THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF UCLA ART COUNCIL by Estate of Anne Hunter Temple < - z « u •£ 1 -i h .- IE £ i , 5 AMERICAN PAINTERS: WITH EIGHTY-THREE EXAMPLES OF THEIR WORK ENGRAVED ON WO OH. By G. W. SHELDON NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 549 & 5 5 1 BROADWAY. 1879. COPTEIGHT BY V. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 1878. / Art Library ^3G PREFACE Although tlie list of American painters whose pictures are here en- graved is by no means an exhaustive one, it being impracticable in a single volume, even of very generous dimensions, to give translations of the work of every artist whose brush has reflected credit upon our country, the wood-engravings in this series have not been surpassed in number and excellence by any similar collection illustrative of national contempora- neous art. These engravings are, of course, the principal feature of the book. Their beauty speaks for them, and for the painters whom they rep- resent. In the text, also, many of the painters appear in their own behalf. Its interest — so far as it has interest — lies in its autobiographies, which are as many and as comprehensive as the circumstances permitted. An Amer- ican painter has said that " the most valuable materials for art-criticism are those gathered from artists themselves, not merely from their works, but from the verbal expression of their views ; " and, whether or not his remark is true, it is believed that the artists' views on art, in most instances ex- pressed publicly for the first time in this volume, will be read with pleas- ure even by persons whose own opinions are widely at variance with some of them. It should be added that a part of the article on George Inness was originally contributed by the writer to Harpeis Magazine. G. W. S. PAINTERS AND ENGRAVINGS. PAGE Frederick Edwin Church ........ 10 TJie Parthenon. {Frontispiece.) A Tropical Moonlight. Chimborazo. Sanford R. Gifford .... .... 14 Venice. Sunset in the Adirondacks. John II. Bristol ......... 20 The Adirondacks, from Lake Paradox. Lake George, from near Sabbath-Day Point. Peter Moran . . . . . . . . . .23 Twilight. The Return of the Herd. Winslow Homer ......... 25 Watermelon- Eaters. In the Fields. George Inness .......... 29 Light Triumphant. Pine - Grove, Barberini Villa, Albano. Thomas Hicks .......... 35 "No Place like Some." Portrait of General Meade. Mauritz Frederick Hendrick De Haas ...... 39 The Coast of France. Long Island Sound by Moonlight. Charles Henry Miller ........ 44 Old Mill at Springfield. Return to the Fold. ,3 PAIXTEES AMD. EXGRA VINGS. PAGE James McDottgall Haet ........ 40 .1 Summer Day on the Boquet liioer. Catth going Home. Jertis McEnteb ......... 01 Autumn Morning. The Danger- Signal. Win i am II. Beard ......... 50 " Lo, the Poor Indian." 'The March of Silenus. William T. Richards ......... 60 At Atlantic < 'ity. On the Wissahickon. Seymoue Joseph Gcy .... ..... 05 Tin Orange-Girl. E. Wood Perry ......... 70 Firesidi Stories. The Old Story. Samuel Colman , i ....... 72 . \mh rnach <>u the Rhim . A Street- Scene in Caen, Normandy. Benjamin Cirtis Porter i ....... 70 The Hour- Glass. The Mandolin-Player. Akiui II QuARTLEY ......... 80 Aii . \fti rnoon in August. Jasper Francis Cropsey ........ 82 Tin Old Mill. William Hart .......... 84 Tin Path !>;/ tin River. Tin Lus/ (i l,,i,n. William Morris Hint. ... .... 88 Summi r. Spring Chickens. Robert Swain Giffobd ... ... 93 On lln Xil, . Tin Till ins of Biskra. PAINTERS AND ENGRAVINGS. 7 PAGE Walter Shirlaw ........ 96 The Toning of the Bell. " Good-Morning.'''' WORTIIINGTON WllITTREDGE ........ 98 A Home by the Sea-side. Study of the Pocky Mountain Aspens, Daniel Huntington . ........ 100 Sowing the Word. Ichabod Crane and Katrina. Thomas Waterman Wood ........ 109 The Village Post - Office. Lemuel E. Wilmarth . . . ... . . . . 110 Ingratitude. George Loring Brown . . . . . . . .111 The Lake of Nemi. The Temple of Peace. James II. Beard . ....... 113 The Mourners. J. Appleton Brown ......... 117 The Upper Merrimac. Storm at the Isles of Shoals. Francis Hopkinson Smith ........ 120 A Glimpse of Franconia Notch, New Hampshire,, Thomas Moran .......... 122 Dream-land. • Solitude. Asiier Brown Durand ........ 128 Brook, and Vista in the Mountains. Horace Wolcott Robbins . . . . . . . .133 Sunny Banks of the Ausahle. Morning. Joseph Rusling Meeker ........ 135 The Indian Chief. Near the Atchafalaya. Benjamin F. Reinhart ........ 138 Katrina Van Tassel. 8 PAINTERS AND ENGRAVINGS. PAGE John G. Brown. ......••• 141 " By the Sad Sea - Waves." Alfred Thompson Bricher ........ 144 Cliffs of Ironbound Island, Maine. The MM-Stream. Albert Bierstadt ......... 146 JVear the Black Mills. Mount Corcoran, Sierra Nevada. Frederick A. Bridgman . . ...... 150 Pyrenees .Peasants returning from the Harvest-Field. John W. Casilear ......... 154 Riverside. Moonlight in the Glen. William M. Chase ......... 156 The Court-Jester. Albert F. Bellows ......... 158 A By-may near Torquay, Devonshire. Devonshire Cottages. Robert W. Weir ......... 160 Columbus before the Council of Salamanca. Alexander H. Wtant. . . . . . . . .164 A Mielsummi r A'* treett. On the Ausable Rivi ,-. Eastman Johnson . . . . . . . . .166 The Emigrants* Sunday Morning. Wyatt Eaton .......... 169 Harvesters at Rest. A. I). SiiMiccK. ......... 174 By the Stream. John- P. Wi:iu .......... 175 Casting the Shaft. William Page .......... 177 Far my nt in the Shrouds of the Hartford. Engravings executed principally by Messrs. Linton, Mouse, IIahlkv, Anthony, Bobbett, and Filmer. AMERICAN PAINTERS. rriHE Eliaus built a studio for Phidias in the court of the temple of Jupi- -*- ter, and all Greece worshiped a statue chiseled by that illustrious man. Even the gods were connoisseurs of art ; once, in answer to a sculptor's prayer for a token of approval, they flashed lightning from a clear sky across his feet. Will those good old times ever return ? Do we care to see them back again ? In England, not long ago, the very words " Fine Arts " are said to have called up a notion of frivolity, of great pains expended upon small things — things that gave fops an opportunity of pluming themselves on their sagacity and capacity ; while in America the Puritans used vehemently to exorcise what in their eyes were not the Muses, but the devils, of painting, music, and archi- tecture. " This is a plaistered, rotten world," said one of their spokesmen ; " The creation is now an old, rotten house,' 1 exclaimed another. What mock- ery, then, to address one's self to the cultivation of the beautiful ! what folly to embellish an existence the cherished symbols of which are sackcloth and ashes ! Those days, of course, nobody yearns to see again, nor is there the faintest prospect that they will return. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, at least, is neither classic nor iconoclastic, neither Greek nor Puritan. In art-matters it takes a middle ground, and its admonitions are those of Lessing to his friend Mendelssohn : " Only a part of our lives must be given up to the study of the beautiful ; we must practise ourselves in weightier matters before we die." Yet how wholesome a part is that which is spent in the service of art, and how great are the obligations of civilization to art ! If, as some one has said, 2 10 AMERICAN PAIXTEES force and right are the governors of the world— force, until right is ready— how large has been the force of beauty when expressed by the poet and the paint- er ! With each new epoch of development come fresh revelations of it in man and in Nature — revelations which art alone is competent to disclose, and healthy sensibilities and vigorous intellects alone are able to appreciate. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, not because beauty is lovely in itself, nor yet because it educates and elevates the feelings, but because it is simply the splendor of the true ; because, in the words of Goethe, it is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, which, but for this manifestation, had been forever concealed from us. The fine arts, therefore, concerned solely as they are with the expression of the beautiful, have a very serious reason for existence ; and painting, which reveals to us the mysteries and potencies of color, is, next to poetry, the noblest of them all. American painters, if not the greatest of ancient or modern times, have wrought for themselves, especially in the domain of landscape art, a very distinct and honorable position ; and at the present day, when the influence of foreign study has made so many of them cosmopolitan in their views and resources, a peculiar interest attaches to their aims, their methods, and their triumphs. The compass of this brief essay necessarily excludes the mention of a multitude of names which lend lustre to the history of contemporaneous art on the western side of the Atlantic ; and the few which appear in these pages must serve as representatives of the rest. Perhaps the pleasantest feature of the recent sale of Mr. John Taylor John- ston's collection of paintings was the fact that in competition with Meissonier, Turner, Decamps, Delacroix, Delaroche, Jules Breton, Gerorne, Horace Yernet, Diaz, Corot, Zaniacois, Troy on, Vibert, Ilamon, Boldini, Schreyer, Fortuny, Daubigny, and a score of other foremost modern masters, the first prize was carried off by an American artist. The largest sum bid for any single work was twelve thousand five hundred dollars for Frederick Edwin Church's "Niagara Falls," and that, too, in a city where buyers of pictures are generally supposed f<> subscribe to a creed the first and front article of which is, "I believe in the transcendent excellence <»f Parisian art." Asked, on one occasion, A TROPICAL MOONLIGHT. From a Painting by Frederick Edwin Church. p. 10. FREDERICK EDWIN CHURCH. \\ what were his methods of work, and his views of the nature and the ends of art, Mr. Church replied that he had always been a faithful student of Nature, and that this was the only answer he could give to such questions. So far, indeed, as methods of work were concerned, he had never looked upon himself as having any ; and the question put to him with reference to them had sug- gested the matter to him for the first time. Mr. Church's pictures, however, speak for him more satisfactorily than he can speak for himself. In the first place, they tell us that, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, he sees little beauty in com- mon things, and depends largely upon the external splendor of his subject. His instincts, in a word, are tropical ; and in the gorgeousness and magnifi- cence of the tropics he has found the themes that please him best. Outside of the tropics, his subjects are still gorgeous and magnificent — the Falls of Niagara, with rainbow accompauimeut ; the iridescent and majestic icebergs off the coast of Labrador ; the gloi'ious Parthenon in a blaze of light, and in an atmosphere unrivaled ; the city of Jerusalem beneath the Syrian skies. And, even when in the tropics, his fondness for wealth and brilliancy of scene leads him, as in his famous picture " The Heart of the Andes," to make artificial combinations of the mightiest mountains, the most picturesque val- leys, the richest vegetation, the lordliest trees, the most sparkling water, the gaudiest birds and flowers, and the most enchanting perspectives ; so that one is reminded of Sir Philip Sidney's saying : " The world is a brazen world, the poets alone deliver a golden ; nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, and whatsoever may make the earth more love- ly." Where landscapes are the stateliest and the most radiant, there Mr. Church's brush is eager to be at work ; but it is most eager when the artist has selected from a wide range of objects, fair, bright, and grand, those which are especially fair, bright, and grand, and made of them a single compo- sition. A student of Nature Mr. Church is undoubtedly ; he is also an indefati- gable student of the resources of his pencil and his palette. He draws with remarkable accuracy, and has mastered not a few of the harmonies and the glories of color. Yet he has been trained in no European nor American school. Thomas Cole, the father of American art, whose name is, and will 12 AMERICAN PAINTERS. be, held in reverential and loving remembrance, taught Church the fun- damental technics of his art ; and the pupil's persevering industry and singleness of purpose took up the task where Cole left off. It is, perhaps, worth while to lay special stress upon this matter of Church's diligence in study, because too many so-called artists are very lazy. They repeat them- selves constantly in their subjects and styles, and they do not improve in the representation of textures, in subtilty of modeling, in general quality of work. Thev are otiose and desultory ; and neither their insight nor their execution advances with advancing years. It is Mr. Church's perseverance, seconded by his love for subjects of novel and striking interest, that has led him to make travels as varied, if not so uncomfortable, as those of the companions of ^Eneas. The region of the Cats- kills, fascinating as it is to him and to most American painters — to Durand, for example, to Sanford GifTord, to McEntee, and to Kensett — did not long detain him. Nor was there anything in the pleasant city or neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, where, in 1826, he was born, to keep him after he was aide to get away. It may be doubted, indeed, whether even the easily-acces- sible attractions of the Catskills Avould have drawn him, had not Cole lived there. When Cole died, Church began Ins peregrinations. He traveled over New England, making a multitude of studies of hills and valleys, of rocks and trees. In 1849, having opened a studio in New York, he was elected a mem- ber of the National Academy of Design, in his twenty-third year. One of his !ir-t principal works was a view of "East Rock," near New Haven, which was considered a picture of unusual promise. This was followed by a series of landscapes, in which he used the studies obtained during his wanderings in the Catskills and in New England. Four yeai-s after his election to the Academy, Church made his first trip to South America, and, when he returned, his painting entitled " The Great Mountain-Chain of New Granada," together with other works founded upon studies made in that continent, met with immediate success. People did not lh' ii know much abouf the land of the Amazon and the Andes, and Church succeeded in greatly interesting them in it, showing them the most surprising features of a very wonderful region. The reception accorded to his pictures naturally stimulated him to other ventures in the same line of business, and o s > •*} (1 N < IS ■#1 o ,*" 01 k, 2 •« X ft, >*; FREDERICK E DW I X CHURCH. 13 four years after his first excursion he made a second one. It was in 1857 that he again set sail for South America. This time he staid longer and pene- trated farther — obtaining, doubtless, material sufficient for a lifetime of pict- ure-painting ; a recent work, exhibited at the Century Club in New York, and now in the gallery of Mr. William E. Dodge, Jr., being an elaboration and arrangement of all sorts of South American studies. We may expect to see a good many similar productions from the same brush, if the health of the man who holds it permits. Mr. Church's right arm, as is well known, has been partly disabled for several years. May it speedily resume its cunniug ! The immediate trophies of this second trip to the tropics were, " The Heart of the Andes," " Cotopaxi," " The Eainy Season in the Tropics," " A Tropical Moonlight," and " Chimborazo," the last two being eugraved for this narrative. They are all well known, exceedingly popular, and entirely representative of the artist's best powers. It is scarcely necessary to stop here and explain what their principal defect is, because, by this time, that defect must have been recognized by almost every intelligent American lover of art. It consists in the elaboration of details at the expense of the unity and force of sentiment. Some of Church's pictures, if reduced, would make capital illustrations for Humboldt's " Cosmos," or any similar text-book of natural science — for Agas- siz's works on Brazil, for instance. They are faithful and beautiful, but they are not so rich as they might be in the poetry, the aroma, of art. The higher aud spiritual verities of Nature are the true home of landscape art. The heart of the Andes, as the natural philosopher sees it, is one thing ; but the poet gets near enough to hear it beat. Not long after Mr. Church's return from his second visit to South America, he painted his famous " Niagara Falls," now in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington. It is widely known through the engraving. In a few years he went to Labrador, and painted his " Icebergs," which was exhibited in London in 1863. and received with great favor. In 1866 he sailed for the West Indies, and familiarized himself with their local traits. His large picture " Jamaica " is now owned by Mrs. Colt, of Hartford, Connecticut. Again he left America, this time for Europe and Asia. At Athens he made studies for his " Parthenon," which we have engraved, and which is in the 14 AMERICA:: PAIXTERS. possession of Mr. Morris K. Jesup, of New York. At Damascus he turned especial attention to " El-Chasne," the rock-temple of Arabia Petrsea. Near Jerusalem he painted a view of the ancient capital of Judea. Mr. Church's latest work, " The iEgean Sea," which as we write is on exhi- bition at the Goupil Gallery in New York, is a picture so excellent in han- dling and so rich in sentiment that no notice of the artist would approach com- pleteness which did not take cognizance of this more than fulfillment of the promise of his earlier years. Its composition is ideal. In the centre of the sea is an Acropolis like that of Athens ; on the right coast, a Turkish city, with its domes and minarets ; on the left, a precipitous and rocky mountain-side, in which are the open gates of a tomb ; while in the foreground are grassy slopes and several fallen columns. The atmosphere is delicately veiled and vapor- laden, full of silvery tones and of sunlight that tinges with its reflections the dimpled but waveless sea, the rich verdure, and the lofty buildings. Two rainbows in the middle distance radiate the powerful but subdued brilliancy of their hues, setting off to advantage the warm grayish-white of the cumuli- clouds. The impression of the scene is complex yet single, full of sweetness, and mournful tenderness. We see Greece in her degradation, and we think of Greece in her glory, while the light that shines across the entrance to the sep- ulchre, hewed out of the rock, concentrates and emphasizes the sentiment. Here is poetry of a fine sort — the poetry that comes of technical excellence and noble thought, when these are in the service of the imagination. In no other work that we remember has Mr. Church given evidence of so much more than mere skill and patience ; and for this reason it is that any just estimate of his posi- tion as a painter must take into consideration the surpassing merits of " The vEgean Sea." Like Mr. Church in his fondness for travel, Mr. Sanford R. Gifford has visited the Catskills, the White Mountains, the Adiroudacks, the Rocky Moun- tains, the Alps, the Rhine, the Nile, the Mediterranean, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, and Italy. He was born in Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York, in 1823. His boyhood was spent at Hudson, in the same State. Like Mr. Church, also, he was greatly influenced by the landscapes of Thomas Cole. ill & o *> -^ III z w •§> > t/> SANFORD R. OIFFORD. 15 His principal teacher in the technics of painting was the late John R. Smith, of New York City. In 1854 he became a member of the National Academy of Design. He was a soldier in the War for the Union ; and one of his best pictures, " The Camp of the Seventh Regiment," was sketched while he was with that famous organization of volunteers. To one who knows him well, his success seems natural enough. In his opinion, an artist- is simply a poet. Both work from the same principles and aim at the same result, namely, to reproduce the impressions which they have received from beautiful things in Nature — the poet reproducing them when they can be reproduced by words ; the painter, when they are so subtile as to elude the grasp of words. Take, for instance, the impression made upon one by an Indian-summer afternoon, when not only the foliage but the very atmosphere itself, owing to its density, is suffused with color, so that the natural color of the leaves is heightened by the colored light upon and through and around them. Every- body feels the influence and responds to the charm of such a day. But who shall so describe the scene that the impression of it shall be reproduced by words ? One might as well try to describe all the colors of the sunset. The artist alone has the means whereby we shall be made to feel just as he felt when he saw the scene, and just as we ourselves should have felt had we seen it. Nay, more : by the secrets of his art, he can even emphasize the impres- sion which the natural scene would have made upon us. He can direct our attention to its salient features, can remove from our attention unimportant features, can make new and finer combinations than Nature herself ever made, and can so arrange matters that our imaginations shall be more easily stimu- lated. In one sense, therefore, he can really improve upon Nature. Accord- ingly, when Mr. Gifford finds himself particularly impressed by any natural scene, and determined to make a picture, the first question that arises is, " What causes all this beauty \ " (for, if there is not beauty in it, he does not wish to paint it). The grand distinction between an artist and another person of equal sensibility to natural beauty who is not an artist is, that the former can penetrate into the causes of that beauty, and can make use of those causes, while the latter cannot do either. With Mr. Gifford landscape-painting is air- painting ; and his endeavor is to imitate the color of the air, to use the oppo- 16 AMERICAN PAINTERS. -it ions of light and dark and color that he sees before him. If the forms are represented as they are in Nature under atmospheric conditions of light, dark, and color, these forms will look as they look in Nature, and will produce the same effect. Thus much, perhaps, Mr. Gifford believes in common with every educated artist. But every artist has his own particular method of work, and, in the case of a successful artist, this particular method is always an inter- esting thing to know. Mr. Grifford's method is this : When he sees anything which vividly impresses him, and which therefore he wishes to reproduce, he makes a little sketch of it in pencil on a card about as large as an ordinary visiting-card. It takes him, say, half a minute to make it ; but there is the idea of the future picture fixed as firmly if not as fully as in the completed work itself. While traveling, he can in this way lay up a good stock of mate- rial for future use. The next step is to make a larger sketch, this time in oil, where what has already been done in black-and-white is repeated in color. To this sketch, which is about twelve inches by eight, he devotes an hour or two. It serves the purpose of defining to him just what he wants to do, and of fixing it in enduring material. Sometimes the sketch is not successful, and is thrown aside to make room for another. It helps him, also, to decide what he does not want to do. He experiments with it ; puts in or leaves out, according as he finds that he can increase or perfect his idea. When satisfactorily finished, it is a model in miniature of what he proposes to do. He is now ready to paint the picture itself. All that he asks for is a favor- able day on which to begin. To Mr. Gifford, this first day is the great day. He waits for it ; he prepares for it. He wishes to be in the best possible phys- ical condition. He is careful about his food ; he is careful to husband his resources. When the day comes, he begins work just after sunrise, and con- tinues until just before sunset. Ten, eleven, twelve, consecutive hours, according to the season of the year, are occupied in the first great effort to put the scene on the cam-as. He feels fresh and eager. His studio-door is locked. Nothing is allowed to interrupt him. His luncheon, taken in his studio, con- sists of a cup of coffee and a piece of bread. His inspiration is at fever-heat ; every faculty is stretched to its utmost; his brush moves rapidly, almost care- lessly. 11«- (\<>r< not stop to criticise his work. The divine afflatus is within him, and he does un X? ^ 3 Z * ~ H &° 01 a 2! a < 2 $ GEORGE TNNES8. 33 he sometimes loses in sentiment. Corot, on the contrary, is, to some minds, lacking in objective force. He is most appreciated by the highly-educated artistic taste, and lie is least appreciated by the crude taste. He tried for years to get more objective force, but he found that what lie gained in thai respect he lost in sentiment. If a painter could unite Meissonier's careful reproduction of details with Corot's inspirational power, he would be the very god of art. But Corot's art is higher than Meissonier's. Let Corot paint a rainbow, and his work reminds you of the poet's description, 'The rainbow is the spirit of the flowers.' Let Meissouier paint a rainbow, and his work reminds you of a definition in chemistry. The one is poetic truth, the other is scientific truth ; the former is aesthetic, the latter is analytic. The reality of every artistic vision lies in the thought animating the artist's mind. This is proved by the fact that every artist who attempts only to imitate what he sees fails to represent that something which comes home to him as a satisfaction — fails to make a representation corresponding in the satisfaction which it pro- duces to the satisfaction felt in his first perception. Consequently, we find that men of strong artistic genius, which enables them to dash off an impres- sion coming, as they suppose, from what is outwardly seen, may produce a work, however incomplete or imperfect in details, of greater vitality, having more of that peculiar quality called ' freshness,' either as to color or spon- taneity of artistic impulse, than can other men after laborious efforts — a work which appeals to the cultivated mind as something more or less perfect of Nature. Now, this spontaneous movement by which he produces a picture is governed by the law of homogeneity or unity, and accordingly we find that in proportion to the perfection of his genius is the unity of his picture." Concerning chiaro-oscuro, or the means of producing sensuous impressions of objects by effects of light and dark, the mind, said Mr. Inness, is governed by a law of equilibrium. " If we consider for a moment that all things appear to us (so far as their light and dark, or chiai'O-oscuro, are concerned) by means of the shadow which their own objectivity produces, we shall see at once that, in reasoning concerning light and dark, we must start from the point of equi- librium, which is half-way between light and dark. At that point all things cease to appear — all is light and flat as a fog of vapor that obscures every- thing. Now, in Nature we find that the horizon is where all things cease to 34 AMERICAN PAINTERS. appear. The horizon, therefore, the flat blue of the sky (not clouds) is the point of equilibrium — the foil against which all lights and darks are relieved, the middle tone or the half-dark or half-light of the picture. Hence, it is the horizon that the artist must consult in producing a representation in which all parts are in equilibrium ; and there is no greater difficulty than in finding the relation which the sky bears to the objects in his landscape. The eye is con- tinually deceived by the tendency of the mind to make violent contrasts of light against dark, and dark agaiust light, when looking at Nature analyti- cally. A person seeing a dark shadow (as of a building) against the horizon, cannot easily keep at the same time the idea that the horizon is really the half- way house of light and dark ; but, if from the deck of a vessel he will observe the ocean-line when the sun is under a cloud, he will find that, although the sky at the horizon appears to him to be very light, yet the moment that the sun dashes its light upon the water the exact reverse is produced — the sky looking very dark, showing that the proposition is true. . . . "There is a notion," he continued, "that objective force is inconsistent with poetic representation. But this is a very grave error. What is often called poetry is a mere jingle of rhyme — intellectual dish-water. The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature which can be included in a harmony or real representation. The lack of local color in a work of art — the lack of objective form, even though the work may have the equilibrium of a well-diffused ehiaro-oscuro — is still, so far, a detraction from its power forcibly to represent emotional vision, and therefore a lack in the full presentation of the poetic principle. Poetry is the vision of reality. When John saw the vision of the Apocalypse, he saw it. He did not see emascula- tion, or weakness, or gaseous representation. He saw things, and those things represented an idea. . . . " Among the French artists it is that we find the best works of art. Mil- let is one of those artistic angels whose aim was to represent pure and holy human sentiments — sentiments which speak of home, of love, of labor, of sor- row, and so on. Many of his pictures, indeed, display weaknesses to which minds like his are at times peculiarly liable, as though the strength of flesh and blood had overcome the power of the spirit. But he is the very first in that class of painters who reproduce such sentiments in their paintings; and in THOMAS HICKS. 