveal them. The heights of Parnassus are very calm, but they are not reached without a struggle. The great ones--those who scale the upper peaks--are perhaps the most intensive strugglers of all. Inness was one of them.

III

ALEXANDER H. WYANT

It was Corot who declared that in art Rousseau was an eagle and he himself was merely a lark singing a song from the meadow-grasses. The contrast and the comparison are not inapplicable to two of our own painters. Wyant never possessed the wide range or the far-seeing eye of Inness, but he had something about him of Corot’s mood and charm. He, too, was a lark, or should we say a wood-thrush singing along the edge of an American forest? He had only a few mellow notes, yet we would not be without them. They still charm us. And it is not certain that in the long account of time the direct and simple utterances of Corot and Wyant may not outlive the wide truth of Rousseau and the vision splendid of Inness. More than once in æsthetic story the songs of a Burns have been held more precious than the tumults of a Milton.

The wonder of Wyant’s success is greater than that of Inness, for his boyhood surroundings, if anything, were less stimulating and his pictorial education far more restricted. Besides, Inness lived on to seventy years, but Wyant died at fifty-six, having endured ill-health, and for the last ten years of his life--his best working years--been paralyzed in his right arm and hand. Living much to himself, something of a hermit in his mountain home, weighed down by misfortunes and disappointments, the wonder grows that he not only kept up and improved his technique to the end, but that he preserved his serenity of mood and purity of outlook through it all. He must have been a man with fortitude of soul beyond the average. It is not every painter that can turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.

Wyant was the typical barefoot boy of the near West in the days before the Civil War. He was born in 1836 at Evans Creek, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and his boyhood and early youth were far removed from anything like the madding crowd. His parents were Americans of the soil, his father being a farmer and carpenter of Pennsylvania extraction, and his mother of Dutch-Irish descent. They were nomadic, after the manner of border people, and soon left Evans Creek to live in or near Defiance, where Wyant learned his three R’s in the village school. There were less than one thousand people in the town at that time, and what Wyant got out of it by way of enlightenment or encouragement must have been meagre. As a boy he, no doubt, roamed the woods, fished the streams, and trailed along the Ohio hilltops; and at this time, unconsciously perhaps, he was storing up visual memories of appearances that were to be of service to him later on.

That he had an eye and was an observer from the start comes to us in the tales told of his boyish sketches on the floor made with charcoal from the wood-fire. At least they showed an inclination that was afterward to develop into a passion. But the inclination found no immediate outlet. After leaving school the youth served as an apprentice in a harness-shop, but he did not care for harness-making. He preferred to paint photographs, cards, signs--almost anything that could be done with a brush. At twenty-one he went to Cincinnati and for the first time saw some paintings in oil. Before that his ideas of art had been bounded by book illustration and the omnipresent chromo. It is said that among the pictures he saw at Cincinnati was something by Inness. The young man was impressed by it, or by the reports about Inness, for he took the train to New York to consult that master about art as a vocation.

He found Inness at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy. How long he stopped there and what was said we do not know, but the master was encouraging, and the young man went back to Cincinnati determined to be a painter. He had a right instinct about art at that early time or he never would have chosen Inness for a counsellor. The famous landscape-painters then were Kensett and Church. Inness was the most progressive, the most ultra-modern of the time, and had not yet won universal applause. He did not paint enough in detail for the man in the street, and evidently he must have given Wyant his argument for breadth of view over detail, for, as we shall presently see, Wyant had it almost from the start. But perhaps the most and the best that he got from Inness was inspiration.

Back in Cincinnati and painting pictures after his own formula, Wyant found a purchaser and a patron in Nicholas Longworth. It became possible for him shortly thereafter to move to New York. There, in 1863, he saw a large exhibition of Düsseldorf pictures that probably stirred his imagination. Pictures in America at that time were rather scarce, and any exhibition of foreign work would be more impressive then than now. The next year he exhibited at the National Academy of Design for the first time, and in 1865 he went to Europe on a Düsseldorf pilgrimage, impelled thereto by a mountain-and-waterfall landscape of Gude which he had seen in New York.

He went straight to Gude at Carlsruhe and put himself under his tutelage. Gude was a Norwegian painter, influenced by Dahl, and imbued with the Düsseldorf method and point of view. The grand landscape--panoramic in extent and mountainous in height, with a hot sun in the heavens--was then in vogue, and Achenbach was its prophet. From Wyant’s short stay with Gude it seems that his enthusiasm was soon chilled down to zero. In after-life he often referred to the great kindness of Gude and his wife, but he seemed to think that his instruction in art had been fundamentally wrong. His pupil, Bruce Crane, says that he spoke of his art environment there as being “a miserable one,” and Wyant believed that “environment played the greater part in the making of a painter for good or bad.”