35 his paintings do we find the highest of these sentiments. Meissonier is a very wonderful painter, but his aim seems to be a material and not a spiritual one. The imitative has too strong a hold upon his mind. Hence, even in his sim- plest and best things we find the presence of individualities which should have had no place, because they are really outside of the idea or impression which he intended to convey. That idea which came fresh into his mind from the scene which he saw — why should he not have reproduced in its original purity unalloyed by the mixture of those individualities ? Even in his great- est efforts there is not that power to awaken our emotion which the simplest works of a painter like Decamps possess. There every detail of the picture is a part of the vision which impressed the artist, and which he purposed to reproduce, to the end that it might impress others ; and every detail has been subordinated to the expression of the artist's impression. Take one of his pictures, ' The Suicide ' — a representation of a dead man lying on a bed in a garret, partly in the sunlight. All is given up to the expression of the idea of desolation. The scene is painted as though the artist had seen it in a dream. Nothing is done to gratify curiosity, or to withdraw the mind from the great central point — the dead man ; yet all is felt to be complete and truly finished. The spectator carries away from it a strong impression, but his memory is not taxed with a multitude of facts. The simple story is im- pressed upon his mind, and remains there forever. . . . In Mr. Inness's " Light Triumphant," and " Pine Grove, Barberini Villa," which are engraved herewith, these principles of art are fully exemplified. The rendering of light, of color, and of texture, is very nobly done. Some of his works, to be sure, are not so successful, but his aim is always pure, and his inspiration is always felt. He is a great painter, and his name will be held in honor. In early boyhood, Thomas Hicks, who was born at Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, October 18, 1823, had developed a talent for drawing, especially for caricaturing. The antimasonic campaign was vigorous in Bucks County in those days, and Thomas made a sketch admirably adapted to elicit the execrations of every stanch freemason in the neighborhood. The village 36 AMERICAN PAINTERS. postmaster, Laving seen and admired that sketch, presented the author of it with Cunningham's " Lives of the English Painters," one of the lives in which — that of Barry — fired the enthusiasm of the recipient. " I will he a painter," he resolved, keeping the resolution at once by producing a portrait of his cousin, and keeping the portrait two months for fear that it might cause him ridicule. He showed it to the brother of the subject. It was recognized at once as a portrait, and the young artist took great courage. Dr. Kennedy, of Philadelphia, who was on a visit to Newtown, became interested in Hicks, and advised him to go to the Academy of the Fine Arts in the Quaker City. The portrait-painter went there — it was in the summer of 1839. In the winter, for some inscrutable reason, the doors of the institu- tion were closed, and Hicks repaired to the National Academy of Design, then at Beekman and Nassau Streets, New York. There he drew so successfully from the antique that, before the season ended, he was admitted to the life- school as a reward of merit. A number of his pictures, chiefly genre subjects, were soon bought by the Art Union. In 1845 Mr. Hicks went to London, and, after experimenting in the National Gallery, made a copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds's " Infant Samuel," ordered by Mr. Hippolyte Mali. In the sailing- packet which took him across the Atlantic were Mr. Goodwin, and Mr. Dalton, of Boston, young Mr. Oxnard, and Colonel Polk, a brother of the President, just appointed charge at Naples. Not long afterward he met Oxnard in Par- is. " Goodwin wants to see you," said the latter ; " he is in the long gallery of the Louvre." Hicks, whose finances were not in a plethoric condition — he had left home with a small letter of credit, and with the intention of staying away only a year — hastened to find his late fellow-passenger. " Walk down the gallery with me," said Goodwin, " and show me what you admire." The artist had been working his brains and wrist several weeks in that gener- ously-stocked museum — had, indeed, worked himself half sick, and knew what was choice. " Pick out some smaller samples," said the patron, when the larger ones had been indicated to him, " and we will walk back again." Cor- reggio's "Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine" was one of the works that pleased them both, and Hicks received from Goodwin an order for a copy. He spent three years in Italy. In 1847, Kensett, George William Curtis, W. W. Story, and Margaret Fuller, came to Rome, and a merry party they made, w Sj X u w •= o -5 < =2 s! ; a u; Z THOMAS HI OK 8. ■■■•: holding receptions every night. In the summer of that year Hicks, Kensett, Curtis, and his brother Burril Curtis, went to Venice and remained a month. During June of the next year, Hicks returned to Paris at the beginning of the revolution there, entered the studio of Couture — then quite the fashionable resort for our young artists abroad — ascertained that the demerits rather than the merits of that painter usually descended upon his pupils, became satisfied that his own case was not likely to be an exception, and, after an eighteen months' sojourn, came home. It was in the autumn of 1849 that he found himself in his studio on Broad- way, near Prince Street, and also in the Century Club, where he has held many positions of honor. At a meeting of the club, January 26, 1858, he read a eulogy on the character and works of Thomas Crawford, the sculptor, which was published by order of the club and extensively circulated. The following passage from it gives some of Mr. Hicks's views on art-mat- ters : " From the number and variety of Crawford's works, together with the rapidity of their execution, it might be inferred that he did not bestow upon them the elaboration which sculpture requires. But in a careful examina- tion of their intrinsic merit, if such deficiencies are discovered, they are the results of two facts with which he was perfectly acquainted : First, that the imagination and other high faculties of the mind, when educated and intelligent, are affected by the very reverse of those qualities which are merely visual, microscopic, and mechanical ; and, secondly, that his invention was so fertile, his thoughts and fancy so teeming with forms of grandeur and beauty, that the necessity to create new works was imperative. Some such charges were made against Michael Angelo — how groundlessly, history is per- petually demonstrating. Does it ever occur to a cultivated mind that the Sibyls and Prophets in the Sistine Chapel are wanting in finish ? Still, the works of Carlo Dolci have many admirers, and Michel Angelo has left the indisputable proof of his ability to lose in monotonous softness all traces of other character, and has showed his contempt for it in a solitary bass-relief in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. Crawford, also, in some of his works, carried tenderness and elaboration into the siqjerlative degree. In the group of ' The Children in the Wood,' nothing is omitted that belongs to the story. The shoes, the little birds and leaves, are all wrought out with the utmost truth- 38 AMERICAN PAINTERS. fulness, while the touching pathos of the sleeping children is consistent and exquisite. But we may safely assert that there is not a work in sculpture, ancient or modern, that surpasses in elaboration the portrait-bust of Mrs. Crawford, executed in 1846. Every attribute of the best art is retained in its fullest expression. Intellectuality, dignity, and womanly sweetness, glow with the artist's skill. The effect of the whole is classical, preserving in al- most faultless symmetry the minutest individuality of character. This is car- ried with studied particularity into the laces and flowers. Their ornate and delicate tracery is so subdued as to heighten the imposing perfection of the work. In the entire range of sculptured portraiture, it has neither superior nor equal." Mr. Hicks's portrait of George T. Trimble, now in the Board of Education building ; of Pelatiah Perrit, now in the Seamen's Savings-Bank ; of ex-Secretary Hamilton Fish ; of Jonathan Sturgis, now in the Union League Club gallery ; of Mr. Van Dyke, a Detroit lawyer ; of Frank Palmer, of Margaret Fuller, of R. M. Olypkant, of Secretary Evarts, of Governor John A. King, in the City Hall ; of Dr. Joseph G. Cogswell, the first Superintendent of the Astor Li- brary ; of Bishop Beckwith, of Georgia ; of Dr. E. K. Kane ; of Dr. Frank W. Johnston, of the New York Hospital ; of Fitz-Greene Halleck, of Mr. William Cullen Bryant, of Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, and of Mr. H. W. Long- fellow, are among bis best productions. To the anmial exbibitions of the Artists' Fund Society, of which be was elected the president in 1875, Mr. Hicks has contributed a number of striking genre and figure pieces ; for exam- ple, "A Pennsylvania Kitchen," "The Vacant Chair," "The Garden-Gate," " Autumn Leaves," " Brittany Flower-Gb-1," " Reading George Eliot," " The Morning Prayer," and " No Place like Home," which is engraved to accompany this sketch, and tells a clear and pleasing story. In his pleasant studio in Astor Place, New York, which be has occupied for more than twenty years, is a life- size portrait of Edwin Booth as Iago, full of deviltry, fire, and force. Mr. Hicks strives to reproduce the character of a sitter in its highest and truest condition, to become in sympathy with the best phase of the sitter, and to transcribe it. He has an especially profound respect for three pictures, name- ly, Raphael's " Portrait of Julius II.," Raphael's " Portrait of Csesar Borgia," and Titian's " Portrait of a Gentleman," in the Pitti Palace ; and in them he PORTRAIT OF GENERAL MEADE. From a Painting by Thomas Hicks. p. S8. UAURITZ FREDERICK EENDRICK DE HAAS. 39 finds the embodiment and the vindication of the true principles and methods of portraiture. The railroad disaster at Norwalk, Connecticut, in May, 181 very nearly proved fatal to him. He and his friend were two out of tour per- sons saved from a car containing forty passengers. The portrait of General Meade is undoubtedly the finest piece of charac- terization that the artist ever set his name against; rich and solid in color and in sentiment, and managed so as to make an impressive war-picture. The commander of the Army of the Potomac is standing on the crest of a hill, on the slope of which his soldiers have spread their tents, while far behind them in the sunshine stretches the gleaming plain. His left hand rests upon the hilt of his sword, his right hand grasps his belt, and his right forearm presses his hat to his side. His coat is partly unbuttoned, and near the opening thus made hang his eye-glasses from a cord around his neck. The features of the face constitute a happy and striking likeness, and its expression is nobly chosen, having in it none of the mock-furious or pseudo-military, but telling rather of a sense of responsibility — a "fronting with level eyelids the To Come " — a self-contained and self-centred soul. Near and just behind him are half a dozen of his men. From the peak of one of the tents floats listlessly the flag of the Union. It is a serious time in the history of the country ; not the gla- mour of war, but its stern realities are in the artist's mind. There, too, the spectator is forced to believe, is a vigorous and ardent patriotism, with which every pigment in the picture seems to be aglow. The figure is manly, full, and rich, the invention fresh and ripe, and the motive simple yet striking. The tints are finely harmonized, the handling is precise, and the execution is carried entirely up to the requirements of a just and sensible realism. This work is destined to increase largely in value as the years go on ; already it may be said to form an important chapter in the pictorial history of the war. Mr. Hicks received a medal for it at the Centennial Exhibition. In making a picture, Mr. Mauritz Frederick Hendrick De Haas, the marine painter, first prepares a sketch with charcoal and chalk on tinted paper, in order to get forms and the general effect. Next, on the canvas itself, which is slightly tinted, he draws in charcoal the outlines of the picture, at 40 AMERICAN PAINTERS. the same time often improving upon the sketch already made. Then he sets his palette, beginning at the right, with the following pigments, in the order now given : vermilion, the cadmiums, Naples yellow, yellow ochre, gold ochre, sienna, and the blues. Below the blues, at the extreme left, are placed the browns ; below the vermilion and the cadmiums, at the extreme right, are placed the lakes ; between the browns and the lakes is placed the white. He likes a large palette and plenty of room. The pigment of which he uses the most is white — for the sky and water. Cobalt-bine comes next so far as quantity is concerned. The other pigments are applied in very nearly equal amounts. The charcoal outlines are next " drawn in " with umber and tur- pentine, and are thus preserved. Then comes the painting proper. Most ar- tists begin with the sky first, but he begins below the horizon, and lays in the background and foreground tentatively and proximately, not finishing them till afterward. Next in order is the sky. When about half done the picture is put into its frame, and " worked up " to it. The most difficult part of his work is the rendering of the sky, although many marine painters find the water the most troublesome ; and the most pleasant part of his work is the finishing, after the canvas has been entirely covered, and all the parts have been roughly put together. The older he grows the harder he finds it to paint a picture. " Nothing is easier," he remarked, " than to make water look thin, transparent, and glassy — thin and transparent, so that any object would drop through it to the bottom ; glassy, so that the waves would cut right into a ship. The artist, however, gives you water on which a vessel can safely float — wet water, water with movement and body to it. I like nothing better than to paint a storm." Mr. De Haas's style is neither what is known as the broad nor what may be called the minute. He always tries to finish a picture as far as the impres- sion that he desires to convey will allow ; but his finish is rather in color than in lines. He believes in trying to represent things as he sees them in Nature; and he cares nothing for book-principles of art. " I don't think," he exclaimed, " that a picture is ever done ; I may think that I can't do any more to it — and, indeed, I never let a picture go that I can improve ; but a com- pleted picture does not exist. When I see one of my old pictures, sometimes I feel like changing it, and at other times I am surprised to see it looking so THE COAST OF FRANCE. From a Painting by M. /•'. //. De Haas. p. 40. MAURITZ FREDERICK EENDRICK DE II A AS. II well. I Lave, and always have had, a special fancy for moonlight-scenes; the oftener I see them the more I am impressed by them. The moonlight-scenes in and near New York are, I think, finer than in any other locality, except per- haps on the ocean. They are more luminous, more highly-colored, and more atmospheric, than in Europe. The cloud-scenery in the suburbs of New York is the noblest and most beautiful in the world. "The great charm of marine painting," he says, " consists in the fact thai every cloud of any size affects the color- of the water, so much so that what you see is rather sky-reflection than the real color of the water, except, of course, in the immediate foreground. Wind, "also, comes in and changes the color. On the surface of a lake, when there is no wind and no motion, the sky is perfectly mirrored. I have seen instances where you could hardly tell which was sky and which was lake. The reflection was complete both in color and in shape. Since waves never exactly repeat themselves, I watch the appearance of just such a wave as I wish to represent, draw it at once, and take its color from a second wave. Only after long experience will the draw- ing be successful, and even then the correct aspect of a wave is hard to get. Waves in deep water have one distinctive aspect, waves in soundings another, waves along the shore another. In mid-ocean, for instance, they are rounder and hill-like ; near the land they become sharp and broken up. As for color, in deep water they are a dark, inky blue, difficult to describe because it varies with the appearance of the sky ; while toward soundings they become green- ish, and nearer the shore green, where the coast is rocky, and yellowish where it is sandy. Waves in deep water are always the most difficult for me to paint ; the motions of those on the coast are much more distinct and regu- lar." Mr. De Haas was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1832. His first teacher in art was the figure-painter Spoel. After the regular course of instruction in the Academy of the Fine Arts in his native city, he became a pupil of Roseboom, the landscape-painter ; and it was while in the studio of this artist that he developed a special fondness for marine painting. He went to the coast of Holland several times on sketching-excursions, and in 1851 visited London and practised himself in the use of water-colors. The next year he made many studies of the Channel-coast of England, which were received by 40 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Rosebooni with appreciation, and which gained for the young draughtsman a letter of introduction to the celebrated marine painter Louis Meyer, who lived at the Hague. For two years De Haas worked with Meyer, meanwhile send- ing specimens of his skill to the principal Continental exhibitions and also to England. One of these specimens found a way to the heart of the Queen of Holland, who honored De Haas with a substantial token of her admiration. In 1857 he made a trip in the flag-ship of a Dutch admiral. Soon afterward he sent to the Hague Academy Exhibition a large picture, which had the good fortune not only to be hung honorably, but to be bought by the hang- ing committee. The same year, however, he set sail for New York. During the last fifteen years, Mr. De Haas has become well known throughout this country, and has won distinguished success. His marines are in the galleries of Mr. Belmont, Mr. Marshall O. Roberts, and Mr. Charles Gould, of New York, Mr. William H. Stewart, of Philadelphia, and of many gentlemen in Boston, Chicago, and other cities. He became an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1863, and a full member in 1867. One of his conspicuous works is a representation of Admiral Farragut's fleet pass- ing the batteries and fortresses near New Orleans. " The Coast of France," which is engraved, is a typical representation. Mr. De Haas has painted scores of pictures, the composition of which is not at all dissimilar. On the right are the chalky cliffs, the stony shore, the sailing-vessels stranded at low tide ; in the middle distance is a row-boat full of sturdy watermen, beyond whom stretches a smooth expanse of sea, illu- mined by the glory of the setting sun. The listless, lazy waves that creep along the coast are in a full blaze of light, which beats against the sail and side of the principal fishing-smack, and bathes the cliffs in a tender radiance. One of the sailors has built a fire on the shore, and will soon welcome his fel- lows, who are approaching in the small boat. " Long Island Sound by Moon- light," also engraved, is more picturesque. A brig, under very nearly full sail, just passed between the lighthouse and the shore, is cleaving the shim- mering water amid the refulgence of a moon that has not yet begun to wane. The sky is peculiarly varied and beautiful. The position and the rigging of the vessel would, doubtless, be satisfactory to the eyes of a sailor ; the water looks like real water, and the quality of the whole is brilliant and pure. So LONG ISLAND SOUND BY MOONLIGHT. From a Painting by M, /•'. //. De Haas. p. 43. .1/ .1 U R I TZ /-'A' ED E RIC E II E X D RIC K D E II I .1 S. 4;> far as familiarity with the appearance and handling of a ship are concerned, Mr. De Haas has no superior in the studios of this country. Much of his success is due to his taste in the selection and arrangement of subjects. The walls of his studio are decorated with multitudinous studies of gorgeous sunsets, mid-ocean waves, rock-bound coasts, white-crested breakers, stranded and swift-sailing vessels, and tender moonlight effects, which are in- teresting in themselves, and in what they have to say about the artist's indus- try and sensibilities. From a paper on Mr. De Haas, in a recent number of Appletons' Art Journal, the following extract is taken in addition to the several quotations already made : " A painter in any department of art naturally magnifies the characteristic difficulties of that department ; and perhaps it is impossible to tell whether landscapes or figures, animals or marines, are the hardest subjects to paint. Mr. De Haas, as might have been expected, thinks that marines are the hardest, and his reasons for the opinion are fresh and bountiful. A coast- painter, he says, is only half a marine painter. A marine painter is a painter who can paint mid-ocean scenes as well. To do this it is necessary that he should go to sea, and become as familiar with the appearance and the han- dling of a ship and her rigging as a sailor is. He must learn how to put a vessel in position, what sails to use under different circumstances, what each particular rope is for, how the vessel appears at various times, how the water looks, what elements disturb it, and a thousand other things, a knowledge of which can be obtained only by going to sea. Mr. De Haas's practice has been accordant with his theory. He has been a sailor in the Dutch Navy ; he has cruised in the English Channel in pilot-boats and other craft ; he has wit- nessed a great variety of noble sea-scenes, and has preserved the noblest of them in sketches. He has also crossed the Atlantic, and he knows how to sail a ship. But a figure-painter does not need to go out of his studio — he can bring his models into it. Mr. De Haas admits that it is more difficult to make drawings of the human form in different positions than to make draw- ings of ships in different positions ; but he thinks that if figure-painters would only try marine painting they would get a more adequate idea of its demands. Wave-drawing, sky-painting, and wave-coloring, would open their eyes, even if an attempt to represent a ship did not. For the sake of peace, however, he 44 AMERICAN PAINTERS. would concede to figure-painting an equal difficulty with that of marine paint- ing. But lie could not g:o further than that. The fact that thei'e are so few good marine painters in this or any other country is perhaps an argument on his side of the fence. ' People,' he said, ' often want an artist to paint an im- possible picture. They go to his studio, pick out a sketch that they like, a mid-day coast-scene, for instance, and ask him to make a sunset or a moon- light scene out of it. This thing can't be done, of course ; but, if you take the trouble quietly to explain why it can't be done, they will see the reasons at once. Most intelligent persons sometimes make just such mistakes, simply because they have not had a special training. Very often they wish a picture painted from a high point of view — a point from which all creation is visible behind and before. A little explanation will convince them that such a rep- resentation would do for a panorama, but not for a picture. I suppose that every artist has had such experiences in his studio.' " Marine painters, as far as Mr. De Haas's observation goes, make mistakes oftenest in the position and in the drawing of vessels. These vessels are fre- quently represented in positions where neither the wind nor the currents of the scene could ever have put them, and are also imperfectly drawn. Then, too, the rigging often assumes impossible aspects. Many of these faults, of course, only a sailor-critic could detect." Chaeles Henry Miller, the landscape-painter, is a native of New York City, where he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1863, when twen- ty-one years old. Not long afterward, he went to England as surgeon of the ship Harvest Queen. Already he had exhibited in the National Academy a picture called "The Challenge Accepted," and from boyhood had been an enthusiastic draughtsman. When, therefore, he found himself for the first time in the galleries of the Old World, he was prepared to be stimulated by them. On returning home, he decided to abandon the practice of medicine, and to mix pigments instead of pills. In a short time he went to Europe again, visited London and Paris, and settled in Munich. His principal teacher in the last-named city was Prof. Lier, the landscape-painter. For three years he studied there, making excursions meanwhile to Paris, _^_^^_ a § w ^ U. 7. S a "5* 0. m E h a D 3 u I t- z < a (t w S 2 D to S J.AMES HCD OUGALL HART. 49 Colonel Roebling, the engineer of the East River Bridge, is the possessor of "Coming out of the Shade," cattle emerging from the edge of the woods into the sunset glow; in the foreground a pool in which are reflected the white legs of the nearest cow. In 1871, after painting his " Under the Elms," now in the possession of Mrs. Carnochan, of New York, Mr. Hart began to feel the need of a thorougl acquaintance with cattle. He went out-doors and began to study them. He found them worth studying. Perhaps no artist in this country better appre- ciates the nature and the merits of oxen, or would better understand Mr. Hamerton's enthusiastic eulogy of them : " Who that has seen these creatures work can be indifferent to the steadfast grandeur of their nature ? They have no petulance, no hurry, no nervous excitability ; but they will bear the yoke upon their necks, and the thongs about their horns, and push forward without flinching from sunrise until dusk. I hear, as I write, the cry of the ox-drivers — incessant, musical, monotonous. I hear it, not in imagination, but coming to my open window from the fields. The morning is fresh and pure, the scene is wide and fair, and the autumn sunshine filters through an expanse of broken, silvery cloud. They are ploughing not far off, with two teams of six oxen each — white oxen, of the noble Charolais breed, sleek, powerful beasts, whose moving muscles show under their skins like the muscles of trained ath- letes. The first condition of success in animal-painting is, as the French say, to possess your animal. You cannot paint an animal in movement until you know him by heart ; you must know his structure, the places of his bones and muscles, and the markings caused by every change of attitude ; you must even know more than this : the mind and character of the animal must be familiar to you, and more than familiar — friendly. The amount of knowledge, and of gentle, condescending sympathy — a condescension of which only fine minds are capable — which is necessary to the painting even of a calf, is little dreamed of by persons of exclusively literary culture, who too often conclude that, because the calf himself has not much intellect or information, it does not require much of either to paint him. This comparison between the intel- lect of the subject and the intellect necessary to grasp the subject, has been the cause of a very curious, old illusion. Figure-painters have imagined that because man is a more intelligent animal than the ass — which, in exceptional 50 -I U E B J C A X PAINT E R S . cases, is undoubtedly true — tlie painter who represents men is superior in the same degree to the painter who represents asses. They do not consider that by the mere fact of our human nature we have easy access to all human na- ture that resembles our own ; whereas, to go out of our humanity, so as to enter fully into the existence of the inferior animals, requires either great effort of imagination, or the most comprehensive sympathy. Children and childish painters solve the difficulty in a very simple way by attributing human sentiments to animals; and as the public easily enters into such human sentiment, it applauds them, without too nicely considering how far they have studied the true character of brutes." Mr. Hart, however, never lends him- self to the perpetration of so easy an untruth. For cows and oxen he has the fullest sympathy. Their thoughts which are not men's thoughts, their ways which are not men's ways, and their faces which do not depend for interest upon any human likeness or suggestion, have been the objects of his studious love. He says that he likes cattle as well as landscapes — and this, for an artist like him, is saying a great deal. An Adirondack scene, " While yet the Wild Deer trod in Spangling Snow," in Mr. Marshall O. Roberts's gallery, presents a foreground of beauti- ful deer, a high mountain in the background, and a dense fog in the centre. Colonel Rush C. Hawkins bought his " In the Autumn Woods," which was in the Academy Exhibition of 1878, on the south wall of the south room. Cat- tle coming home through the trees are startled by some slight thing ; the white steer has thrown his head up ; above and beyond him is a faint-blue sky, where fleecy clouds show themselves through a loose network of branches and russet leaves. Almost all of Mr. Hart's pictures are large, and he makes but ten or twelve of them in a year. One of his latest is an expression of these lines of Whittier, a poet in whom this artist delights : " Through dust-clouds rising thick and dun, Like smoke of battle o'er us, Their white horns gleaming in the sun, Like shields and spears before us." The cattle are accompanied by a real drover's dog, and behind them are two drovers on horseback. We have engraved " A Summer Day on the Boquet 12 CATTLE GOING HOME. From a Painting by James M. Hart. p. 50. • JERVIS M<> ENTER. 51 River" and "Cattle going Home." The former is a pastoral scene in Essex County, New York. Some cattle, very skillfully grouped, arc drinking or standing in a stream, which the heat and drought of summer have very much reduced ; beyond them lie or browse a flock of sheep, two of which are near a scarlet shawl. On one side of the river is a luxuriant forest-growth ; on the other side a row of stately and flourishing elms, carefully and happily drawn, even to minute details. The sun fills the scene with warmth and brightness. This picture is in the gallery of the late Mr. Alexander T. Stewart. The other one, " Cattle going Home," shows cows fording a brook in a rich atmosphere of approaching sunset. Trees pleasant to see — maples, tamaracks, white- birches, and others— decorate either bank of the narrow stream. The per- spective is far-reaching and excellent, and the colors of the clouds, through which the light is breaking, are many and exquisitely beautiful. " Corot," said Mr. Jervis McEntee one day, " is incomplete and slovenly. His landscapes are ghosts of landscapes. They have neither technical nor literary excellence. The ' Orpheus,' recently in the Cottier collection in New York, while not so unfinished as many other of his works, did not strike me as anything noble or large. The sky, to be sure, was of a soft, pleasant color, but it was full of dirt — whether this was part of the scheme or not I don't know. I believe that a man can learn to like anything in art. In France, the rivalry is so great, there is so much competition, that the artists are con- stantly doing outre things, which surprise, or bewilder, or stun. There is no longer any care to record honest impressions of Nature. Art in that coun- try is in a bad way. It is feverish and diseased. All the Cottier pictures were specimens of incomplete art. The groups of Monticelli, to be sure, were interesting bits of color ; but a picture should be something more than an interesting bit of color. The thought is the important matter. Take Wil- kie's ' Blind-Man's-Buff,' for example : I don't remember about the color, but the work tells a charming story, and touches us and moves us very power- fully. It is the same with Knaus's paintings. I know there is a boundary- line between what art and literature should express ; but people differ con- cerning where to draw it. 52 AMERICAN PAINTERS. " In landscape, certainly, you can tell a certain kind of story. The days and seasons in their gay or solemn beauty, in their swift departure, influence you, impress you, awaken emotions, convey teachings. If you can relate this influence, you tell their story. I don't care for mere scenery or ' views,' unless these have some peculiar and distinctive character, which makes places that at first are not picturesque really picturesque ; which addresses one's artistic feeling. I especially like to walk when in the country in pasture-fields, where the beautiful greensward has been cut into and broken up by the teeth of the cattle. Side by side you see the traces of what they have eaten and the beauty of what they have not eaten. The sight touches you. If you can make it touch others also, you are a successful artist. The detail, the variety, the beauty, in a piece of pasture-land destitute of any striking object, are always very interesting to me ; and I don't care for what is known as ' a fine view.' From my home in the Catskills I can look down a vista of forty miles, a magnificent and commanding sight. But I have never painted it ; nor should I care to paint it. What I do like to paint is my impression of a simple scene in Nature. That which has been suggested is more interesting than that which has been copied. The copying that an artist does should appear in a study rather than in a picture proper. In all my studies you will see servile copying ; for example, in my tree-drawings I have produced every little twig and leaf, and the knowledge so obtained is used afterward for the purpose of suggesting. Corot's trees, however, do not display much knowl- edge of that sort. They look like poles with cobwebs wound around them. They are unsubstantial, not real. " I look upon a landscape as I look upon a human being — its thoughts, its feelings, its moods, are what interest me ; and to these I try to give expres- sion. What it says, and thinks, and experiences, this is the matter that con- cerns the landscape-painter. All art is based upon a knowledge of Nature and a sympathy for her ; but in order to represent her it is not necessary to make a thing exactly like a thing. Imitation is not what we want, but sug- gestion, as I said before. The most popular pictures, undoubtedly, are those that imitate the most — those of the Franco-Spanish school, for instance. I do not believe in art for art's sake, nor in art for schemes of color, for purposes of mere decoration, but in art for the expression of one's self. An artist cannot I' •' z z X o s JEBVIS MO EN TEE. 53 improve upon Nature, but often his recollection of a natural scene serves him better than a labored study of it made on the spot. Perhaps this is why- Ian tl scape-painters who have lived exclusively in the country are not apt to paint so well as when they get away from it. A good deal of untrained art is more valuable than the trained. . "Some people call my landscapes gloomy and disagreeable. They say that I paint the sorrowful side of Nature, that I am attracted by the shadows more than by the sunshine. But this is a mistake. I would not reproduce a Late November scene if it saddened me or seemed sad to me. In that season of the year Nature is not sad to me, but quiet, pensive, restful. She is not dying, but resting. Mere sadness, unless it had the dramatic element in it, I would not attempt to paint." Jervis McEntee was born in Rondout, Ulster County, New York, on the 14th of July, 1828. The place is situated picturesquely on the west bank of the Hudson River, just within the shadows of the Catskill Mountains, and is still his country home. In the winter of 1850-51 he became the ptipil of Mr. Frederick E. Church, in New York. Four years afterward, having spent the intervening period in diligent study in city and in suburb, he opened a studio in New York, and was welcomed cordially by the brother- hood of the profession and by the principal patrons of American art. In the summer of 1859, accompanied by Mr. Sanford R. Gifford, he visited Eu- rope, examining the works of the old masters in the chief galleries, but lin- gering the longest among the glories of the Alps — those glories of color, of light, and of shadow, which exerted so powerful an influence upon the unfold- ing genius of the youthful Titian. He did not stay away long. The lapse of a few months saw him back again in his own studio, his impressions of the home-scenes, which had taken strong hold of him, remaining intact side by side with those of the magnificence and splendor of Switzerland. A portfolio of sketches made in that country and in Italy came back with him. In the Academy Exhibition of 1861 he was represented by an autumn scene, the object of which was to give pictorial expression to the sentiment of Mr. Bryant's poem, " The Death of the Flowers : " " The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere ; 54 AMEBIC AX PAINTERS. Heaped in the hollows of the grove the autumn leaves lie dead, They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread ; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day. The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more." The picture, which bore the title " Melancholy Day," was bought while in the exhibition by the late artist James A. Suydara, and bequeathed by him to the Council of the Academy. Its excellence attracted very general recogni- tion, and its author was elected an Academician. It was followed by a series of somewhat similar representations : by " October in the Catskills," " Late Autumn," "An Autumn Afternoon," "An Autumn Morning," and others, in which Mr. McEntee strove to apply the principles already stated, es£>ecially to express the influence that these autumn days on the mountain or in the forest had exerted upon his feelings. The name " Melancholy Day," given to his first principal work, seems to indicate that in his earlier artistic life he did like to paint sadness and the dying year. Of late his musings have taken color from divine philosophy, and, where once he saw melancholy on an autumn day, he now sees peace and rest. To the Royal Academy Exhibition in London in 1872 Mr. McEntee con- tributed a small landscape, which was not overlooked by the critic of the London Times. " A new name, Jervis McEntee," wrote that person, " at- tached to a landscape of unpretending and rare quality, ' November,' with the appropriate line — ' Shade deepening over shade the country round embrowns,' is, we understand, American. The picture shows, what is so rare, an imagina- tive feeling of the subject — a scene of low hills with a foreground of scrubby woodland, its winter suit of brown here and there enlivened, but very spar- ingly, with a touch of autumnal scarlet and gold, and an horizon of higher hills of sombre indigo. The picture is too low in tone and too sombre in senti- ment to attract much attention ; but it deserves and will reward study, and affixes a niark in the memory to the artist's name." " Too low in tone and too sombre in sentiment to attract much attention " in England half a dozen years 1 f ,», ■bib -m, m tjI \ M ,pi, I z g 35 E U z w I h <*) s ! ,j- llll/i:! - 1! ! 1! ■ ! ■ :' ■ ! i: !■ " JER VIS l/' EN TEE. 55 ago, be meant. But what would some of the modem French critics say to such an utterance as that % The Italian studies and sketches made by Mr. McEntee during his visit to Europe have not often been elaborated and exhibited by the artist. On one occasion, his "Scene on the Via Appia, near Rome," was hung in the gallery of the Century Club, of which he is a member; but the most of his pictures are records of his impressions of American scenery in the time of the sere and yellow leaf, the snow, the ice, and the leaden sky. The "Autumn Morning" which we have engraved, is a representative example of the brighter aspects of his theme. It is an autumn morning, to be sure, but the distant mountain is robed in warm sunlight, the clouds are fleecy, fair, and tinged here and there with crimson, which repeats the tints of the trees in the left foreground, and of the bushes near them. Nature certainly is not dying — she is smiling and resting. " The Danger-Signal," a train of cars rounding a curve at night in a driving snow-storm, is later autumn. Across the track and the moor the snow lies in wave-like drifts in the full glare of the white light of the locomo- tive. The red lantern of the watchman is swung high above his head, but the locomotive is thundering along like the one in Turner's celebrated picture in the London National Gallery. Concerning a small landscape, " October," in the American Water-Color Society's Exhibition of 1877, the present writer had occasion to say: "The beauty of Mr. Jervis McEntee's landscape is, to a large extent, projected upon the canvas by the intelligence that discerns it ; and in the case of his produc- tion, as perhaps in that of no other artist represented in the collection, is it true that the proper appreciation of a work of art comes not from intuition but from serious and instructed study. A placid surface of water, a bit of whitish- gray beach, some trees, and some fleecy clouds — these may be said to constitute the picture, but only in the sense that clay constitutes a portrait-bust. There are scores of pictures in the exhibition with all these constituents, and they attract nobody. Nor would one trouble himself to go far to look simply at a placid surface of water, a bit of whitish-gray beach, some trees, and some fleecy clouds. With Mr. McEntee the idea, the sentiment, is everything, and he subordinates all other matters to the expression of it. Take his ' A Nip- ping and an Eager Air,' for example, in the north-room. What does he care 56 AMERICAN PA I X TEES. about the nature of the material of which the man's trousers are made, about the kind of gun the man carries, about the botanical names of the trees or the shrubs around the man ? He is seeking something else, and that something is the expression of the coldness of the weather. Whatever is not of service to the interpretation of this idea he ignores and rejects. He is not painting a fashion-plate, like Willems, nor a favorite dog, like Landseer, nor an illustra- tion for a hardware-dealer's catalogue, like Leloir, nor a bouquet in which you shall designate the name of every flower, like Robie. So, in this ' October ' in the east-room, it is not water nor beach nor trees nor clouds that he is attempting — it is the most delightful month in the most delightful season of the year. And this month is really represented. You are out-of-doors in the country, and you feel yourself out-of-doors, and the beginning coolness sur- rounds you, and the tints of the foliage greet you, and the skies of the sunny, shortening day bend over you, and the compliments of the season are offered you — nay, not the compliments only, but the teachings and the inspiration. This is no pictured scene, but Nature herself, hushed, sweet, and mystical. At the same time the mechanism of art is here also, and one may look long without tiring of the technical dexterity, the sylvan repose, the clear, far- reaching perspective, the color and the symmetry, the contrasts and the har- mony, the finish and the truth." Mr. William H. Beard was born in Painesville, Ohio, April 13, 1825. After painting some portraits in his native town and in the neighboring towns, he went, at the age of twenty-five years, to Buffalo, which, with the excep- tion of Cleveland, was the nearest large city to Painesville. After a residence of six or eight years in Buffalo, he made the European tour, studying one summer at Diisseldorf, and visiting Paris, Switzerland, and Rome. About the year 1861 he came to New York, and for the last twelve years has occu- pied his present studio in the Tenth Street Building. Mr. Beard is most widely known as a humorous painter of bears and monkeys. His picture, recently sold in the Latham collection in New York, and entitled " The Runa- way Match," is. a very adequate representative of his most popular style. The runaways are a pair of monkeys dressed gaudily, after the fashion of some Q z s $ ' : ':; ' ' ' J WILLIAM n. HEARD. ; )7 country-folk, and standing before a monkey-parson, who is making an inspec- tion of them, in the presence of several monkey-witnesses similar]) attired, before forging the matrimonial bonds. In this picture, as in most of his live- lier works, his design is to express character by the use of satire rather than of caricature; and in all his pictures he attains this end by telling a story. The literary instinct predominates, as indeed it usually does in American and in English figure-painting. When you look at one of Beard's representations you occupy yourself in reading what he has narrated ; and so good is liis com- mand of the pictorial syntax and vocabulary that his meaning is always clear. Cruikshank himself is not more easily understood. The subject is the firsl thing aud the chief thing. Perfection of materials and of methods, subtile harmonies of forms, movements, and hues, combinations and contrasts of lines aud of color, the poetry of pigment and the mechanism of finish, are not at all what he thinks most of. The thought is his great concern ; the vehicle of the thought is of secondary importance. Successful and many as are his pictures of bears and of monkeys, they are, however, to Mr. Beard himself, by no means his most satisfactory works. He feels happiest when dealing with themes like "Old King Cole," " Four-am 1- Twenty Blackbirds," aud other familiar nursery-rhymes, where the imagi- nation has an easy chance to give a fantastic turn to ideas, thereby exciting merriment and, perhaps, laughter. "Those nursery-rhymes," I once heard him say, " offer such excellent opportunities for pictures ; " and so they do, especially to a painter whose playfulness takes the form of humor rather than of wit, aud whose liking is to make men ashamed of their folly, rather than to sting them into resentment. But Mr. Beard is serious as well as amusing, and his ripest ambition is embodied in certain sketches which, though not yet translated into finished pictures, undoubtedly soon will be. "The Star of Bethlehem " is one of these sketches, and consists of a group of scenes in- tended to illustrate the beneficent mission of Christianity, which sheds its cheering rays upon the wise men and the castaways ; the toilers on the moun- tain aud the peasants in the cottage ; the martyr and the prisoner ; infancy and old age. Here the thought conveyed is of the noblest possible descrip- tion ; the feeling is sincere and sympathetic, and the constructive imagination is in lively operation. The subject of another sketch is " The End of Time, - ' 58 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Death carrying off Time in Lis arms, amid the crash and destruction of all things. The artist proposes to model these figures in clay, life-size. Like Leighton, the Englishman, and Lore, the Frenchman, he has a penchant for sculpture ; and certainly it is easier for a painter to become a sculptor than for a sculptor to become a painter. Some years ago Mr. James Lick, of California, invited contributions of designs for a grand historical monument cornineinorative of the growth and the glory of that Commonwealth. His death, however, prevented him from accepting any one of the designs prepared in response to the invitation. Mr. Beard was one of the competitors, and the rough draught of a model for such a monument is now in his studio. A colossal figure representing California is seated upon a pedestal, at the base of which are wild animals and the pio- neer ; above them, Painting, Poetry, and the other Fine Arts ; while still high- er, at the feet of the colossal figure, stands Science. A more important work is a design for a subterranean entrance to the Museum of Art in the Central Park, which was prepared in 1871. It is a series of very elaborate and pict- urescpie allegorical representations, which he purposed should be carved in the solid rock. These are some of the things that Mr. Beard's pencil has done, and they are precisely the sort of things that he would be most happy to carry into execution. His bears and his monkeys do not please him so well as his patrons ; they certainly do not begin to exhaust his resources. The beauty of art is said to lie in not being susceptible of improvement ; but Mr. Beard's literary instinct leads him to magnify the importance of his subject, and to yearn for grandeur therein, though he knows well enough that every building need not be a tenrple, nor every poet a Milton ; that simplest objects are often more impressive than the most complex ones, when a true man, well ecpxipped, tells us his impression of them. " Lo, the Poor Indian ! " presents Mr. Beard from still another point of view. The red-man is reclining on a hill-side, his faithful dog by his side, and his eyes peering eagerly across the prairie, over which the wind is blow- ing fiercely. There is but little foreground — as little as possible — the general tone is gray, aud the sentiment is concentrated and intense. It is not General Sheridan's Indian, nor yet the missionary Eliot's. It is the lonely, pictu- resque Indian, whom our forefathers dispossessed of his hunting-grounds, and THE MARCH OF SILENUS. From n Painting by William II i : at ■' p. 59. WILLI A U If. BE J /,■/>. ; g whom our philanthropists idealize and consecrate. He is ,i very nice person and very interesting — Lo, the poor Indian ! " The March of Silenus " is one of Mr. Beard's characteristic pictures. Silenus is a great, fat, drunken grizzly bear, followed by goats as satyrs, and other bears as bacchanalians, all of them treated in classic style with a rich, warm tone. The expressions <>f t In- several faces are worth noticing, and the sense of inebriated revelry is strong and single. The conception has real dramatic force. To one of the Union League Club's monthly exhibitions, and also to the New Fork Academy Exhibition for 1878, Mr. Beard sent his " Who-o ! who-o-o ! " a semicircular group of rabbits staring at an owl seated on a limb above them. It is freely and deftly painted, the rabbits especially being full of life, action, and distinc- tive character. His " Cattle upon a Thousand Hills " is a rolling prairie with great herds of beasts, and a finely delicate play of light and shade. His "Fallen Landmark" is a study of a giant birch, by the side of which in the sunlight stands an aged Indian in a contemplative mood. This painting and "The March of Silenus" are owned by the Buffalo Academy of the Fine Arts. "The Wreckers" is a number of crows on an old spar just washed ashore in a white fog. Other works are " The Traveled Fox," who got his tail cut off by accident, and has returned to persuade his comrades to a similar course ; " The Consultation," a bear-scene, engraved by Holyer, and " The Dancing Bears." Mr. Beard is now preparing a book of drawings designed to suit the peculiar vein of each celebrated American poet, and to be accompanied by original poems written expressly by the several authors represented. Next, therefore, to the fact of his humor, the most conspicuous feature of his career is the breadth of its scope. He is a figure-painter, a portrait-painter, a genre painter, a landscape-painter, an animal-painter, and, for aught we know to the contrary, a marine painter. He paints woodlands, meadows, and rivers ; monkeys, bears, sheep, deer, and rabbits ; men, women, and sunburned boys and girls ; parlors, kitchens, and bar-rooms ; marriages, picnics, and the final destruction of the universe. There is not an American, living or dead, who has transferred to canvas scenes so widely different ; and the possibilities of his future are incapable of being soundly estimated even by himself. To- morrow morning he is quite as likely to make the preliminary sketch of a picture representing the beast in the book of Revelation, Jonah in the whale's 60 AMERICAN PAINTERS. belly, the white-armed Juno, or the fierce wrath of the Olympian celestials, as to set about telling another monkey or bear story. If the thought should strike him, he would not hesitate a moment to make a crayon-drawing of the earth when it was without form and void. Nor would the brain that could conceive " The End of Time " be staggered by the beginning of eternity. Mr. Beard's popular reputation rests undoubtedly upon his animal pict- ures, especially upon his delineations of the domestic life of monkeys and bears. Can it be compared with Landseer's ? In some respects, undoubted- ly it can be. If Landseer was often dramatic ; if on many occasions he abused his dramatic gift, jumping into tragedy when melodrama was on the boards, or into farce when comedy would have been better ; if he loved the beasts that he painted, and sympathized with them ; and if he was sometimes too good a story-teller, displacing the artistic with the literary, and invading the domain of the penman — all this may be truly said concerning William H. Beard. Each of these artists has fallen into the error of ascribing human emotions and thoughts to animals, when a profounder study would have shown them that a dog's ways are not a man's ways. In manual dexterity, Landseer, of course, has the precedence. Perhaps there never lived an animal- painter who in this particular excelled him. Mr. William T. Richards was born in Philadelphia on the 14th of November, 1833. During the earlier years of his career he received some instruction from Paul Weber, a German artist of repute, who has since re- turned to his native country. One of Mr. Richards's first pictures was a view of Mount Vernon, painted in 1854, for the Art Union of Philadelphia. The next year he went to Europe, and spent twelve months in Florence, Paris. Dusseldorf, and the Tuscan Apennines. He is a pre-Raphaelite, and his stud- ies proper were begun on his return from this trip in 1858, he having been moved to them, he modestly says, by a growing conviction of his need of a painstaking and protracted study of Nature. When he was once on the new path, he continued there for many years. In 1859 he painted for Mr. William T. Walters, of Baltimore, his " Tulip-Trees ; " in 1861, for the late Mr. Hugh Davids, his " Wood-Scene ; " soon afterward, for the late Mr. William T. Blod- WILLIAM T. RICHARDS. 