He left Gude and started back to America, but stopped on the way in England and Ireland, where he studied pictures and painted some of his own. The old masters in the National Gallery apparently did not make a strong appeal to him. His work shows no sign of Claude, Salvator, Poussin, Ruysdael, Hobbema, or Cuyp. Even Gainsborough and the ascendant Turner seem to have left him cold. But Constable he liked very much. Here at last was a man seeing things in a large way and doing them with breadth of brush. Moreover, he was doing simple transcripts of nature, not the panorama of blazing perspective. In America Wyant had inherited something of the spectacular from his Hudson River predecessors; Düsseldorf had aided the conception, and Turner had abetted it; but Constable seemed to be against it. Wyant was inclined to renounce it. Constable produced the broad realistic look, and at that time Wyant had probably not arrived at any other conception of art than as a large transcript of nature. Ruskin’s doctrine of fidelity to fact was in the air, and the landscape as emotional expression, or as a symphony, or even as a decorative pattern, was little known either in the studios or the critic’s den. There was, however, plenty of controversy going on. And yet fresh from varying theories and impressions, Wyant went over to Ireland and painted pictures that bore no earmark of any painter or any school.

In the Metropolitan Museum there is an Irish landscape by him done in 1866--“View in County Kerry, Ireland.” There are gray mountains at the back, a green foreground with a pool of water, a gray-blue and whitish sky, a gray atmosphere. At the right middle distance is a white cottage. The rest is treeless upland running into mountain heights that are lost in haze and cloud. The picture is not only remarkable for its simplicity of composition but its absence of small objects or distracting details. Though a mountain landscape, it is broadly seen, largely and simply massed, and painted with a broad flat brush. It may have been repainted in later years, but I am willing to believe from the breadth of its composition that it was painted broadly to correspond, and is to-day substantially as when originally done.

This picture is in somewhat violent contrast with another Wyant landscape hanging in the same gallery and dated in the same year--1866. I refer to the large “Mohawk Valley” landscape--an excellent picture, though evidencing limitations perhaps peculiar to America. It is a huge valley view with a gorge and stream in the foreground running down to a fall from which mist is rising. The stream as a pool is seen again emerging in the middle distance. A half-lighted sky with falling rain at the left and warm grays of clouds and blues of distance make up the background, while in the foreground a tall tree at the left is balanced by a group of lesser trees at the right. The whole color-tone is warm (probably from underbasing), especially in the foreground, which shows in grays and browns. It is a symmetrical composition with a central point of sight, and in its detailed elaboration gives no hint of selection or sacrifice. The trees, the ledges of rock in the foreground, the water, the clouds are all exactly drawn and realized to the last item, each one having quite as much importance as its fellow. As for the painting, it is thin, kept thin to allow the underbasing to show through; but it is flatly painted, not stippled. In the latter respect it is an advance on, say, Church’s panorama, “Heart of the Andes,” in the same gallery, where the stippling with white paint produces a glittering, bedizened surface, and the minute drawing of leaves in the foreground runs into petty niggling.

Now, the “Mohawk Valley” was probably completed just before Wyant went to Europe; at least in method it antedates the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape of the same year.[1] It is a very important picture and represents the culmination of Wyant’s early style--a beautiful picture for any place or period or painter to have produced. It shows Wyant’s original point of view, with some of the influences that must have come to him from the Hudson River school, from Inness, from various unknown American sources. But the “County Kerry, Ireland,” landscape shows a departure, a widening, and a broadening of both brush and vision which were to increase and expand thereafter into a second style--the style of Wyant’s later and nobler canvases. To this style Wyant was undoubtedly helped at first by what he saw abroad, especially by the pictures of Constable.

[1] “In regard to the two pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, ‘View in County Kerry, Ireland,’ and the ‘Mohawk Valley,’ I never could reconcile myself to the idea that they were both painted in 1866. There is no doubt about the ‘Mohawk Valley’ because its manner is so much like the many canvases of that period which Wyant often showed me and which Mrs. Wyant destroyed after his death. The ‘View in County Kerry, Ireland,’ marks a new period in his art and the widely different handling as well as view-point are too much to have been acquired in one year. There is certainly some mistake in the date--I should say a difference of ten years. At some time that picture has been cleaned and the restorer accidentally destroying the date restored it incorrectly.”--(_Bruce Crane in a letter to the writer, December 13, 1917._)

[Illustration: “Mohawk Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]