61 gett, of New York, his "Midsummer;" and in 1864, for Mr. Robert L. Stuart of the same city, his "June Woods." For Mr. George Whitney, of Philadel- phia, he produced two of his most important landscapes, namely, " The For- est" and "The Wissahickon." These works, perhaps, best represent the tri- umphs of his early pre-Raphaelistic methods and aspirations. What is pre-Raphaelitism ? Let us go not to Mr. Ruskin but to M. Charles Blanc for an answer; and let us find it in the hitter's description of the " Ophelia " of Mr. Millais, of London, whom M. Blanc calls the pre- Raphaelite par excellence : " The young girl," says the French critic, " who, in her madness, trusted herself to the treacherous stream, is represented as already drowned, in a profusion of agreeable details, depicted with the pa- tience of a Benedictine monk, and a realism a hundred times more faithful than that of our foremost realists. Not a leaf is wanting to the willow, not a reed to the bank. Cresses, water-lilies, iris, sweet-brier, myosotis, and I know not what more besides, distract and charm the attention, which is now fixed upon and now distributed amid a wonderful confusion of marine plants and flowers ; the convolvulus is a setting for the poppy in the necklace of a crazy nymph — a contrast repeated by a robin-redbreast and a blue-winged king- fisher. Everything has been told us by the painter ; the least bit of straw, the smallest blade of grass, the daisies and the buttercups which the poor girl still grasps, the moisture of her hair, the teeth behind her smiling lips, her linen puffed out by the water, her petticoats drenched and limp, the laces floating on top of them." Shall we say with M. Blanc that all this is a mis- take ; that Art should not enter into competition with Nature, because it can- not compete with her ; that Art has nobler ends than mere illusions ; and, with Sir Joshua, that, because a man can paint a cat so cleverly that you can take the animal in your hands is no reason for comparing him to Raphael and Michael Angelo ? Or, on the other hand, shall we say with M. Petroz, that the realists are the true artists, that future progress is with them, that their notion of art is the correct one, and that all they need is to carry out that notion to its farthest limits ? Mr. Richards, certainly, is a disciple of the latter master ; he would disdain to paint anything that he himself had not seen or touched, or to paint it less faithfully, to imitate it less closely, than was possible. Had he been an English student twenty years ago he would 62 I -'/ E RIG A X /' . I INTER S. have been as enthusiastic and ardent a Ruskinian as Holman Hunt himself. "So carefully finished," says one of his reviewers, many years ago, " are his leaves, grasses, grain-stalks, weeds, stones, and flowers, that we seem not to be looking at a distant prospect, but lying on the ground, with the herbage and blossoms directly under our eyes. Marvelous in accurate imitation are the separate objects in the foreground of his pictures : the golden-rod seems to wave, and the blackberry to glisten.'' To marine painting, of late years, Mr. Eichards's attention has been espe- cially directed, and he makes now the best drawings of waves that this coun- try can produce. The sea-shore has been his home. In 1865 he spent the summer at Nantucket, and painted some remarkable works — remarkable for their loving and elaborate reproduction of surf, breaker, wave, and sand. In 1866 he went again to Europe, this time to perfect himself in the execution of coast-scenes. He studied the canvases in the Paris Exhibition of 1867 with renewed avidity ; and when, in the autumn of that year, he returned home, he was better equipped and more successful than any other American marine painter. The summer of 1870 he passed at Atlantic City, New Jersey; and every summer since he has devoted to sketching by the sea. The fine atmos- phere and surf of Newport have recently attracted him with peculiar force, and he now owns there a cottage by the ocean. His maturest Avork has un- doubtedly been that in which he has attempted the presentation of scenes at and near that beautiful place ; and his " Mid-Ocean," now owned by Mi'. Wil- liam Sellers, of Philadelphia, and his " New England Coast," in the gallery of Mr. G. P. Wetmore, of New York, would be creditable accessions to any col- lection of American marines. Mr. Richards has been for many years a regu- lar contributor to the National Academy Exhibition in New York, and also to the American Water-Color Society. His love of finish is so strong that even the water-colors he exhibits are not sketches, but whole pictures. If Ameri- can art in water-colors has been charged with resembling English art in water- colors, of which some writer has said : " It is an art which proposes the mak- ing of pictures as its raison d'etre, and looks upon Nature with eyes trained only to see in her a certain number of pictorial effects, and in man only pleas- ant arrangements of color and form. Here every artist seems to cater for the public as a dramatic agent caters for the theatre — to say in his heart: 'Here is I X! >< . • 5 g h £ Z "~ < 5 I- I < «5 WILLIAM T. RICHARDS. g 3 a nice, pretty thing I've made for you. Don't you like it ? Then I'll make something else.' Beautiful in many respects, the English art is practically an art without any coherent faith and life" — if, we say, our native art has with more or less justness been likened to its English sister, how unjust would he the application of such words as those to the honest, thorough, and masterly performances of Mr. William T. Richards! "We have seen in ail exhibition a whole room full of weak prettinesses supported by one strong, virile work of his — a work almost strong enough to capture the enthusiasm of grave and titled Academicians, in whose eyes art in water-colors is usually a woman's plaything, half patronized, half despised, who insist that oils are the true channels of vigorous and respectable effort, and that considerable non- sense is promulgated by the water-colorists in their frequent assumption of a monopoly of " transparency," " delicacy," and the power to seize " subtile, evanescent impressions," and fix them where they will do the most good. In the Philadelphia Loan Exhibition of 1878 Mr. Richards was repre- sented by seven landscapes and marine pictures, varied both in style and in subject. Concerning one of these works a Philadelphian says : " It is worth noting that the ' Leafy June,' by our Philadelphia landscapist, W. T. Richards, loses nothing by its juxtaposition with the fine ' Twilight on the Seine,' by Daubigny, an interpretation of a difficult phase of Nature, in which every- thing is dependent on an exquisite harmony of tone. ' Leafy June ' was painted as far back as 1862, at a time when a good many of our American painters were in the habit of sneering at Mr. Richards's exact and painstaking methods, and before he acquired that freedom of handling which characterizes his later works. It is just a trifle hard aud over-exact in non-essentials, but its intrinsic merits are proved by the fact that it is well able to hold its own not only with the landscape by Daubigny referred to, but with a number of other brilliant and masterly works on the same walls. The reason is, that Mr. Rich- ards, when he painted this picture, saw not only every leaf on the trees before him, but he saw, and consequently was able to paint, the whole effect." If some artists sneered at Mr. Richards's pictures. in 1862 because he was too minute and intricate in details, it is also true that some artists affect a contempt for his later and riper delineations. A crowd in the National Academy galleries in New York during the annual exhibition is easily divisi- 15 (34 AMERICAN PAINTERS. ble into the three classes who admire this artist's pictures, who dislike them, and who do not intelligently appreciate any work of art — the last class, of course, being by far the most numerous of the three. Among our young painters who, after a course of study in Paris or Munich, or both places, have returned to their beloved land with the purpose of showing to their country, men the only true and infallible methods of art, you will hardly be able to find two warm admirers of Mr. W. T. Richards. The Society of American Artists, composed chiefly of those young gentlemen, did not invite Mr. Rich- ards to contribute to their first and celebrated exhibition in the spring of 1878. They deliberately resolved not to invite him. Their reason was, that they did not consider him to be an artist in the strict and approved sense of the term. Not one of them — we are speaking with exactness — not one of them is able to approach within arm's-length of his splendid draughtsmanship. Nor is there one of them who would assert his own ability in this direction, or claim to possess the resources in technique which the accomplished Philadelphian has acquired by years of honest and most diligent application to his business. The fact is, that most of these young gentlemen are exhibiting as finished pict- ures what to Mr. Richards are simply studio-studies, or out-of-door sketches — works the excellence of which Mr. Richards, doubtless, would be the first to see and acknowledge, but the incompleteness of which would be, in his eyes, positively painful and certainly inexcusable, except on the ground of juvenile incapacity. It may, indeed, be questioned whether or not the modern Euro- pean school to which the Society of American Artists chiefly belongs — we say school and not schools, because, in whatever city the masters who lead it reside, the motives that compel these masters are substantially the same — is not becoming increasingly inefficient by reason of its vehement scorn for de- tails which only instructed and industrious painters are competent to repre- sent. Consider, for instance, the marvelous incorrectness, as well as sloven- liness, of many of the great Corot's drawings of the human figure. This famous and brilliant artist once affixed his revered name to the worst-drawn female arm that, perhaps, has ever been publicly exhibited in a first-class gal- lery in the city of New York. It might as well, then, be said at once that the trained and honest pencil of Mr. Richards has secured for him the very hearty respect of many compe- ON THE WISSAHICKON. From a Painting by William T, Richards. p.M. SEYMOUR JOSEPH GUY. gg tent connoisseurs ; and that the greater number of the canvases on which this pencil has left its tracings are sure to improve with age in precisely the same respects and to precisely the same degree that Falernian wine did. The oc- casional rigidity — frigidity, if we please — that characterizes his pictures, the occasional apparent forgetfulness on his part that a work of art is not an assemblage of details, but a fused and glowing ensemble, cannot, of course, but be deplored. His latest works show less of these faults than his earlier ones ; his landscape in two shades of green, for example, which was hung in the fifty-third annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, was, in the particulars just mentioned, a marked advance upon his landscape entitled " Leafy June." Some of his more recent water-colors, too, are obvious im- provements upon his first attempts on Whatman paper. The evidence is sufficient that Mr. Richards has himself felt the need of a change, and that he has manfully discarded some of the errors of his juvenescent pre-Raphaelism. This is well, and worthy of praise. Consistency is the worst, as it is usually the first, infirmity of noble artist-minds. The painter who begins his career with one idea, ends that career much more speedily than he is aware, when- ever this idea has metamorphosed itself into a hobby. If, like a Bourbon, he will never learn, like a Bourbon, also, he gets laid upon the shelf, wb ether he is conscious of the result or not. " At Atlantic City," which we have engraved, was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1873, and is now in Mr. Joseph Ferrel's private collection in Phila- delphia. It is a subject too barren to attract many artists very strongly, but Mr. Richards's treatment of it has made it positively picturesque. The cedars in late autumn on the coast, the easy play and sparkle of the breakers, and the vast perspective, are the principal elements of the composition. " On the Wissahickon " is a richer subject. The leaves of the trees, the foreground shrubs, the tumbled rocks, and the sylvan stream murmuring past the obstruc- tions in its course, and reflecting the serenest beauty of sky and forest-brink, are deftly and lovingly depicted. It is a scene of sunshine, gladness, and rest. Turning for a moment from landscape to genre painting, we are confronted with the pictures of Mr. Seymour Joseph Guy, whose reputation has been 66 AMERICAN PAINTERS. earned as fairly as that of any other American artist. He was born in Green- wich, Kent, England, on the 16th of January, 1824, and in his boyhood was fond of painting horses and dogs. At the age of fifteen he took lessons of Mr. Buttersworth, a marine painter, whose name might never have been men- tioned on this side of the Atlantic but for the success of his pupil. His parents were dead, and his guardian objected to his becoming a painter be- cause of the precarioxisness of the emoluments of that profession, advising him to study engraving instead. But the " premium " asked by employers of an apprentice was too much for Guy's circumstances, and all that the young aspirant could do was to wait. He learned to labor also — at his favorite easel — and in six years Death took the pains of removing the obstacle to his pursuit of his art. His guardian died. " Now," said Guy to himself, " I'm going to turn painter in earnest," although, as he has since confessed, he " didn't know where to get his salt." To begin poor, however, is the regula- tion method in art, as he had already learned in the little he had read of the best of the masters. His heart was not cast down nor his ambition lessened. He gathered about him his mental resources, girded himself like an athlete, and set out in search of Fortune. She came to him as seldom she fails to come to a brave, young, self-reliant seeker — this time in the person of a friend named Mliller. " Would you," asked Midler, " like to enter the Royal Acad- emy ? " "I should like to get into the British Museum as a student," replied the youth ; and next day came an invitation to go there. The gladness of the recipient may be imagined ; it is scai'cely worth while to attempt to describe it. To this day, Mr. Guy himself is bothered by the attempt. Good things, like that, rarely coming single-handed, it was natural for him to succeed in finding a studio also where he could put into practice the lessons learned at the Museum. He articled himself to- Mr. Ambrose Jerome, a London painter, whose reputation, like that of Mr. Buttersworth, owes a debt of gratitude to his pupil, and made an arrangement by which he should work three days each week for his master and three days for himself. His time was devoted to por- trait-painting, to designs for naval basins, to " effects " for architects, to plans for vessels in isometrical perspective, to anything, in a word, that came to hand — neither he nor Jerome were at all particular concerning what it was, so long as it brought with it pounds, shillings, or pence. THE ORANGE-GIRL. From a Painting by Seymour Joseph Guv. p. 67. S E YM U B J OSEP U U Y. 67 It was not in the nature of events for this sort, of life to continue forever ; and accordingly, in the year 1854, Mr. Guy found himself in America, a coun- try at that time the El Dorado of enthusiasts, and the isles afar off that waited to enrich emigrants. His first works here were portraits, the contemplation of which, occasionally in the year 1878, causes him to smile The besl of them, perhaps, is the picture of Mrs. Falconer, a cabinet-work of considerable inter- est, now in the possession of Mr. John M. Falconer, himself an artist and a friend of artists, a gentleman to whom was largely due the formation of the American Water-Color Society, and without the mention of whose name and services no history of the Artists' Fund Society would be complete. A rep- resentation of a child undressing herself in a stream of moonlight that floods the room from a dormer- window, and pours itself upon her breast, is another of his earlier works. It is owned by Mr. George Whitney, of Philadelphia. " Going to the Opera," a family group, painted for Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, and hanging in one of his parlors, gained for Mr. Guy considerable newspaper celebrity. During the period of his pupilage in England he was much interested in the matter of painting shadows. He was told that he should paint them directly "out of his head," and should not go to Nature for them at all. At that particular epoch of British art it was the almost invariable custom to make shadows "hot;" to represent them by means of burnt sienna and umber. One day, in the Royal Academy in London, he was struck with Paul Dela- roche's picture of Cromwell looking at King Charles, which was to him a reve- lation and a marvel in the rendering of light and shade. The sight of that canvas opened his eyes. He thinks that they were shut before. Ever since, his delight has been in the laws of light and shade, especially when a spec- tator of his works says to him, " Your pictures look as though I could walk into them." There is no doubt whatever that some of them really look so ; and this is one excellence of Mr. Guy's professional performances. " A work of art," says Mr. Guy, " divides itself into the natural and the ornamental. Blank's landscapes " (mentioning a noted American painter) "are natural, but they are not art, They are simply faithful copies of external Nature. Turner's ' Tower of London,' on the other hand, perfect though it is in chiaro-oscwro, and almost perfect in color and in lines, is not Nature. The 16 (38 AMERICAN PAINTERS. true picture is both Nature and art We must follow Nature as closely as we can, but we must select from Nature ; we must take the most beautiful thiugs and discard the deformities. Of course, nothing in art has yet surpassed Na- ture, and we all go wrong when we go away from her. Still, Ave want some- thing more than her alone. I ' paint up ' a simple story, trying to get into it as much beauty as possible from color, light, and shade — as much beauty of every sort as it will admit. In later years I think I have gained most in lucidity and brilliancy of coloring." In 1861 Mr. Guy was elected an Associate of the National Academy, and in 1865 an Academician. A pleasant little portrait, entitled " The Spring," and painted in the latter year, has found a lasting welcome in the home of Mr. James M. Hart, the artist. " The Sorrows of Little Red Riding Hood " was exhibited at the same time. His favorite subjects are incidents in children's lives. His " Orange-Girl," engraved herewith, is a good example of them. The scene — a familiar one to New-Yorkers, at least — -is a young girl standing, with hands crossed, near a basket of oranges, which she has evidently been carrying a good while, and has set down on a broken box in order to rest her- self. She is on the pavement near the piers, the shipping, and the drays, but her thoughts are elsewhere, and are sad. The story is a good deal more than a paragraph-picture of an event, and the best part of it can be felt but not described — an observation, indeed, which might with truth be made concern- ing any work of art. Mr. Guy has never been a rapid painter, and he has not a particle of dash in execution. He works slowly, carefully, and perseveringly ; and he is very conscientious about keeping his canvases in his studio until they have re- ceived the finishing touches. Before beginning a picture he knows precisely what effect he intends to produce, and he hammers away at the nail until it can be driven in no farther. Then he stops — that is to say, he does not load his delineations with more than they can bear. He knows when he is done, and he lets well enough alone. But to send away an incomplete work, one to which he feels justice has not been done, would be almost impossible with him. Should he by chance or necessity do so, he woidd be miserable until he got it back again, which is the same as saying that for the commercial aspects of art he has a profound disrespect. He does not paint for dollars, but for THE OLD STORY. From a Painting by E. Wood Perry. p. 71. SEYMOUR JOSEPH GUY. 69 love, and in order to satisfy himself it is necessary for him to pain) steadily, evenly, and long. His " Fair Venice," a young lady of fine personal attrac- tions leaning over the railing of a balcony and gazing upon the blue Adri- atic, is a painstaking performance if ever there was such a thing. It is beau- tiful also. Mr. John H. Sherwood, of New York, owns Mr. Guy's "Supplication" and his " Knot in the Skein ; " Mr. P. Van Valkenberg, of New York, " The Gamut " and " Children catching the Bird ; " Mr. Jay Gould, " The Father's Return," a girl with her hand before a candle, standing at a cottage-door, and listening to the footsteps that are approaching ; and Mr. Polhemns, of Brook- lyn, " The Broken String " and also " The Orange-Girl." The artist's industry compensates for the absence of celerity, and his pictures may be found in most of the collections in the principal cities of the continent. The painting of portraits, a department to which Mr. Guy once devoted almost exclusive attention, has very little consideration from him now. He is a genre painter almost exclusively, a painter of scenes in American domestic life, an historian in a sense, but never a moralist ; and just what he best likes to produce is expressed in Mr. Frederick Wedmore's description of a work by the Dutch artist Maes, entitled " The Listener : " "A girl descending the last turn of the stairs that just hides her, in her silent and arrested moment, from sight of the talking group, lantern-lighted, in some dim background of kitchen or cel- lar, has an effect of light and shade attained by great subtilty. The broad and general effect is of high light on the yellowing white of the listener's apron and tippet, and darkening gloom elsewhere ; but the subtilty is there, too, and the eye, when once familiar with the work, may pass from these broad spaces of warm light on tippet and large apron to changing and van- ishing effects on chamber-wall, where, in tints strangely neutral, it is diffi- cult to say whether the light begins to be shadow, or shadow begins to be light, and so, amid half-glooms, to isolated points of brightness ; the balus- ter-head catching at just one rounded bit the stray glimmer ; the glimmer breaking out again, yellow and brassy, on the farther nails of the straight Dutch chair that peers from background space and wall, in cozy and gathered dimness. Light in this picture is a moving presence of slow and changing life, giving life, too, and companionship to the else inanimate things ; and 70 A Ml-: HI CAN PMXTERS. Maes and his fellows followed its subtilties on chamber-wall and hanging, and in its narrow yet eventful passage from chamber to hearth — played out its little drama there, within that limited space — much as the more commonly extolled painters of our last generation watched it in problems of conflicting sunshine and shadow in English landscape." If Mr. Guy has never yet pro- duced all these subtilties, he at least can recognize and appreciate them as well as can any other genre painter in this country. For the cpiality of some of his still-life painting, especially for the faith- fulness and delicate feeling with which he has portrayed the mysteries of old- china cupboards and mantel-ornaments, Mi-. E. Wood Perky has distinguished himself among American artists. The tiles, the tongs, the fender, the hang- ing brush, in " Fireside Stories," are delightful specimens of pictorial represen- tation, and the large tin pail which the milkmaid carries while listening to " The Old Story " is probably as skillfully done as most persons would care to see it. But when Mr. Perry attempts to tell a story, and to introduce into it a woman's face, the excellences of his work are less striking. Of one thing, however, the spectator may be confident when about to examine a canvas from the easel of this artist : if there is a story told, it is domestic, simple, and perspicacious. To call Mr. Perry a genre painter would be entirely correct, as the present popular art-nomenclature counts correctness ; but the connoisseur who desired to contemplate him on his brightest and best side would devote attention chiefly to that admirable quality of his still-life painting of which mention has just been made, and good examples of which have been seen in New York at almost every Academy exhibition during the last ten years. Mr. Perry was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in the year 1831. When seventeen years old he became a clerk in a commission-house in New Orleans, where iu three years he succeeded in saving the sum of eleven hundred dol- lars. This mouey enabled him to study art and to develop his artistic capaci- ties. With it in his pocket, he bade adieu to the counting-room and went to Europe. The late Mr. Emanuel Leutze, a figure-painter of no mean cisatlan- tic reputation at that time, was living in Di'isseldorf, and to him, as was alto- gether natural, the aspiring young clerk turned, after making the usual tour ■I p II ■WMHUMiniii FIRESIDE STORIES. From a Painting by E. Wood P p. TO. E. WOOD PERRY. 71 of London and Paris. So well did Mr. Leutze treat him, and so pleased mu- tually were scholar and teacher, that it was not until the end of a pupilage of two years and a half that Mr. Perry found himself departing from Diisseldorf. Then he went to Paris and took lessons of Couture, in whose studio Daniel Huntington, Thomas Hicks, and other American painters, had already served an apprenticeship of longer or shorter duration, and whose methods Mr. Hun- tington once described to the present writer as follows : " After making the outline of the picture in charcoal, oil, and turpentine, Couture nil died over the canvas a transparent, warm tint of a deep-toned salmon-color. Next, with another warm tint, he deepened the strongest shadows of the sketch, develop- ing the light and shade. Next he painted, with a neutral gray inclining to green, the masses of shadow in the flesh, and into that neutral gray draped some bloody tints, giving it fleshy illumination. Where the masses of light in the flesh were to be, he first painted in a lower tone, rather negative and gray, and over that spread, or dragged, some very solid color, warm and rich. The under-painting in each case shone through in little specks, giving sparkle and life to the surface ; and the whole treatment was as easy as it was mas- terly. Couture had as much facility and certainty in every touch as any man that ever lived. He never tried again. If he failed in one attempt, he must take a new canvas, or blacken over the old one. For the lights of his flesh he used Naples-yellow and vermilion, with cobalt broken in ; and, for the deep shadows, cobalt and brown-red.' 1 Couture's inspiration left upon Mr. Perry's mind an impression less deep than upon Mr. Huntington's, and more deep than upon Mr. Hieks's ; and since many of Couture's notions and processes have latterly lost caste somewhat, it is in order to say that Mr. Perry's realistic iustinets and modes are quite different from those of his French master. One year in Couture's studio was followed by a few months in Rome, and then by about three years in Venice, where our unpaternal government was nevertheless paternal enough to appoint the young American a consul. The salary of the position made him comfortable, and the atmosphere of the place made him happy. Perhaps no American consul would respond more warmly than Mr. Perry to the im- passioned descriptions in " Childe Harold," or in M. Yriarte's " Venise," of the queen city of the Adriatic. 17 72 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Iii 1860, after au absence of eight years, the artist returned home, and opened a studio in Philadelphia ; but, yielding to the promptings of his nat- ural and acquired love of travel, he made a tour to the South and West, sup- porting himself by painting portraits. San Francisco was attractive enough to hold him for three or four years. He visited the Sandwich Islands, and, on his way back to the Atlantic, stopped for some time at Salt Lake City for the purpose of committing to canvas the vei'isimilitudes of the late Brig- ham Young and the luminaries of the Mormon Church. In 1866 he settled in New York, and began his career as a still-life and figure painter. Two years afterward he was elected an Associate of the National Academy, and the next year an Academician, in recognition chiefly of his painting " The "Weav- er," which, like most of his best pictures, is a transcript of humble Ameri- can life. Recently he has been making another long stay in California. It was often remarked, during the first exhibition of the Society of Amer- ican Artists in New York, that young Mr. Sargeant's magical " Fishing for Oysters at Cancale " had been bought by Mr. Samuel Colman. In fresh, translucent, humid atmospheric effects, this picture was the best there dis- played; and when asked by a friend why he had purchased it, Mr. Col- man replied, promptly: "Because I wanted to have it near me to key my- self up with. I am afraid that I may fall below just such a standard, and I wish to have it hanging in my studio to reproach me whenever I do." This remark is mentioned here first, because, in the circumstances, it was an unu- sual one. The artist who made it was much the elder of the two, and had had much the greater advantages. He had traveled more extensively, had studied more widely, and had painted more canvases. It would have been natural and to be expected for him to decline to learn of an inferior in age and in equipment ; and the majority of artists in his position would, it may safely be said, have acted differently. Certainly, they would never have con- fessed themselves to be the pupils of a countryman who was their junior. In the next place, the remark is worth quoting because it was entirely a char- acteristic one for the gentleman who uttered it. Mr. Colman is most con- spicuous for breadth of artistic vision. Without being in any special sense I W z H I K . W I i Kki H Z V'-'-f I r < z z. w Q z i\ h «: ^3 SAM V EL COL MA N. 73 an eclectic, he discerns the good in every school — nay, the "soul of good- ness" even " in things evil ; " and whenever he recognizes a sincere and intel- ligent purpose honestly attempting to give itself expression, whether the attempt be a striving, a struggling, or an easy, instinctive gliding, he sends it good wishes from his heart and from his lips. Mr. Colman was horn in Portland, Maine, in the year 1832, but soon after- ward his father moved to New York City, and established himself as a pub- lisher and bookseller. The store of the elder Colman became a fashionable and favorite resort for artists and other art-lovers, and many of his publi- cations were among the most beautiful books of the period. In such an atmosphere it was not strange that the son should have inhaled artistic pleas- ure, instruction, and inspiration ; nor was it strange that the father, whose own tastes had produced it, should foster in the young life that he had called into existence the germs of an artistic career. Saumel Colman, however, being an artist by nature — as is every artist — took kindly to the environment that For- tune had ordained ; and when he found himself a pupil in the studio of the now venerable and ever since beloved master, A. B. Durand, his progress was rapid and thorough. At an early age he was often seen sketching the ships and the shipping, the waters and the sky, the wharves and the wharf men ; and (which cannot with truth be recorded of every neophyte) receiving from patrons of art the wherewithal to pursue his way. The future opened auspiciously for the steady and diligent aspirant. The visions that had allured the boy deepened and widened their glory for his dawning manhood. In his eighteenth year he sent a picture to the National Academy Exhibition. It was accepted, well hung, and praised. What better encouragement did he desire ? He enlarged the boi-ders of his excursions, and began to study the scenery of that beautiful lake whose crystal waters the early French settlers called sacramental. Lake George, perhaps, never re- flected from its peaceful shores the figure of a happier artist. To the White Mountains, also, he turned his steps, painting there the studies for many pict- ures that are now safely and honorably housed in the galleries of the metropo- lis. And then — to Europe. It was in 1860 that he first found himself in the romance and the splendor of the French and Spanish capitals, and the two years that he spent in the 74 AMERICAN PAINTERS. studios and the museums, the cathedrals and the palaces of the Frank, the Castilian, and the Moor, were doubtless appreciated as much as have been similar opportunities by any intelligent traveler. Not appreciated only, but improved ; for, when he returned to America, and was welcomed by an elec- tion as Academician, there came with him those now well-known architectural studies which afterward reflected themselves in his most popular pictures in oils and in water-colors. The first of these finished productions were the " Harbor of Seville," the " Tower of Giralda," and the " Bay of Gibraltar," concerning the last-named of which a critic wrote at the time of its exhibi- tion that, while the subject is not a promising one for picturesque treatment ; while Turner in his admirable work made it an almost subordinate object, struggling for notice amid a splendid array of sunlit clouds and sea; and while Achenbach, in a work of scarcely inferior merit, depicted the rock as a distant object, darkly gleaming in a stormy sky, Colman, not caring to follow either of these distinguished precedents, shows us the grand old historical monu- ment, on a tranquil summer's day, lifting its majestic summit from a calm, unruffled sea into a serene and cloudless sky, and glowing in the golden rays of the noonday sun. Like all his other pictures thus far, the " Bay of Gibraltar " was painted in oils; but in 1866 Mr. Colman, who had previously shown fondness for water- colors, united with several brother artists, and organized the American So- ciety of Painters in Water-Colors, now the American Water-Color Society. He was elected its first president. For five years he held the position, having been reelected each year, but resigned it iu 1871, on the occasion of his second visit abroad — this time to Switzerland, to Germany, to Northern Africa, and to Rome, as well as to Paris, to Madrid, and to Seville — staying four years, and being not less industrious than during his previous visit. The old towns in France, especially in Normandy, the old castles on the Rhine, and the fine old tombs in Algeria and the neighboring provinces, seem to have been his chief attractions. It is doubtful whether St. Peter's itself made upon him so deep an impression as did the cathedral at Caen, the castle at Andernach, or the marvelous tomb of Sidi Bou Hac at Tlemcen. Two of these pictures the engraver has been extremely happy in reproducing. In one of them we see an ancient citadel rising in the perspective above the cross-crowned towers of A STREET SCENE IN CAEN, NORMANDY. From a Painting by Samuel Coltnan. p. 75. SAMUEL COLMAN. the cathedral on the left, and the sunny slopes of the mountain on the right holding its castle in the air higher than the gleaming belt of light behind it, and casting its majestic and mantling protection upon the houses, the vessels and the rippled, sparkling Rhine — a scene of glory and of peace. In the other we are introduced to rare old Norman architecture, and pleasing modern festivity, the sun himself being pressed into service, and throwing a blaze of light athwart the concourse of a thousand happy men and women, and the riehly-sculptiired cathedral-front. Duriug the last twelve years Mr. Colman has produced many more works in water-colors than in oils, and his contributions have been among the strong- est, if not themselves the strongest, attractions of the Water-Color Society's annual exhibitions in the rooms of the National Academy of Design. Most artists who paint exclusively in oils assume a patronizing attitude in the pres- ence of a water-color exhibition. They admit the cleverness of the clever works in it, but they deny that they cannot equal them by using oils ; while, in addition, they assert that many of the robuster effects produced by the lat- ter means are impossible to the painter in water-colors. Even those subtiler and more evanescent expressions which the water-colorists profess to have a monopoly of, they will promise to show you in their studios, saying : " The characteristics that you produce with water-colors I can produce with oils — if not directly and absolutely in all cases, at least by the help of contrasts; while a score of effects that with your materials you can never produce — that you will admit you can never produce — I can produce in an hour." This is not the place to settle the dispute between the two classes. One thing, however, is certain, namely, that while the possibilities of the water- color painter have for the most part been uncovered and discovered, the possi- bilities of the oil-painter are practically illimitable. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that, among English-speaking peoples at least, modern art in water-colors has been the forerunner and the promoter of a new and serious study of Nature, especially in the department of landscape, a depart- ment in which it has won its brightest and most enduring triumphs. " I be- lieve it to be impossible," says a living English Academician, " to exaggerate the charm of pure water-color" (by which he means water-color without body- color of any sort) " as a means of artistic expression. Many of Nature's love- is 76 AMERICAN PAINTERS. liest phases, especially those where atmospheric effects are the leading feature, are rendered far better by it than by any other means. The mere material seems delightfully void of all materiality. That crux of a painter in oil, which daily vexes his soul, namely, the endeavor to get rid of a painty look in his work, and the difficulty, as Sir Joshua says, of ' finding the means by which the end is obtained,' never trouble the water-color painter." These words would awaken a response, probably, in the heart of Mr. Colman, who has devoted himself so loyally and successfully to this branch of the fine arts, and no intelligent artist would deny that they are more or less true. Mr. Colman's brush is not less busy than in his earlier days. Its master is a scholar in the matter of drawing, and in the matter of large and clear lighting. His poetic invention is real and active, and his execution is vigor- ous and firm. Benjamin Curtis Porter, of Boston, made his mark in New York by sending to the Academy Exhibition of 1877 his "Portrait of a Lady, with Dog." No previous or subsequent work of his is so noteworthy as this in quality. The lady stands leaning gracefully upon the back of a high chair, on which is seated a pertinacious, staring, full-blooded pug-dog, whose ugli- ness is in eloquent contrast with the refined and classic beauty of the woman. The motive of the representation had the disadvantage of being considered by some spectators to be a little stagy. Other persons preferred the dog to the woman ; others still liked the attitude of the woman best of all ; but the picture, as a whole, met with popular and academic recognition. It was full of delicate realization and of linear grace ; in its treatment there was neither baldness nor artificiality; and if, as a piece of character-painting, it was some- what wanting in dejith and precision, in evidences of artistic insight at the disposal of a brush used to the rendition of difficult and subtile phases of psychologic interest, it possessed other merits sufficient to entitle it to intel- ligent respect, and to justify the frequently-expressed wish to buy it. Mr. Porter, who was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, August 27, 1843, has the advantage — or disadvantage — of having studied regularly under no master. Contrary to the usual practice, he did not enter any art-school, nor the studio THE HOUR-CLASS. From a Painting by Benjamin Curtis Porlei p. 77. BENJAMIN CURTIS PORT El;. 77 of any painter, nor did he receive set lessons in painting. He went to Boston early in life, and picked up, as chance or inclination threw them in his way, the principles of his profession. In 1872, when twenty-nine years old, ho spent six months in Europe, principally in Paris and in Venice; but, although he studied considerably, he attached himself to no particular artist. In 1875 he again spent six months in those cities ; and in May, 1878, made his third trip across the Atlantic. One morning in that month he was in the east-room of the National Academy in New York, putting some turpentine on the por- trait of Mrs. T. F. Gushing, of Boston, on exhibition there, the varnish of which had " bloomed," as the painters say. This picture, while not scoring an advance on the " Portrait of a Lady, with Dog," has nevertheless several commendable features. Mrs. dishing is represented life-size, and descending a flight of stairs. The background, per- haps, is too florid, and the figure is not remarkable, either for the purity of its flesh-tints or for its relief. The chief fault is a straining after the vividly picturesque ; yet Mr. Porter doubtless would not be insensible to the beauty of a grave and simple portrait like that of Prof. Robert W. Weir by Mr. J. Alden Weir, in the same exhibition, where the self-abnegation of the artist, the utter absence of any effort at display, the dignity and almost severe reserve, are obvious. In the case of Mr. Porter's picture, however, the de- mands of the subject were different from those felt by Mr. Weir ; the two portraits have little in common, and cannot properly be compared with each other. Mr. Porter's aims in portraiture are not at all those of the new French school, nor of any foreign school. Like Mr. Daniel Huntington, Mr. George A. Baker, the late Mr. Henry Peters Gray, and other eminent American artists, he is extremely sensitive to the pictorial possibilities of his sitters. He considers it to be the duty of a portrait-painter to make a picture while producing a portrait, and he would probably think little of a verisimilitude which was not conditioned by pictorial necessities. Ingenuity of composition, arrangement of accessories, choice of local colors — the dress and ornaments that his sitter wears, and the place and surroundings where she sits — are mat- ters of prime importance in his eyes. He desires something more than a per- fect and sober veracity, and his portraits usually please the general spectator, not less than the friends of the persons whom he has placed upon the canvas. 78 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Mr. Porter is a young man yet, and his future is attractive. In Boston, he has wrought out an enviable reputation, and in some respects his portraits rank as the very best which that city can produce. He is a figure-painter also, and "The Mandolin-Player" and "The Hour-Grlass," engraved herewith, adequately represent his skill in this kindred department. The former is in the possession of Mrs. George D. Howe, of Boston. The latter was in the New York Academy Exhibition of 1877, where its excellences, thoiigh gen- erally recognized, were partly eclipsed by those of the " Portrait of a Lady, with Dog," which hung in the same room, and in a much more favorable posi- tion. Near a woman with a lute in her lap is Cupid holding an hour-glass. The gracefulness of the invention, the skill of the drawing, and the suave blending of the tints, are noticeable. The originality is uncpiestionable, and the same is true, in general, of Mr. Porter's compositions. Even the critic of the London Academy, who finds that, iu the American section of the Paris Exhibition, " nearly every work of above average merit has been executed in a French atelier ; " that, " as a rule, the subjects of the works exhibited are furnished by Europe ; " and that, " if by chance the manners and customs of the United States are dealt with, there is no trace of anything like special national character in their treatment," could scarcely have failed to notice an exception in Mr. Porter's portrait now in that Exhibition. Last spring the artist received the honor of an election as Associate of the National Academy of Design. Iu carrying out his effort after picturesqueness, Mr. Porter undoubtedly tries to steer midway between the so-called real and the so-called ideal — that is to say, he endeavors to be loyal to his sitter, and, at the same time, to pre- sent those larger and better aspects which often are discernible only by the eye of faith. His portraits transcend the real, and yet are not precisely ideal. Overbeck, who abandoned the careful study of the model, preferring to paint out of his consciousness of the fitness of things, would have thought Mr. Porter's pictures too life-like ; and some of the old Dutch masters, who studied the model until the latter was almost shriveled with fatigue, would have pronounced the Boston artist's works to be not life-like at all. The strict truth about the matter is, that Mr. Porter's portraits sometimes get far enough away from the real to be inadequate as likenesses ; inadequate chiefly because, THE MANDOLIN-PLAYER. From a Painting by Benjamin Curtis Porter. p. 79. BENJAMIN GURTIs PORTER. 7., in his struggle for the picturesque, he has been sorelj tempted to natter men's and women's faces — to flatter them not only as an ordinary photographer does by toning down his " negative," by removing all traces of wrinkles, sens, and so on, and by giving improvised tints to the hair, the cheeks, and the lips, bul also after the manner of a photographic artist who, putting a transparent sheet of paper upon a photograph, and placing it so that the light shall shine through it, makes a crayon-drawing concerning the portraiture of which 1 1 it- most that can be said is that it is founded upon a photograph. The picture of the "Lady, with Dog," for example, is said, by persons who know the original, to be incorrect as a likeness. Its excellences in other respects they recognize, but its deficiency in this respect they assert to be obvious. It is related that, at a recent exhibition of oil-paintings, a visitor, while gazing upon a representation of the children of Charles I. at dinner, was overheard to exclaim, "O that hideous little object ! " — the " object" being the smallest son of that unfortunate monarch; but it is safe to say that no such exclamation has ever yet been made in the presence of one of Mr. Porter's portraits. In the first place, probably, Mr. Porter would not paint a hideous object, little en- large ; and, in the next place, even if he had been tempted unawares to do so, when the last touches had been laid upon the canvas the once hideous object would have become transformed into a thing of more or less beauty. This susceptibility to the potential aspects of a sitter is, of course, not unusual in a portrait-painter. Gainsborough had it in some measure. Sir Joshua Reynolds in greater measure and many an American artist in still greater measure. The studios of this country contain at least several por- trait-painters who insist upon art's obligation to " improve " upon Nature in the direction that has been mentioned. "It is not only lawful," say these draughtsmen, " to flatter a sitter, it is expedient also. We cannot reproduce any person perfectly; some faithlessness to veracity is inevitable. Let us, then, compensate for our incapacity in representing the real by drawing upon the resources of the ideal. Besides, where is the harm in giving innocent pleasure to the sitter and the sitter's friends I The ideal, too, is the very realm of art." The arguments are plausible, certainly, but they would be more interesting had they the element of freshness. Leaving the matter a moment, it is pertinent to inquire whether or not 19 80 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Mr. Porter's portraits ever fail in another particular. The effort for pictu- resqueness easily leads to a confusion of accessories whereby are lost breadth in masses and distinctness in lines. Without breadth in masses and distinct- ness in lines, a painting is artistically incomplete. Destitute of these quali- ties, a picture, properly speaking, is not even picturesque, and sometimes these qualities are lacking in Mr. Porter's works. But for an artist who is original and industrious, and has familiarized himself with the best that is thought and done in art, a pleasant and inspiriting future may be predicted. Arthur Quartlet is distinguished for having, after only four or five years of professional life, put himself among the first of the marine painters in this country. He was born in Paris, France, May 24, 1839. Soon afterward his parents took him to England, and, in his thirteenth year, to America. In early manhood he was apprenticed to a sign-painter in New York City, and for several years followed his trade there. For about ten yeai-s he was in business in Baltimore. Meanwhile, for many months, he had spent his spare moments in studying the art of painting. When the desire for practising it became too strong to be restrained, he broke away from business and got him- self a studio' in 1873. He had already fretted and chafed himself into an illness. In 1876 he came to New York in pursuit of a wider field of work, and painted his " Low Tide," now owned by Mr. J. B. Thorn, of Baltimore, which is his first important picture — a stranded vessel on the wet sand, a morning effect, gray-toned, and exceedingly simple. Its sentiment is fine and complete. Not dissimilar is his " Oyster-Season, Synepuxent Bay," in the possession of Mr. John W. McCoy, of the same city. Through the shallow water an ox- team is drawing a cart full of oysters taken from a vessel just unloading. Mr. John Taylor Johnston bought his "New York from the North Biver," a strong sunlight pouring down upon the water and illuminating a ferry-boat and other river-craft. It is in the Paris International Exhibition. Mr. Colgate, of Twenty-third Street, New York, owns his " Afternoon in August," which somewhat resembles but has not copied a Ziem. Mr. Quartley has never attended an art-school, and has never taken a les- h m D ?> ^ ■J I < » " ^ 2 £> y '« z 'I .- u l»w . ARTLTUR QUART LEY. . j son. He never even had a drawing-master. lie has no fixed method of arranging his pigments on the palette, nor of painting it picture. He begins anywhere on the canvas, sometimes with the foreground, sonic! inns with tin- horizon, sometimes with the sky at the zenith. His "Close of a Stormj Day," in the Academy Exhibition of 1877, was painted in this wise : " Having been kept by a storm for three days in a house on the shore," he says, " a( sunsel there was a glorious break-up, and I went out to see it. It was too grand, too awe-inspiring, too rapidly-changing, for me to attempt making a sketch of it then. In the morning, after dreaming over the scene, I made a colored draw- ing of it — a delightful way of doing: your mind is not confused by the changes that so swiftly succeed one another. After I hail begun to paint the picture it seemed a total failure. For months it stood upon the easel. I tried a dozen times to get at it, but I could not reach the subtilty and true signifi- cance. There are perhaps fifty or sixty days' work on the canvas ; but it doesn't follow that four or five days would not have made a better pictiu'e. It is very strange how sometimes every touch seems to tell, and at other times no touch seems to produce anything." His "From a North River Pier-head" shows the beauty that lies in the homeliness of many surroundings of the metropolis. The scene is near the Barclay Street Ferry, where one of the docks is devoted to the storage of oysters brought thither by small coasting schooners and sloops. There is a long row of buildings, each one displaying a sign-board with a dealer's name. The natural composition of the lines is awkward, and the subject in general is ill-favored. But at daybreak in summer, when the sun shines athwart the structures and the vessels, and begins to dispel the mists that hang about Trinity Church-spire, the Western Union Telegraph Building, and the new Post-Office, the scene is beautiful. " Who would have thought," exclaimed a spectator of the picture, " that we had anything in New York as picturesque as that ? " Mr. Quartley does not repeat himself in his marines. Each work is the result of a distinct impression. He struggles to keep out of mannerisms, and has been entirely successful in the effort. " Moonlight," he says, " is not so hard to paint as sunlight ; it is impossible to paint a true moonlight, but you can easily produce something pretty to hang on your walls. Moonlights, too, 82 AMERICAN PAINTERS. are almost always salable. 1 ' He paints but few of them. "The most diffi- cult tiling in a marine," lie continues, " is to make the whole picture hang together. To get the sky alone is not hard ; to get the water alone is not hard ; but the water partakes so much of the effect of the sky, that, unless a hearty sympathy is preserved between them, the result is worse than a fail- ure. Marine painting is much more difficult than figure-painting. The figure- painter has his model constantly before him, but the marine painter is forced to catch the movement of the water when the darks may turn to lights a dozen times while he is making the simplest sketch. It nearly sets one crazy. In painting water, I try for motion above all things, and the ten thousand re- jections from the sky." The reader will scarcely fail to notice the brilliant execution of Mr. Morse, whose engraving of Mr. Quartley's " Afternoon in August " is one of the finest woodcuts that any country can produce. The shimmer of the ruffled waves, the softness and warmth of the sky, and the proximity to color — if not its very presence — in a reproduction in black-and-white only, are truly de- lightful features. To go back to Mr. Quartley, it may be said in conclusion that his genius is as indisputable as are his earnestness, industry, and origi nality ; that both his subjects and his style are native products ; that his finest period is undoubtedly yet to come, and that when it does come his reputation will be cosmopolitan. Jasper Francis Cropsey is a native of Rossville, Staten Island, and was born February 18, 1823. In his thirteenth year he received from the Amer- ican Institute in New York a diploma for the best specimen of architectural modeling, and soon afterward another diploma for architectural drawing. For five years he studied architecture in the office of Joseph French, meanwhile taking lessons in landscape-painting under the direction of Edward Maury. At the age of twenty, having been overtaken by ill-health, he withdrew into the country, and devoted himself to making studies from Nature. His " Green- wood Lake," sent to the National Academy Exhibition, won for him an elec- tion as Associate of that institution. It is said that he was the youngest Associate of the Academy ever elected in this country. Architecture still had t £ •5, " J A SPER Fit A N CIS CR OPS E )'. 83 for him the attraction of a first love, and one of his best works is the chapel at the New Dorp Cemetery on Staten Island. In 1847 he weu\ fco Europe and visited London, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, spending the w inter- of thai year and the next in Rome, and traveling a good deal in the company of Mr. W. W. Story and Mr. C. P. Cranch. His principal pictures at that time were " Jedburgh Abbey," painted for Mr. John Rutherford, and " The Pontine Marshes," painted for the Art Union. In 1849 he returned to America. His " Sibyl's Temple " and " Peace and War," allegorical subjects, are in the gal- lery of Mr. Harrison, of Philadelphia. Another important example is " The Times of Queen Elizabeth," a landscape with a hawking-party. He became an Academician in 1851, when Mr. Durand was President of the Academy. Four years afterward he made his second visit to Europe, and spent seven years in London. Those years Mr. Cropsey even now contemplates with ex- treme satisfaction, and with utmost readiness to relive them should Destiny so decree. He was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy exhibitions, and found easy sales for his pictures both within and without Burlington House. He was presented to the queen. He became acquainted with Mr. Ruskin and other literary and artistic luminaries, in whose radiance he delighted to gird up his loins. " Richmond Hill," one of his characteristic works, found a purchaser in Mr. James McHenry ; and " Autumn on the Hudson River " was sold while hanging in the International Exhibition of 1862. To that great fair he was an assistant commissioner, and for services rendered there he re- ceived a medal. About this time he made illustrations for Poe's works, for " The Poets of the Nineteenth Century," and for Moore's poems. The origi- nals for these designs are now owned by Mr. Tom Taylor. The London pub- lisher, Mr. Gambart, possesses a series of sixteen oil-paintings representing American scenery. Mr. Cropsey came back to America in 1862, and painted two more pictures for Mr. McHenry, of London, entitled " Wawayanda Valley " and " Ramapo Valley." His " Bonchurch " aud " Bridge at Narni " were bought by Mr. Butterfield, of England. At the Centennial Exhibition he was represented by his " Old Mill," which received a medal and diploma, and was engraved for the Centennial catalogue. The artist's capacity for architectural work dis- played itself in his supervision of Mr. George M. Pullman's house at Chicago ; 20 84 AMERICAN PAINTERS. in Iris building of the same gentleman's cottage at Long Branch ; and, more recently, in his construction of the beautiful stations on the Metropolitan Ele- vated Railroad in New York. Mr. Cropsey's pictures are known as well and as widely as those of any other American painter. Especially of later years, they have displayed per- haps an undue emphasis of local colors. Most of them depict autumn scenes, in which the foliage usually approaches splendor ; and all of them speak of a refined appreciation of and delight in natural beauty. The London Times in 1860 said of his "Autumn on the Hudson River:" "The singularly vivid colors of an American autumnal scene, the endless contrast of purples and yellows, scarlets and browns, running into every conceivable shade between the ex- tremes, might easily tempt a painter to exaggerate, or revel in variety of hue and effect, like a Turner of the forest. But Mr. Cropsey has resisted the temptation, and even a little tempered the capricious tinting of Nature ; his autumn is still brilliant, but not cpiite lost to sobriety, as we have sometimes, we think, seen it in that Western World. The result is a fine picture, full of points that are new, without being wholly foreign and strange to the Euro- pean eye. It will take the ordinary observer into another sphere and region, while its execution will bear any technical criticism." In Paisley, Scotland, in the year 1822, Mr. William Hart was born. At the age of nine he was brought to this country by his parents, who made their new home in Albany, New York, and apprenticed their son to a coach- maker. It was as a decorator of panels in the shop of this mechanic that Mr. Hart made his first public appearance as a painter. For several years he continued in the same modest business. Soon success encouraged him to widen the field of his labors, and he began to sketch from Nature and to dec- orate window-shades. In his eighteenth year he was graduated a portrait- painter. His prices were five dollars a head; his studio was in his father's wood-shed in the neighboring city of Troy. His first fee of five dollars, he says, made him feel prouder than he has ever felt since on similar occasions. The daguerreotype, the ambrotype, and the photograph, being at that time unknown, and the liking for likenesses of the human face being not less real w X >• a X h < 0. Id I h WILLI A M II ART. 85 nor common than in later years, Mr. Hart found opportunities for painting many portraits; but, as the production of every portrait consumed several days, he did not get rich fast. He found that five days' work, for instance, yielded him at once a revenue of precisely five dollars whenever his customer was prompt in making payment ; and it did not take him long to calculate the possibilities of his progression in this financial direction. He began to try his brush on landscapes, and to sell them for cash or by barter. As his facility and skill increased, he increased the price of his portraits. He went to Michi- gan and furnished the inhabitants of that young and thriving State with veri- similitudes of their features and figures at twenty-five dollars an inhabitant, 'boarding around" among his patrons, and thus killing two birds with one stone. This he did for three years, but at the expiration of that time, having failed to become acclimatized sufficiently to withstand attacks of fever and ague, he packed up his easel, pigments, palette, maul-stick, and brushes, and in 1845 returned to the capital of the Empire State, where he abandoned por- traiture for landscape-painting. The ampler scope in art, however, did not dissipate the germs of disease that he had brought with him from the West. He was troubled by them for four years, or until Dr. Ormsby, an Albany Maecenas, whose memory Mr. Hart will not soon cease to cherish, presented him with money enough to make a trip to Scotland. Whether or not the Scots are as fond as are some other peoples of their native land, is a ques- tion concerning which a difference of opinion may justly be held and not discourteously expressed. " Every Scotsman," says a Saturday Ileviev. r, " believes that he himself is the one exception to the charges which are brought against his countrymen. Besides, he flatters himself that his people have a kind of dry humor of their own, so superior to all other as to be inap- preciable by the blunter senses of the south." Mr. William Hart arrived in Scotland just twenty-six years after the death of Sir Henry Raeburn, her best portrait-painter, whose influence then was a force not less potent than it is to-day. Although the Scottish-American paint- er had relinquished his hold upon portraiture, it is probable that the works of Raeburn left an impression upon his mind. Certainly, ever since his visit to the banks and braes of Doon Mr. Hart's sympathy, like Raeburn's, has been for beauty of outlines rather than for brilliancy of c< dors. It is a curious 86 AMERICAN r A INTERS. fact, an exemplification of which is found in some of Raeburn's pictures, and a philosophical explanation of which would be both easy and interesting, that Scottish art has long entertained a kind feeling toward modern French art — a feeling that in England has had a very precarious existence, if indeed it may be said to have existed at all. In Mr. Hart's later works there is no trace of this quality ; but some of his earlier ones displayed a soberness and grace not unworthy of a Gallic origin. For beauty of outlines, however, all of them are more or less distinguished. The sketches which he made in the Scottish Highlands during his three years' absence are noticeable for that feature, and these sketches exerted a profound influence upon his ripening career. They possessed also the prime value of originality. Mr. Hart never was a copyist — of anybody but himself. His recent works, for the most part, closely resemble one another. If you go into his studio you will see ten or a dozen of them in various states of incompleteness, but very similar in subject, in composition, and in treatment. His latest and extremely popular cabinet landscapes, which may be found in almost all the auction-rooms where pictures are sold, and in almost all the principal private collections in the Atlantic cities, consist of a central piece of forest divided by a running stream, where are some cows, whose backs gleam with sunshine from a background sun. These productions always meet with a ready sale. Their author multiplies them fast. He is very industrious and persevering. In 1852 Mr. Hart returned from Scotland, and reopened his studio in Albany. The next year he removed to New York City. Two years after- ward he was elected an Associate of the Academy, and three years subse- quently to this event became an Academician. He has been a member of the Council of that institution, and a President of the Brooklyn Art Association. During his presidency, he delivered a lecture entitled " The Field and the Easel," which discussed the history and the future of American art in land- scape. Like his brother, Mr. James M. Hart, he is fonder of home than of club life, and retiring in disposition ; at the same time, one is often in his presence reminded of Jean Paul's fine saying, "There is a certain noble pride through which merit shines brighter than through modesty." Mr. Hart's landscapes present the sunny and peaceful aspects of Nature — the sylvan stream, the refulgent sunset, pleasant trees, honest cows, and lush, SOTBtti'' "" "■ ; ' 1,,|,|I l»" w tfjr ifJli HI: M WILLI A M II A E T. 87 green grass. Like Mr. Inness, Mr. Whittredge, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Bristol, Mr. Casilear, Mr. Sliattuck, and other American painters, he directs his thoughts and his brush with especial delight to the contemplation and rep- resentation of cheerfulness, brightness, warmth, and quietness, and, like them also, he is attracted most strongly by the human element in lain I scape-art. He doubtless agrees cordial])' with the dictum of a London Spectator essayist, that a landscape destitute of the traces of man's hands does not take a strong and vital hold upon the heart of the seer; that pictures of wild and nigged Alpine scenery, for example, can never be particularly impressive. ( )f course, he does not insist upon the introduction of figures of men, women, or chil- dren ; the human element is contained as truly in a tilled field or in a clearing ; but this element he would always have present if the painting is successfully and permanently to appeal to the sympathies of the person who beholds it. Man can sympathize deeply with presentations of natural scenes only when in these scenes is discerned the presence of himself. The spirit of the age in art-matters, however, takes a much wider view. It recognizes beauty every- where ; it says that a really ugly thing does not exist. Diaz takes the decayed trunks of trees and adorns them with light ; Rousseau makes lichens, moss-covered rocks, and forest-grasses smile. These objects have a human ele- ment, to be sure, but the painter gave it to them. " Let us imagine,'' says the editor of Appletons 1 Journal, while discussing this subject, " a painting of a forest interior, the solitudes of which are disturbed by no human presence. If this picture is full of imaginative power and strong sympathies, if the painter felt the scene in all its beauties and charms, the spectator identifies with it the full beat of human interest. The cool shadows are to him a dream of delicious rest ; the fall of the brook over the stones sends musical murmurs to his ear ; he feels the pleasant wind fan his cheek ; the sun- shine that flecks through the leaves charms bis eye with its shifting play of light ; odors from the mosses and aromatic plants seem to fill his nostrils ; the scene in its completeness takes possession of his whole nature, fills him with a subdued rapture, becomes an embodiment of his emotions. If the for- est-scene has no power of this kind over one's imagination, it is less than noth- ing : the value and charm of the picture are in its control over the human senses, in its power to transport the spectator there and permit him to fill it 21 SS AM ERIC AX PAINTERS. with his own personality. In this way a human element may and does enter landscape-art effectively, efficiently, and to the complete identification of the scene with our emotions and our susceptibilities. The mere introduction of figures cannot of itself create human interest ; if they form a part of the pict- ure in such a way as to strengthen the sentiment of the landscape, well and good ; if not, they weaken if they do not destroy the very human interest to the end of which they are imported into the scene. It is clear that the value and character of a painting do not depend upon rides at all, but upon the imagination of the painter, lacking which his human figures will have no human vitality or hold ; possessing which, his solemn, empty forest-depths will be full of human feeling." The greatest of Boston painters, and one of the few really great American painters, Mr. William Morris Hunt, was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of March, 1824, and became a student in Harvard College in 1840. Six years afterward he began to study sculpture in Dusseldorf. He staid there nine months, then threw away his clay and hastened to Paris — to Cou- ture's studio, and to Jean Francois Millet's heart. He lived about ten years in Europe. In 1855 he went back to Boston, where, and at Newport, his home has been ever since. If ever there existed a friendship between two artists, Mr. Hunt and M. Millet were friends ; and if ever one artist influenced another, William Morris Hunt was influenced by Jean Francois Millet. In the atelier of Couture, Mr. Hunt learned art-rules ; in the companionship of Millet, he obtained inspira- tion and regeneration. The true interpretation of Mi - . Hunt's best works is possible only to the sympathetic and thorough student of Millet's works. The impression made upon Mr. Hunt by his pupilage under Couture is get- ting fainter every day ; but the impression made upon him by his intercourse with Millet is deep in the structure of his mind, growing with his growth and strengthening with his strength. When Millet was unknown in this country, Mr. Hunt was his devotee ; when even France herself had not yet recognized his genius, Mr. Hunt was buying his pictures. At the same time, it is true that Mr. Hunt is an entirely original artist, and that every picture of his is a s £ W ILL I A M M o I; It i S II V N T. M) spontaneous and independent product. Nature reveals herself in the same dress and with the same facial expression to both men ; and both men respond heartily to her and woo her. The most important contribution to the literature of art by an American is Mr. Hunt's "Talks on Art" — a book which Mr. Hunt himself did not write. For years he had been in the habit of meeting a class of drawing-students in Boston, and, in a free aud off-hand fashion, telling them what lie knows and believes concerning the subject that chiefly interested them. A member of this class, Miss Helen M. Knowlton, herself an accomplished and successful young painter, jotted down on stray scraps of paper many of the utterances of her teacher, and sent them to a Boston journal. Afterward, with his consent, she gathered many of them into a volume which she called " Talks on Art,' 1 and has seen circulated extensively in America, and reprinted, and, for the most part, very favorably reviewed, in England. Through her courtesy, we have received a number of the original contributions to the Boston journal, and also some additional reports of Mr. Hunt's speeches, which, having never before been printed, are now for the first time given to the public. These latest and freshest passages are the following : " My little book, ' Talks on Art,' was written for mere students, but great artists read it. You may say it was contradictory, but it was addressed to different students. Some of them needed hasty-pudding, some Albert Diirer." " Keep your love of Nature keen. The moment you think how to do it, then you don't paint unconsciously." " I like to see the most finished things in the world ; but I want to see things begun." " When you paint what you see, you paint an object. When you paint what you feel, you make a poem." " I don't believe in the latest French school. The true French masters came in a great wave, which began with Gericault and ended with Daiibigny. All the facile doing of the men of to-day does not count, and never will. It is merely a mercantile develop- ment. These men might have painted differently. It is this looking after perfection that I tell you not to do." " Do what you do while you do it, with thumbs or elbows." " There's going to be painting that's perfectly simple — the simple expression of simple forms. To do this a man must be tremendously strong." " Conveniences are often an inconvenience, and my usual course has been to dispense 90 AMERICAN PAINTERS. with them. However, 1 was once in Berville's shop in Paris, and he wanted me to buy a box of materials for charcoal-drawing. I didn't want it, but he kept pressing it upon me, and at last I took it, simply because I could not hold out any longer. And that box was the beginning of all the ' charcoal-drawing ' in my classes — of my having any class, in fact ; for I took it with me to Brittany, and liked it very much. I had hardly ever used charcoal before, and when I made sketches they were on scraps of paper which were easily lost. But this little box kept my things together, and interested me in that way of draw- ing." Other of Mv. Hunt's instructions, as reported by Miss Knowlton, are as follows : " Paint what you see and what you feel, if it's nothing but a cat. You can't paint a scene that you saw years ago, and of which you have only a literal drawing. If you've forgotten the poetry and the mystery, you can't get it again. It's the way you look at a thing that makes the picture ! It isn't paint, or the way in which paint is put on ! " " Painting is only an adjunct. A drawing is often better than a painting — more apt to be kept inside of the frame — a truth which some critics never will find out." " You canH help doing your own way. You come here to be shown somebody else's way. Where's the person that ever did anything without knowing what others had done before him ? Why can we talk ? Because we are talking all the time." " Going to paint that in to-day \ Well, then, crack ahead ! Do it ! Don't be afraid ! The moment you're afraid, you might as well be in Hanover Street, shopping ! We have got to have faith in the biggest people that have ever done anything. If we can find out a way of doing our work with less expense, all right ! Paul Veronese gives you the resume of a thing. Velasquez painted hands with two strokes of the brush. Near the canvas you would say that his hands had but three fingers each ; but, at the distance at which they were meant to be seen, they were real hands ! Now, it would be very easy for me to say ' Yes ! ' to your admiration of painters who are not the greatest ; and it isn't what might be called ' pleasant ' for me to combat your ideas. But, in spite of what you may think of me, I have a firm conviction that you haven't the true idea of great art ! Besides, I want to tell you that you haven't a right, at the age of twenty years, to pro- nounce judgment on these great artists, who may never be equaled, never can be excelled! I have disliked pictures so much that I afterward found were good, that I want to hint to you that you may, some day, want an outlet from the opinions you now hold. The fact is, we must take, in the works of these men, what you call faults, and ask ourselves if they were not, perhaps, qualities. - What a time has been made over Michael Angelo's 'Moses,' with his homs ! Mi- chael Angelo felt that Moses must have horns ! To represent him he must have some- 5 z w o X 2 £ Q. $ WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT. gi thing more than a man with a full beard, and sou must accepi these horns jusi as vou would a word which some poet had felt the need of, and had coined. A> Michael An- gelo was the greatest creator that ever worked in art, hadn't we better decide thai we'll wait fifteen minutes before passing judgment upon him, or upon whal he did '. " "Instead of one canvas ready to paint on, you ought to have forty, and paint for a joke! I have a hundred and fifty in waiting, and each of you ought to have ten at least. You always have gloves to wear. You need canvases just as much." " I've just finished this little sketch, painting it in twenty minutes, \\ itli the intention simply of getting light in a sky. When I left it, I thought, ' The first person who comes in will say, " Oh, trying to pamt like Corot ! " I wasn't trying to paint like any one : but I know that when I look at Nature I think of Millet, Corot, Delacroix, and sometimes of Daubigny. Just as if we were to write a line of poetry that hit the nail sharp upon the head, it might make us think of Shakespeare /" " You soften the fibre of your memory by fastening yourself too closely to your work and your model. You could come here and look at that figure, and go away and draw it. if you had accustomed yourself to work in that way. Some niceties of Nature you must correct and refine from life ; but you can get values, proportion, etc., by observation and memory. Some of the most vivid renderings of Nature have been done after Nature had passed. How else can you paint a thunder-shower, a sunset, a flying cloud, a galloping horse \ You don't trust yourself enough. You are too timid. If you were to have that head only four minutes yon would put in something that would be like it ; but, if you are to have it all day, you twist it all out of shape. If I were to show that sketch of mine to some people they would say, ' It looks as if you had daubed stuff around upon that can- vas ! ' I should feel tempted to say that they might ' daub stuff ' around, and not get so much of a picture as that even ! I am trying, first of all, to get a simple, luminous color. I don't want to make it like the color of any painted sky that I ever saw. I want. I say. a simple, luminous color. Don't bother too much about color! Get the effect of light, and you won't miss color. I know that my pictures are said to ' lack color : ' but I don't like a great many things which people admire for their ' color.' " " {Moonlight.) You don't have to be literal to a line to make an impression. Moon- light pictures are apt to look as if you had dipped the thing in ink and half washed it out. This sketch looks like one thing, instead of sixteen — which is one good quality." " Don't despise anything which you have honestly done from Nature. There's a sketch which, when I brought it home, seemed only a patch of bright green there, of violet there, and of orange here. But, a year later, I chanced upon it, and found that it was an impression from Nature ; and that's what our sketches ought to be." " If you are determined to paint you won't mind what kind of things you use to paint with. I remember when I sketched that ploughiug-scene I had only a butter-box for a 22 92 AMERICAN PAINTERS. palette, a brush or two, and a palette-knife. For rubbing in a velvet coat, sometimes noth- ing works better than the palm of your hand." " You can't do good work unless you are physically in order for it. It requires as much strength to paint well as to plough." " In charcoal-drawing leave your darks as you first put them in. You want the fresh velvet of an untouched black. You lose it when you begin to work upon it." " If you leave a large surface to paint over, get sash-tools from the paint-shop and do it at once. I believe that the old painters used these brushes, certainly for skies, back- grounds, and draperies. At any rate, they painted broadly and frankly, and they couldn't have done it with such brashes as we buy nowadays, long, flimsy, weak things, or else stiff and unyielding. If you want to know what brushes to use, watch the painters at work on windows and doors." " We stupidly suppose that what is called finish, or outside-work, gives value to a thing. It is too much like the mince-pie given to a boarding-school boy at his last dinner of the term. It may deceive a little, but it don't mend matters. The finish should be done in the same mood with the beginning. A highly-finished imbecility is worth no more than an imbecility. Adapt your finish to the stuff that's underneath, and let it be of one piece ; and don't try to make believe that you know more than you do. Don't smooth your mashed potato with a knife ! This much-admired finish is like the archi- tecture that the countryman said was going to be put upon his house by a Boston man after it was built ! Oh, think of a last week's meat-pie with the added truthful date of to-day stamped upon its crust for a finish ! This kind of thing may do in putting up mackerel and blackberries, but it won't answer in pictures. If the truth isn't the funda- mental part, there's no use in adding it as embroidery. Tinkering isn't painting ! " During the last five or six years Mr. Hunt has painted many landscapes. His earlier works were portraits and figure-pieces. To the first exhibition of the Society of American Artists he contributed an unfinished portrait of a lady, which was very delicate and harmonious in color and rich in suggestive- ness ; but the most of his later pictures are never exhibited publicly except in his own private gallery overlooking Boston Common. In the summer of 1878, in a shop in that city, there hung a picture of a sweet and serious girl of fif- teen years, which was as winning in sentiment and as full of tenderest poetic feeling as any work of Millet's that we have seen. The treatment was as broad and cool as Millet's, and the technique in every respect as good. Mr. Hunt's landscapes are low-toned, simple in subject, masterly in the rendering of atmosphere and atmospheric effects, luminous, and the records of distinct ft '3 ROBERT SWAIN OIFFORD. 93 impressions from Nature. The quoted extracts from his conversations tell clearly what he tries to do. Though not a colorist in the supreme sense that Troyon was, he is a true artist. When Mr. Robert Swain Gifford was elected an Academician in 1x7*, the National Academy of Design distinguished itself. Some years ajro the con- ferring of that honor would have given him distinction. The institution, how- ever, gained by procrastination ; in finally electing Mr. Gifford it added to its own laurels. The new member was born on the island of Naushon, in Buz. zard's Bay, near the coast of Massachusetts, on the 23d of December, 1840. He went to school in New Bedford, and opposite that place, in the village of Fairhaven, he met the Dutch marine painter, Albert Van Beest. It would be incorrect to say that his acquaintance with the Dutch painter made Mr. Gifford an artist, because Mr. Gifford was an artist potentially the day on which he first opened his eyes ; but the influence of Van Beest on the schoolboy of New Bedford was a felicitous factor in the equation of his life. Van Beest saw promise in Gilford's drawings, took a fancy to the maker of them, in- structed him in the rudiments of art, and used him as an assistant. The pupil was soon graduated in his master's studio. In 186-4 he opened a studio of his own in Boston, and, two years later, in New York. To the Academy Exhibi- tion in 1867 he sent three marine paintings — " Scene at Long Branch," " Cliff- Scene, Grand Menan," and "Vineyard Sound Light-ship" — and on their merits was elected an associate member of the institution. This event terminated the first period of his career. The second period began when, in 1869, he spent the summer and autumn in California and Oregon. He was extending his operations into the domain of landscape. In 1870 he visited England, France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Egypt, and went over much of the ground that Mr. Samuel Colman had re- cently traversed, directing especial attention to the Moorish houses of Tan- gier, to the aspects of the region adjoining the Great Desert and to the scenery of the Nile. In 1873 and 1874 he exhibited in New York some of the trophies of his tour, and in the latter year, after his marriage to Miss Eliot, of Massachusetts (whose pencil has since given pleasure to admirers 94 AMERICA X PAINTERS. of the beautiful in art), made a second trip to Europe and Africa. This time he went to France and Algeria, and pitched his tent in the Desert of Sahara itself. "An Egyptian Caravan" was sent by him to the Academy Exhibition of 1 876. He received a medal at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. His third period dates from the organization, in 1877, of the Society of American Artists, of which he is a leading member, and to the first exhibition of which in the following year he contributed his " Cedars of New England," owned by Mr. George E. Clark. This picture was his representative in the Paris Exhibition of 1878, and the critic of the London Athenmim said of it : " It is an excellent motive, showing feeling for effect ; more serious study and attempt at realization would have resulted in a valuable picture" — a criticism entirely characteristic of an Englishman who would define art itself to be " an attempt at realization." M. Charles Blanc, the French critic, says that Eng- land has never had any really great artists, and insinuates, if he does not assert, that she does not know what art is ; the London Spectator a few months ago feared that " under the press of Manchester patronage and Aca- demic criticism," the " higher imaginative art " had " almost breathed its last breath " in the land of Landseer and Holman Hunt ; and Mi 1 . Mark Pattison, the accomplished Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, affirms that during the last twenty years English taste has retrograded rather than advanced. These eminent authorities may or may not be trustworthy ; certainly there is noth- ing in the London Athenaeum's criticism of Mr. Gilford's picture to throw suspicion upon the truth of their testimony. Neither the " Cedars of New England " nor any other of Mr. Gifford's riper works is or was intended to be "an attempt at realization." Mr. Giftbrd does not make such an attempt. He knows that it would be in the first place* useless, because Art never can compete with Nature, but always fails when trying to do so ; and, in the sec- ond place, foolish, because Art has a sphere of her own, in which she is greater than Nature. Madame Tussaud's wax-figures are very earnest and laborious " attempts at realization," but probably no adult human being who can read and write ever supposed that they are works of art. Mi'. Giftbrd puts himself in his pictures. His landscapes are something more than mere scenes in Nature. They are Nature, to be sure, but Nature THE PALMS OF BISKRA. From a Painting by Robert Swain Giffi» RD. 95 as he views her, and Nature with a revelation of his own feelings toward her. The impress of the man is left upon the work, and the work is the measure of the man. He lias something fresh to tell us about what we already know a good deal, and, in addition, he explains to us how this something has gone straight to his heart, and has stirred his emotions. In the last analysis the worth of an artist's performance depends upon the worth of the artist himself; his character as well as his genius is displayed and defined in his works. An ordinary landscape, seen through his eyes, becomes full of mystery and of meaning ; " the meanest flower that blows " can, when he has placed it on the canvas, "give thoughts that often lie too deep for tears." Mr. Gifford will paint a barren moor under a leaden sky so that it shall almost palpitate with emotion. His vigorous, healthy, and educated mind is worth listening to when talking about the contact of itself with Nature. For perfection of tech- nique — that first requirement of modern art — he has the profoundest respect ; he is an indefatigable student, and he appreciates the finest efforts of the latest masters. The fustian and sensationalism of the Diisseldorf school are an of- fense in his eyes ; his tastes are refined and his music is soft and low, like the wind of the Western sea. When the American Society of Painters in Water-Colors was organized, Mr. Gifford became one of its most conspicuous members. His contributions to the annual exhibitions of the society are always among the striking things on the walls. In 1867 he sent his " Deserted Whaler," an old Nantucket ves- sel stranded on the sandy beach of a barren island after hard service in the northern latitudes. Over her empty decks, and strained, worn timbers, the sea- gulls are flying. The title of the picture is a summary of the story, and there is not a line or tint on the canvas that does not help the telling. We feel the subject at once ; the sentiment of the scene is deep and vital. This work is now in the private gallery of Mr. James M. Burt, of Brooklyn. In general, it may be said of Mr. Gifford's pictures in water-colors that they have the two excellences of being serious and of being sketchy. They are effects worth striving for, and they are not wrought up to too high a pitch— not " finished " to mere prettiness and inaneness ; and, since the tendency of modern water- color art is neither toward robustness of conception nor toward simplicity and rapidity of execution, the presence of these qualities is the more noticeable 23 9f, -1 M E R IGA N PA INTERS. and pleasurable. It is something in these days to see a strong motive at the bottom of a wort in water-colors. Mr. Robert Gordon owns Mr. Giftbrd's " Halt in the Desert ; " Mr. Henry E. Lawrence, his " Fountain near Cairo ; " Mr. Charles L. Tiffany, his " Scene at Boulak, Egypt ; " and Miss Hitchcock, his " Lazy Day in Cairo." We have engraved two other Oriental subjects, " The Palms of Biskra, Sahara Desert," and " On the Nile." In 1873 the artist sent to the National Academy Exhi- bition in New York his "Entrance to a Moorish House in Tangier," his "View of the Golden Horn," and his " Scene in the Great Square of the Rumeyleh, Cairo, Egypt." In 1874 he contributed his " Desert-Scene," his " Halting for Water" and his "Evening on the Nile." His range of landscapes is unusually wide. He has painted the heights of the Sierras, the plains of Brittany and of New England, as well as these Eastern scenes. Walter Shirlaw was born in Paisley, Scotland, August 6, 1837. When two or three years old he was brought by his parents to this country, and when fourteen years old was apprenticed by them to a bank-note engraving company. He took some lessons in the school of the National Academy of Design. For five years he was in the employ of the Western Bank-Note Company of Chicago ; and for one year was an instructor in the Academy of Design in that city. In 1859 he Avent to the Rocky Mountains. He has studied art six years in Munich. Mr. Shirlaw has only recently become known in New York as an artist. It was his " Sheep-Shearing in the Bavarian Highlands," exhibited in the National Academy in 1877, that first brought him into favorable notice here, although to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the preceding year he had sent two important works. One of these, called " The Toning of the Bell," represents a scene in a Bavarian foundery. A large church-bell lies on its side on the ground. A workman leaning over it proceeds to test its sound, while a violinist near by gives the key-note. Several children, introduced into the picture, are greatly interested in the proceedings. The other work was " Feeding the Geese," a name which the artist afterward abandoned for " Good-Morn nig.' 1 The title first selected describes the production, the feeder THE TONING OF THE BELL. From a Painting l>y Walter Shirlaw. p. 96. hi l ter Hn in la w. 97 of the animals being a stout, buxom Bavarian woman. This canvas was displayed at the exhibition of the Society of American Artists in 1878 in New York. In the National Academy Exhibition of the same year Mr. Shirlaw appeared with a portrait of himself, and a picture of a naked boy holding an impetuous dog by a string. One of his latest tasks has been the furnishing of illustrations to a monthly magazine. His studio is in Booth's Theatre Building at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Last year he was teacher of drawing in the Art-Students' League — a position which this year is held by Mr. William M. Chase, who also has recently returned from Munich. Mr. Shirlaw was one of the leaders in the new movement which culminated in the formation of the American Art Association, after- ward called the Society of American Artists. He is the president of tins organization. Last June he was elected an Associate of the New York Na- tional Academy of Design. Mr. Shirlaw has so lately been a student in the Munich ateliers, and his best works are so suggestive of masters at that great art-centre, that an esti- mate of his methods and his abilities cannot now, perhaps, be justly and intel- ligently undertaken. His friends expect to see much stronger and more original work from his brush than he has yet shown ; and so industrious and capable is he that this expectation is an entirely rational one. Meanwhile, his reputation is already wider than that of most young artists here. His draughtsmanship, to be sure, is not yet perfect ; but he has manifested a very decided feeling for richness of tone and for color-values. He paints broadly, of course — that is to be taken for granted in the case of a Munich student — -yet not nearly so broadly as do many of his fellow-pupils ; and, since he appreciates and to some distance penetrates into both the fullness and the energy of Nature, by-and-by doubtless his figures will be deeper in significance. He knows what is meant by singleness of thought and by concentration of means ; and he cares much more for the grammar, the rhetoric, and the phi- losophy of his art than for its subject-matter. In the Paris Exhibition of 1878 his pictures received as much notice as those of any other American. 98 AMERICAN PAINTERS. What has been called the dreamy softness of Weber's music may, perhaps, be said to have a parallel in the pictures of Mr. Wortiiington Whittredge, who was born in Ohio, in 1820, when that State was little more than a wil- derness. In early manhood he went to Cincinnati, then the Queen City of the West, and devoted his attention to mercantile pursuits. There he became acquainted with Henry K. Brown, the celebrated sculptor, James H. Beard, the animal-painter, and several enthusiastic patrons of art — for Cincinnati did not first exhibit its devotion to the Muses when it allured Theodore Thomas from the metropolis of the nation. The landscapes of Cole, Durand, and Doughty, and the portraits of Jarves, Chester Harding, and Thomas Sully, were housed in some of the private galleries of the city ; and Whittredge, whose tastes had constantly made the counting-room odious to him, found himself as an art-student in the company of troops of friends, while his rare capacity for making friends served him to good purpose, as it has many times since. The artists and the connoisseurs of Cincinnati encouraged him to the lattermost. It was natural for him to turn his attention first to portrait-painting. Most American painters did so at an early period of their career, not because such work was in all cases the most attractive to them, but because it was the most lucrative. It is also more or less easy to paint portraits in a new coun- try, where the demands of sitters are not invariably of the strictest or largest sort. The likenesses of our ancestors hanging, alas ! too often not in our par- lors, but in less favored apartments, tell an interesting story of the ease with which those venerated persons were satisfied by the rude forefathers of the pencil. Whittredge painted portraits and earned his living with thanks from the men and women who sat for him. The primeval forests of Ohio had long been a source of inspiration to the young artist. Landscapes, without a single human element, were his delight. He reproduced them on his canvases, and then laid them aside and painted them over again. He loved them as Rousseau loved them — Rousseau, whose aims and methods are at the farthest divergence from his own. The friends who had helped him when he dealt in portraits stood nobly by him in his new departure. They gave him plenty of commissions, and enabled him to go to Europe. After making the usual tour of London and Paris, he went to Dusseldorf, and became a pupil of Andreas Achenbach. '• GOOD-MORNING." From a Pai)iti)ig by ]Valter Shirlaw, p. 9a WORTEINOTON WHITTREDGE. 99 The inquirer, however, who seeks in Mr. Whitf rede's works (lie traces of Andreas Achenbach's influence, will scarcely find them there. Nor is it an uncommon thing to see iu a painters pictures the presence of other forces than those which direct the brush of his professed master. Mi'. J. Appleton Brown, of Boston, studied with Lambinet, but communed with Corot. lie speaks lightly of Lambinet. Mr. William M. Huut, of the same city, studied with Couture, but it was from Millet that he took his inspiration. The expla- nation of the phenomenon is clearly in the fact that a pupil is not always able to secure the teacher that he prefers. Mr. J. Alden Weir, one of the most promising of our younger artists, learned the rudiments of his profession in the atelier of Gerome ; but only a person who is color-blind could detect in any of the fine performances of Mr. Weir the hand or the head of the author of " L'Almee." Nor is it likely that Mr. Whittredge's landscapes have ever been reminders of Andreas Achenbach's ways and aims. On the contrary, it is of Andreas's brother Oswald that one thinks when contemplating the besl of Mr. Whittredge's productions. Oswald Achenbach is a great painter ; Mr. Sanford Gilford, we believe, esteems him the greatest of European landscap- ists. The mention of his favorite Italian scenes carries with it something of a charm — a charm like that which Hermann Giimm says accompanies the utter- ance of the word. " Florence ; " " the passionate agitation of Italy's prime sends forth its fragrance toward us like blossom-laden boughs, from whose dusky shadows we catch whispers of the beautiful tongue." Oswald Achenbach's conceptions are tender and delicate, his manner of execution is almost spwi- tuel J he displays a sensitiveness, grace, and beauty, which one is not accus- tomed to look for in Teutonic art. Andreas Achenbach, on the other hand, is as vigorous and realistic as the Dutch. Mr. Whittredge's " Home by the Sea-side," in the valuable collection of Mr. Isaac Henderson, of New York City, is in all respects a competent repre- sentative of his most characteristic work. The tints are soft and seductive, the composition is simple and quite natural, the impression is one of expan- siveness and pleasantness and peace. None of Ruysdael's melancholy nor Tur- ner's solemnity is here ; but mildness and quietness that would have pleased Cuyp or Crome. The Baron de Constant-Rebecque was described by one of his friends as " a gentleman grafted on an artist" — a description that, partly 24 iOO AMERICAN PAINTERS. absurd though it is, one might recall iu connection with Mr. Whittredge. During his residence in Europe the artist visited Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Alps. He staid four years in Kome, where there was a colony of Ameri- can painters. In 1860 he returned to America after an absence of ten years, opened a studio in New York City, and was elected an Academician. Four years subsequently he made a trip to the Kooky Mountains, and came home with a portfolio full of sketches, two of which soon developed themselves into his " Old Hunting-Ground," and " View of the Rocky Mountains from the Platte River." The former work, now in the gallery of Mr. J. W. Pinchot, of New York City, was sent to the Paris Exhibition of 1867. Around the bank of a shallow pool where a deer is drinking are fine, tall, silvery birches. The latter work is in the possession of the Century Club of New York. Mr. Whit- tredge became the President of the National Academy of Design in 1874. He was succeeded in that position by Mr. Daniel Huntington, the well-known portrait-painter, but his influence in the councils of the institution is large and recognized. When on one occasion a by-law had been passed, by which eight feet of the line in every annual exhibition were reserved for the pictures of Academicians, Mr. Whittredge's voice, loud and earnest for a repeal, was heard and heeded. It was not alone, to be sure, but it led the opposition to the obnoxious statute. At the sale of Mi-. John Taylor Johnston's celebrated col- lection of pictures in Chickering Hall, New York, in December, 1876, Mr. Whittredge was the adviser of President Garrett, of Baltimore, who bought many of the best and most valued works. On certain favorable occasions, Mr. Daniel Huntington, the President of the National Academy of Design, may easily be drawn into conversation on art-matters. His powers of verbal expression are above those of most of the distinguished gentlemen over whom he presides. If what he said one evening when chatting in his studio, and asked many questions (to which his answers were full and prompt), were written out in the form of a monologue, it would be very much as follows : " A portrait may be liked by the family of the sitter, while not liked by his friends, and vice versa. I always wish to know for what purpose it is wanted before I begin to paint it. If it is to be owned by w 3 S 1 .9 DANIEL HUNTINGTON. 101 his family, I give, the man a more familiar and conversational look ; if by a society, I try to represent his active public character. The face of almosl every business-man has two characteristic expressions — one rather serious and earnest, the other sweet and cheerful, with gleams of humor and affection. I remember one very remarkable instance where the family of a sitter greatly liked my portrait, but his acquaintances did not. If you want a portrait to look at you, with eyes following you around the room, it is better to be alone in the studio with the sitter, that he may get into relations with you. But it is a mistake to suppose that you must be constantly entertaining him — cracking jokes with him, as Inman used to do. The continual flitting of the artist's mind from the sitter to the subject talked about, and from subject to sitter, wears him out very fast. Besides, the portrait is apt to have — as most of Ininau's portraits have — an amused expression, a sort of expression that is just what is not wanted. Most of Stuart's pictures look at you ; the finest of Titian's and of Reynolds's look off. Of course, there is no rule of position, except the rule which requires the artist to make the most of his subject. Nor is any one quality the test of excellence in a portrait. The living char- acter of the sitter, which is what the portrait-painter strives for, doesn't depend absolutely upon either correctness of color or of drawing, but upon the gen- eral expression. Absolute truth is undoubtedly in one sense the most desir- able in a portrait, if the artist can know and feel it. The real character, not the obvious character, is what he tries to represent : the capacity, capability, potentiality of the man — what the man was, so to speak, designed to be. Still, it seems proper that his finest traits should be emphasized in a portrait, since every side of his character cannot be given in the same picture. For example, in painting a lady's portrait wouldn't it be just to subdue minor infe- licities of profile or complexion, to present the best of her appearance, and so to make amends for our lack of ability thoroughly to reproduce a human face ? That painting, it seems to me, is of a higher order which discerns the germs of truth in the sitter's character, and brings them out. But now and then you see a woman's face so beautiful, a woman's complexion so exquisite, that you feel, as Reynolds felt before Michael Angelo's work, that to catch the slight- est of its perfections would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man. As for the old masters in portraiture, of course it is impossible to tell 102 AMERICAN PAINTERS. how much they flattered their subjects. Certainly, they sometimes caricatured them. We are sure of that. As a general rule, a portrait should please and satisfy the persons most intimate with the sitter. A bust of a man has a death-like look, which, when he is dead, his family do not like. Sculpture cannot be as real as painting. The weakness of a portrait consists most often in the absence of the true character of the sitter ; you feel the absence, you perceive only a waxy resemblance, an insipidity, even though the work is beautifully handled and nicely drawn. It is pretty, but not truthful. On the other hand, a person, when looking at a portrait, often says, ' I am sure it is a good likeness,' although he has never seen the original. He feels it to be such. At the same time, however, the picture may have character, but not the character of the sitter. A moral design in a work of art is a very proper one, I think — in fact, it is the highest of all designs ; but it may be reached by a process little suspected. If you hold that the artist's object is simply to present truth without teaching, you cut off from the realm of art some of the masterpieces of the world. Bunyan's descriptions are certainly pictures, and their sole intention was moral. The same is true of what Dante wrote, of what Milton wrote. I have a feeling that the same is true of the works of Shakespeare. He didn't bring the moral intention out as a preacher does, but it must have been latent in his mind. The story of ' Othello,' for example, must have been intended to convey a lesson. One gets very much disgusted, certainly, by pictures designed to teach a moral or religious truth, but feebly aud poorly painted. Yet, when a picture is a work of art in every other re- spect, the fact that it conveys and impresses a moral truth does not make it not a work of art. Bryant's poem on the water-fowl is one of the most nearly perfect pieces of artistic composition in the world, yet its whole idea is the truth that God cares for a solitary, individual life. That is its key, and that clinches it. As for many modern French pictures — for instance, some of those in the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia — they were evidently intended to pamper the tastes of lascivious men. I felt it. Titian's method was absolutely the beau ideal — fullness of reality and individuality, and, at the same time, breadth and largeness of treatment. Even in his handling of color this same method is seen — certainly very nicely discriminated and emphasized tints appear in every one of his pictures. Flesh is the most STUDY OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN ASPENS. From a Painting by Worthington WHttredge. 1>. 102. DANIEL HUNTINGTON. 103 difficult of all substances to represent on canvas. Very few painters have ever reproduced it. As a painter grows older lie gets to think so much of i be im- portance of pearliuess, freshness, and delicacy in flesh, that he is apt fco lose richness, force, and warmth. He becomes satisfied with too little of the latter qualities. No matter how much love he has for them, he feels that, without pearliness, without that delicate and luminous effect of lijdit in and shining through a porcelain vase, the picture is nothing. Perhaps the film of the eye in old age makes things look a little yellower than they are. At any rate, whatever may be the cause, it is certain that pictures by older painters are very often deficient in yellows. Reynolds's later portraits have this defect ; so have Trumbull's. But Titian's are always incomparable. Nevertheless, this pearliness of flesh in a portrait cannot be too highly valued. It must be pre- served, whatever else is lost. Here" (pointing to an unfinished picture of a lady) "is a sketch of a portrait after only one or two sittings. The first paint- ing of the face is a pearly gray, with merely a film of color — a slight approxi- mation to flesh-color. Gradually I shall deej^en it till I get the tone I want ; and, last of all, I shall add warmth to it — though, perhaps, even after I have done so, it will be too cool. So, when painting the black-velvet robe of that other figure yonder, I began with a tint considerably lighter than that of black velvet. This tint, shining through the one next laid upon it, makes the latter luminous. It is the light in-the-vase effect again. Cold colors need something to give them warmth and tenderness. For example, before paint- ing the green drapery of that picture, I rubbed some browns on the canvas, and then used a purer and fresher green, to which the browns, by breaking through it, give a sparkling effect — an effect which is simply the result of an opposite color shining through. Sir Joshua Reynolds, you remember, found that Titian's process was sometimes the same one that I adopted in the unfin- ished portrait of a lady." Of the pictures in his studio and the other rooms of his house — the num- ber of these treasures is many — Mr. Huntington values most a small Kensett called " In the Woods," and representing a scene above the Kauterskill Falls in the Catskills. It reproduces subtile effects of atmosphere and color, and is also exceedingly bold and fresh. The grays in it are so rich ! Many of Mr. Kensett's friends will remember this beautiful example ; and none of them 104 AMERICAN PAINTERS. will be inclined to question Mr. Huntington's estimate of the lamented and beloved artist, whose place is vacant still. In speaking of one of Kensett's sea-scenes — the one entitled " Eagle Rock," and owned by the artist Hicks — Mr. Huntington, after mentioning its extreme brilliancy of color, its quiet, dis- tant, sunlit effects, its exquisite wave-drawing, its truthfulness, and its delight- ful feeling, exclaimed, " I don't think any man ever did those things as well as lie ! " Some old tapestry, woven with the story of poor Dido ; a suit of armor ornamented with arabesque forms and inlaid with gold ; easels and easy-chairs ; all sorts of plaster-casts of human bodies and parts of bodies ; two copies from Titian; one from Stuart's "General Gates;" one from Couture; an original Stuart ; Hoyt's copy of the head of Rembrandt in the Uffizi Gal- lery, with its noble quality and texture, and its " rotten-ripe " look ; a portrait of l)r. Guyot, of Princeton College — that scholarly and beloved professor — are also in the studio, which is a delightfully confused and comfortable place, open wide to a fine north light. His reminiscences of early friends were interesting. Washington Allston he did not know very well, having passed only a part of one evening with him in Boston. Mr. Huntington went at about eleven o'clock, in company with a lady friend, who thought even that hour of the night was a little early for making a call upon Allston. Mr. Huntington remembered that the artist, who was bright and full of spirit, got out a little saucer of cigars, and some apples ; and that he took the trouble to go down-stairs and draw some cider for his guests. Allston's conversation was full of anecdotes of himself, of the painter Leslie, of old times in England, and of Coleridge, whom he greatly admired and loved. At half-past twelve o'clock in the morning his visitors arose to depart. " I thought," said Mr. Huntington, " that I had staid long enough. But Allston insisted that it was early yet — only the edge of the evening ; and, going up to the lady, he laid his hand upon her arm and with great earnestness besought her not to go. Half an hour later, when we re- newed our attempt to get away, he remarked that it was a pity we had to leave so soon. He never went to bed himself before two o'clock in the i iiorniug." The painter Cole, whom Mr. Huntington knew well, was " a sensitive, deli- cately-constituted man, gentle, affectionate, and cheerful, and funny and frolic- a K & "" W B DANIEL HUNTINGTON. 105 some as a child. He caught the spirit of our wild American landscape with wonderful power, especially in the smaller pictures painted in his middle period. Later in life, having become morbidly excited by the moral ideas which he attempted to depict upon his canvas, he produced so rapidly and with such fire that much of the artistic excellence of his earlier and smaller works was lost. His best works are in the rooms of the New York Historical Society — small reproductions of autumn American scenery, brilliant still, and full of ti-uth and spirit. His finest works will live — there is no doubt about it ; he fills a niche no one else ever did fill, or ever can, for the time has gone by." His " Storm in a Forest," in Mr. R. M. Olyphant's late collection, is " full of blow and fury, and is very characteristic." The last of the series in the Historical Society's rooms — a scene of utter desolation, crumbling ruins covered with ivy in the foreground, a stork's nest, and a full moon — is, in Mr. Huntington's opinion, the most nearly perfect of his paintings : " In texture and color it is absolutely perfect, as perfect as anything I know of. It is a great picture in every respect. Samuel F. B. Morse was a great deal more of an artist than he was generally esteemed to be. When he was painting, a certain flashy style was fashionable — a style which delighted chiefly in deli- cate finish and elaboration, but forgot the existence of such a substance as a soul. Professor Morse despised this style ; and the best of his portraits are painted in a good, solid, Venetian way, without thinness, smoothness, or slip- periness. He had studied hard under Allston and West, and was an accom- plished composer ; but his fondness for experiment in natural philosophy man- ifested itself also in the domain of art. He was always trying different text- ures, vehicles, and methods ; he was always framing theories — equalities val- uable in a professor, but interfering with simplicity of artistic pursuit. When I knew him he had his wires strung around his studio, and his chemical apparatus side by side with his easel. His portrait of an old lady, in Mr. R. M. Olyphant's collection, is like a Rembrandt ; and his ' Mayor Paulding,' in the City Hall, is exceedingly broad, vigorous, and manly." " The ' Slave-Ship,' " said Mr. Huntington, " cannot be understood except by a person who has seen Turners earlier and later pictures. It comes be- tween them. He was a little crazy in his eye when he painted it, and it somewhat resembles the mutteriugs or ravings of an insane genius of the high- 106 AMERICAN PAINTERS. est rank. Full of the most wonderful execution, and the most wonderful knowledge of material and of Nature, it is at the same time disjointed and inconsistent. Its faults are those of a great mind going to chaos. Rich in atmosphere, in the flicker of light, and (throughout the lower part) of trans- lucency ; the water flowing, liquid, and yet solid ; the representation of text- ure and of substances perfect — it is, nevertheless, neither truthful nor natural. The upper part, with its whites running into intense yellows, oranges, and reds, is overdone ; the lower part is exquisite in refinement and delicacy. The clearness, movement, swash, and solidity of the waves are extraordinary. Could we but place 'The Slave-Ship' between one of his earlier and one of his later works, it would become very interesting ; but by itself it gives a false idea of his capacity and taste as an artist. It would be mere affectation for any one to pretend to like it who had seen no other works of Turner's. I hear connoisseurs and painters exclaiming that they can't see anything in it ; that it is perfect folly ; that it is humbug, and so on ; and I confess that the first sight of the work a little astonished me. To call it a miracle of art is to go to the other extreme. It is a product of wonderful power a little disor- ganized. It is just that, and only that, and all that." Inman was a charming fellow — a wag, immensely humorous and droll. His studio and Mr. Huntington's were in the same building. He painted with great rapidity and facility. It was generally thought that he painted ladies best. He was constantly cracking jokes and saying witticisms which made them laugh ; and, consequently, you will rarely see a serious portrait of a lady by Inman. His portraits of old men, determined, solemn old men, who could not be moved by his drollery, were really his best — e. g., the " Bishop Moore," of Virginia, in full Episcopal robes, expresses the dignity and grace of an old gentleman, and is replete with spirit and power. It now hangs in the vestry-room of Trinity Chapel, in Twenty-sixth Street, New York. Bishop White's venerable head is well worth looking at. Inman made several copies of this picture, and one of the best of them is owned by Mrs. Rogers, of Twentieth Street, a sister of Dr. Muhlenberg. The portrait of Mr. Rawle, of Philadelphia, is a masterpiece : the pallid warmth and trans- lucency of a studious old man's face are admirably rendered. A head of Chal- mers in the Lenox Library — Mr. Lenox is an admirer of Dr. Chalmers — is 1CHABOD CRANE AND KATR1NA. From a Painting by Daniel Huntington. p. 107. DANIEL IIUNTINQTON. 107 also an important work. It was painted when Inman was in Great Britain. Macaulay, Wordsworth, and other celebrities, sat for him at about the same time. His self-confidence and " push " were largely developed, and in him were very pleasant. Before going to England he tried to get orders for por- traits of distinguished men in that country. A good story is told in this con- nection. A New-Yorker, to whom Inman had applied for an order, at length gave him one for a portrait of a certain nobleman, Lord Codrington by name. Inman received the commission gladly, but, of course, made no memorandum of the name. The Lord-Chancellor of England at that time was named Cod- dington (or something else very much like Codrington), and in the presence of the lord -chancellor appeared Inman, with a request to be allowed to paint a portrait of him for his friend, Mr. , in America. " But," remonstrated the lord-chancellor, with an oath, " I don't know any such gentleman ; I haven't a single acquaintance in America ! " " Well," replied Inman, not in the least daunted, " he knows you ; he's a leading man in our country — plenty of money, influential, prominent — and he very much wants your portrait. He especially commissioned me to paint one before I left New York." It will hardly be believed that the artist actually persuaded the lord-chancellor to give him a series of sittings ; but such is the fact. Inman came home with a vigorous and flashy portrait of him in official robes. But all the artist's auda- city was useless on his arrival here. The gentleman who had ordered a Cod- rington would not take a Coddington. The picture is now in the possession of Mr. George Buckam, Inman's executor. It is a strong and characteristic specimen, and deserves a place in a public gallery. " Is there an American school of painting \ " I asked. " Undoubtedly, there once was an American school of painting," he replied. " Such works as Cole's wild, sequestered mountain-landscapes, and Mount's genre representations, are distinctively American. ' The Power of Music,' ' Raffling for a Goose,' ' Bargaining for a Horse,' and other of Mount's pictures, could never have been painted in Europe. At the same time, they lack the harmony, richness, artistic strength, that would have come from foreign study. But art is universal, and the distinction of national schools will be done away with — originality being confined for the most part to the individual artist, rather than to any class of artists in a particular country. To-day, however, 26 108 AMERICAN PAINTERS. there is certainly a marked difference in the styles even of Boston and New York artists. William M. Hunt and his pupils display a simplicity and breadth, a large and rather blocky way of laying things out, a neglect instead of a subordination of details, which they learned from Millet, but which, though found in Boston, can scarcely be called an outgrowth of Boston. This method of painting is broad and vigorous ; it gives only the largest and most important features of a scene ; it produces fine results. But it is a dangerous method, for young men especially, and its results are certainly not perfection. American art lacks thorough training and drilling in schools ; and whatever means may be devised to insure a thorough art-education, students should receive the best instruction in drawing, painting, and modeling, and should listen to practical lectures on anatomy and perspective especially. They should be required at regular intervals to pass examinations, should be ad- vanced by slow and sure stages, and should be graduated with diplomas of merit. Such a system, thoroughly carried out, would insure a training appli- cable to every department of art, without loss of originality or individuality. Our independent 'Young America' is not in danger of following slavishly in the track of any master. The late John Beaufain Irving was one of those who did not hesitate to enter the lists for a contest with foreign art, selecting his subjects in fields where the most eminent European artists had won their laurels. His courage in doing so was admirable, and the fate cannot but be deplored which cut him off in the heat of the fight, while the shouts of his adherents were ringing in his ears. Nevertheless, the fight will be main- tained. There will be no truce. Foreign art will continue to pour in its forces, and American art must triumph, not by imitating or decrying it, but by surpassing it." Mr. Huntington was born in the city of New York, on the 14th of Octo- ber, 1816. He was a student in Hamilton College, where he became ac- quainted with the late Mr. Charles L. Elliott, the portrait-painter. In 1835 he was a pupil in the studio of the late Professor S. F. B. Morse. In 1839 he visited Europe, and staid two year3 in Rome. Again, in 1844, he spent two years in the capital of Italy. For seven years, from 1862 to 1869, he was President of the National Academy of Design, a position which he now holds. He has probably painted more portraits of distinguished Americans than any u E u. ( h tfl O P. a o < j j s «? THOMAS WATERMAN WOOD. 109 other painter, living or dead. His historical and ideal subjects are very many. Principal among them are " Sowing the Word," " Henry VIII. and Queen Catharine Parr," " Lady Jane Grey and Feckenham in the Tower," " Mercy's Dream," and "Ichabod Crane and Katrina," the last mentioned being in the gallery of Mr. William H. Osborn, of Park Avenue, New York. The present President of the American Water-Color Society, Mr. Thomas Waterman Wood, a genre and figure painter, was born in Montpelier, Ver- mont. In 1857 he studied art in the studio of Mr. Chester Harding, of Boston, and in 1858 went to Paris. Two years afterward he returned to Montpelier. In a few weeks he went to Louisville, Kentucky, and painted portraits in that city and in Nashville, Tennessee, until 1807, when he came to New York City, bringing with him many sketches of negro and soldier life, which he has since transferred to canvas. To the exhibition that year in the National Academy of Design he contributed a group of works entitled " The Blind Fiddler," " The Sharp-shooter," " The Contraband," " The Recruit," and " The Veteran," all of them relating to the war of the rebel- lion. The last three are in the collection of Mr. Charles S. Smith, of New York City, and were intended to go together and to constitute a chapter in the life of a negro soldier. " In the first," says a writer who saw them, " the newly-emancipated slave approaches a provost-marshal's office with timid step, seeking to be enrolled among the defenders of his country. This is the gen- uine ' Contraband.' He has evidently come a long journey on foot. His only baggage is contained in an old silk pocket-handkerchief. He is not past mid- dle age, yet privation and suffering have made him look prematurely old. In the next we see him accepted, accoutred, uniformed, and drilled, standing on guard at the very door where he entered to enlist. This is ' The Volunteer.' His cares have now vanished, and he looks younger, and, it is needless to say, happy and proud. In the third picture he is the one-legged veteran, though two years since we first saw him can scarcely be said to have passed. He approaches the same office to draw his ' additional bounty ' and pension, or j^erhaps his ' back pay.' " These pictures were the occasion of Mr. Wood's being elected an Associate HO AMERICAN PAINTERS. of the Academy. In 1871 he became an Academician. Mr. Thomas Schultz, of Astoria, owns his " Politics in the Workshop ; " Mr. James K. Osgood, of Boston, his " Country Doctor;" "Mr. Fletcher Harper, Jr., of New York City, his " Cogitation," a character-study ; and Mr. Thau, of Pittsburg, Pennsyl- vania, his " Return of the Flag." Mr. Wood's first contribution to the Amer- ican Water-Color Society's exhibitions was the " American Citizens," which contained representations of the negro, the Dutchman, the Irishman, and the Yankee. His " Village Post-Office," which we have engraved, is owned by Mr. Charles S. Smith. Mr. Lemuel E. Wilmaeth, a native of Attleborough, Massachusetts, was in early manhood a watch-maker in Philadelphia. He entered the night- classes of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1857, and went to Europe two years later. For three years and a half he studied art in Munich. The painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach befriended him, and introduced him into some families of that city as a drawing-teacher. One of his first important works was a cartoon representing Mutius Scsevola burning his right hand in the presence of the King of the Etruscans, which is said to have received warm praise from Kaulbach. In the autumn of 1862 Mr. Wilmarth returned to America. Two years afterward he became a student in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, iu the atelier of Gerome, whence he sent to the Acade- my exhibitions in New York his " Sparking in the Olden Time," his " Playing Two Games at One Time," his " Little Pitchers have Big Ears," his " Last Hours of Captain Nathan Hale," and other works. He opened a studio in New York in 1867. The next year he assumed the charge of the schools of the Brooklyn Art Association, and in 1870 became professor in the schools of the National Academy of Design. His portrait-group, enti- tled " An Afternoon at Home," was in the Academy Exhibition of 1871 ; and his genre picture, " Guess what I've brought You ? " — a boy stand- ing before a lady and little girl, and holding behind him a squirrel in a cage — in the Exhibition of 1873. Not long ago, in the same place, was hung the work which we have engraved. It is called "Ingratitude," and the ingratitude is that of the mother of a litter of pups, who steals the Q "« D 5 H g h ^ < =s « t &! I OEOIi 6 E I. o R I N 6 />' ffi WN. m dinner of a laborer while the latter is in the act of making a bed for her young offspring. Mr. George Loring Brown was born in Boston in 1814. When twelve years old he was apprenticed to a wood-engraver. He took his first lessons in painting from Washington Allston. After Mr. Isaac P. Davis, a connoisseur of that city, had given him fifty dollars for a copy of a landscape, he resolved to go to Italy. A Boston merchant having presented him with one hundred dollars, he put his resolution into execution, and, in his nineteenth year, landed at Antwerp with an empty wallet. The captain of the ship that had taken him over lent him some money ; and with a stout heart he proceeded to make sketches of the Antwerp Cathedral, and studies of the paintings of Buysdael. Soon he found himself in London, where another friend assist ed him financially, and enabled him to buy a ticket for Paris. In the French capital he became a pupil of Eugene Isabey. Money once more becoming scarce, he availed himself of an invitation from his friend, the Boston mer- chant, to send his first European pictures to him ; but, as in those days the Atlantic was not a scene of rapid transit, he was obliged to wait the con- venience of contrary winds and tides. When at length an answer came, it was in the highest degree satisfactory. " The remittances," says a biographer, " were adequate to place him beyond immediate want." One day, in the studio of Isabey, after spending several months in copying Claude's " Meeting of Mark Antony and Cleopatra," he became disgusted with the result of his endeavor, and, in a moment of rage, attacked his canvas with a knife. " He saved the pieces, however," continues the biographer ; " thinking, probably, that they might be useful for the production of new pictures." He returned to Boston, and found, with Edmund Burke, that difficulty had been his helper. His pictures sold Avell, and he bethought himself of his recent copy of Claude, Gathering together the fragments and placing them in a pretty frame, he had the pleasure of hearing Washington Allston say that the patched production was " the best copy of Claude he had ever seen." The testimony of Allston was of value to the young artist. It brought him many orders for copies of Claude, and, with them, the means of making a second trip to Europe. This 112 AMERICAN PAINTERS. was in 1840, when Brown was twenty-six years old. No more struggles against poverty. A Baltimore gentleman met him in Rome, and bought a picture of him for oue thousand dollars. Other purchases followed, and Mr. Brown staid twenty years in Italy. He painted original landscapes, and copied Claude. A moonlight-scene in Venice, by Mr. Brown, says a writer in Appletons' Art Journal for December, 1877, " is poetic in conception, and rises to the dignity of a masterpiece. A distinguished critic asserts that it gives with admirable truth that peculiar density of the sky, so remarkable in Italy on a summer night after a storm, when the moon appears to sail far out from the infinite depths of the blue concave, and silver the edges of massive clouds below. She illumines the Piazzetta di San Marco and the famous Lion of St. Mark ; the Ducal Palace on the right, the lagoons and San Giorgio on the left. In the opening on the right, between the Ducal Palace and the edifice, is seen the ' Bridge of Sighs.' At a proper distance the illusion of this view is absolutely startling, and one who can recognize its local fidelity feels a thrill of solemn delight, such as once transported him when gazing from the Piazza San Marco upon the heavens thus illumined. Critics objected that the pig- ments were laid on too heavily, but none looked upon the picture unmoved, and not a few acknowledged that it was the best southern moonlight that they had ever seen upon canvas. This picture was the result of Mr. Brown's early study ; it represented earnest work and high-toned sentiment ; but he did not pause in his pursuit of artistic knowledge on the achievement of one triumph, for his ambition admitted of no middle ground: his aim was the highest. In 1858 he received the grand prize of the Art Union of Rome, and in 1860, returning to the United States, settled for a time in New York, hav- ing brought with him a large number of drawings and studies, besides several finished pictures, all of which were warmly praised by both artists and critics. The cpiestion is often asked how Mr. Brown produces the excpiisite atmos- pheric effects for which his canvases are so famous; but it is a secret that belongs to the artist, and one which he cannot himself solve. We often hear of the method of this or that artist — how this one glazes and that one scum- bles ; but it does not reveal the secret of the cunning touch, nor of the senti- ment which inspires each stroke of the brush. Hawthorne, in his 'Marble «Q o I w -s ■TAMES IT. BEARD. 1]3 Faun,' says that Mr. Brown is 'an artist who has studied Nature with such tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him t<> reproduce her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth, and yet are but the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the painter's insight, and inter- preted for us by his skill. By his magic the moon throws her light far out of the picture, and the crimson of the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face.' " Among Mr. Brown's patrons are the Prince of Wales; the Prince Borghese, of Rome ; Lady Cremorne, of London ; ex-Governors John A. Dix, Rodman, and Fairbanks; the late A. T. Stewart, of New York, and Alvin Adams, of Boston ; and Samuel C. Hooper and T. G. Appleton, of the latter city. Mr. George L. Clough, of Boston, owns his "Lake of Nemi." This work, and " The Temple of Peace," are beautiful and representative. The well-known painter of domestic animals, Mr. James H. Beard, was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1814. His father became a farmer in Paines- ville, Ohio, and died when James was eleven years old. A traveling portrait- painter arrived in that village, and inspired the boy with visions of being an artist. When the traveler, who had chaiged the inhabitants from ten to fif- teen dollars apiece for pictures of themselves, took his departure, the aspir- ant whom he left behind him entered the same profession, and gained a greater success, because his price for a portrait was not more than five dollars, and in many cases only three. Concerning these early productions, Mr. Beard says, " They were strong likenesses, but not particularly flattering." As orders increased, the charges also became larger : for a portrait with a hand in it — the hand usually resting quietly on the back of a chair, and holding a book, inscribed in yellow letters on the back, " Watts's Hymns " — he asked fifteen dollars, the highest known price in that region for such works. The horizon of Painesville in the backwoods was really as wide as that of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, whither, in his seventeenth year, Mr. Beard went in search of customers, but its area was less promising. Pittsburg, however, did not meet the expectations of the young artist. Its people, it seemed to him, did not care for art. Like Theodore Thomas, he journeyed to Cincinnati, | 14 AMERICAN PAINTERS. with this difference — the musician had money enough to pay for transporta- tion, the painter was compelled to work his passage. The Cincinnati Com- mercial recently proposed to take the New York Philharmonic Society, as well as the conductor of that organization. " We have plenty of room in the settin' sun,'' it said ; "the society can grow up with the country. Send it on." Xo such enthusiasm greeted the Ohioati on his return to the State where his boyhood had been spent. The country had not yet grown up to him. He traveled from place to place on the Ohio River ; but finally, about the year 1835, retraced his steps to Cincinnati, " desperate," he says, " and determined to find work of some sort." In one of his rambles (narrates a biographer in Appletons' Art Journal) "he passed a chair-maker's shop, and, going back, asked for a job of chair-painting. He asked for that kind of work, as he con- sidered it in his line. He felt that, although he was a poor portrait-painter, he might make a fair chair-painter. On asking for work, the ' boss ' said he wanted ' a grounder,' and questioned young Beard in regard to his experience. He answered, although 'a grounder' was Greek to him, that he was fully competent, and was engaged on trial, to begin as l a grounder ' the next morn- ing. His first business now was to find out the rudiments of his new profes- sion by actual observation. To do this, he at once took a seat in the shop, and closely watched the ' grounder ' as he worked, and by night had mastered the theory of the work. When he went to his boarding-house, however, he says, to perfect himself in the practice of swinging the brush, he secured an old duster, and went to work at a chair. His room-mate thought he was crazy, but he persevered, and in a few hours made up his mind that he had at least learned the rudiments of the trade. The next morning he went to the shop, and astonished his boss by the speed with which he worked. He remained in this shop several months, and earned a dollar and a half a day, which was good pay at that time. He was very economical, and with his sav- ings bought a new set of artist's materials, new clothing, and, what was his chief pride at the time, a new cloth cloak with a velvet collar." Throwing over his shoulders the new cloth coat with a velvet collar, he set out a second time for Pittsburg. Why should not Pittsburg serve him as well, at least, as Cincinnati had done? On his first visit to each city the reception had been alike unpropitious. For some reason, however, Pittsburg OS JAMES IT. BEARD. 115 again refused to respond. He left it for Louisville, Kentucky ; lie left Louis- ville for New Orleans ; lie left New Orleans for his old home in Cincinnati ; and, after spending several years, and painting the portraits of General Har- rison, President Taylor, Henry Clay, and other notable citizens, he left Cincin- nati in 1846 for New York. He became one of the founders of the Century Club, and received from Mr. George W. Austin seven hundred and fifty dol- lars for his picture, "The North Carolina Emigrants" — at that time the largest sum of money ever paid for an American painting. There was something in Cincinnati that secured his allegiance to that city. He returned there in a few years, bringing with him an honorary degree from the National Academy of Design. "The Alexander Stock-Farm" was painted in 1867; and Mr. Beard's first dog-picture — he has since produced many such pictures — soon afterward. It is entitled " The Poor Relations." In 1870 Mr. Beard changed his residence to New York City, and began to paint the series of representa- tions of dogs and cats which have made his name known in almost every city in the Union. With some persons the interest of dogs and cats depends upon the sup- posed resemblance between the moral qualities of these creatures and of human beings ; and the Rev. J. G. Wood, whose book, entitled " Man and Animals, here and hereafter," is an elaborate and curious attempt to prove that animals have souls, may be considered as their representative. These persons see in their favorite beasts the reflex of themselves ; and the most of them like dogs better than cats because they regard the latter to be less human than the former. Even in the domain of art-criticism this dogma has exerted an influence ; Mr. Bellars, for example, in his recent pleasant if not very thorough disquisition on " The Fine Arts and their Uses," gravely asserts that " animals may stir our feelings, not by physical pei'fections only, but also by moral qualities, which, in a higher development, lie at the root of our own essential being." That is to say, we sympathize with these creatures partly because they are made in our own moral image. It is natural to suppose that an animal-painter, who held such views, would be tempted to magnify the resemblances which he believed to exist, and to give us, in his delineations of dogs and cats, horses, and wild beasts, imperfect reproductions of hu- man expressions and attitudes. In the Academy Exhibition of 1878 in 28 1 1 Q A U ER1 C A A PAINTERS. New York, Mr. Beard was represented by a picture of two dogs, which he called " Don Quixote and Sancho Panza," and into the faces of which he had endeavored to convey some of the more striking intellectual and moral traits of those Spanish heroes. The name that he applied to this canvas prob- ably emphasizes his views on the subject ; but his previous works were suffi- cient to show what those views are. In Mr. Beard's eyes the true value of dogs and cats to an artist is their human possibilities. He likes to paint these potentialities. He looks upon animals, doubtless, with a reverential affection akin to that of the Rev. J. G. Wood, and he deals with them with as lively and absorbing an interest as does Mr. J. G. Brown with his groups of boot- blacks and other street Arabs. He discerns in them the moral qualities "which lie at the root of our own essential being;" and, so far as cats and dogs are concerned, his opinions and experiences can perhaps best be described by those of a modern essayist, who says : " Cats and dogs are, of course, the most satisfactory pets that can be found under ordinary circumstances, and, with all deference to those who admire the indepen- dence and indifference to human affairs of the cat-nature, we are inclined to think that the nearer a cat approaches to the dog's nature the more agreeable it is as a friend. For instance, a cat which, like one we have known, will walk up and down a terrace outside a country-house with an inmate of the house while he smokes, is obviously a more convenient acquaintance than one that will merely accept the homage of a crowd of admirers with lazy content. Cats, however, are frequently unjustly accused of indifference and absence of affection. Among the better kind of them, it is not so much that they have no affection as that they disdain to show it except on rare occasions. In cases of illness they have been known to wait for hours outside the sufferer's room " (with somewhat of the emotions of the dog-mourners in the picture by Mr. Beard which we have engraved), " and to refuse all comfort until they are admitted to learn for themselves how things are progressing. No doubt cats are less constant in their friendship than dogs, less ready to make a new acquaintance, and less willing to admit persons outside their own family cir- cle to their friendship. In this matter dogs of any fine intellect are singu- larly gracious. We have the honor of knowing a Skye terrier and a Pomera- nian whose recollection of a former friendship of some mouths is so constant J. APPLETON BROWN. 117 that, no matter whether a day or a year intervene between our meetings, we are always received with expressions of delight, which in both cases are al- most hysterical, and in that of the Pomeranian threaten to bring on a fit." " We have the honor of knowing a Skye terrier," that, we should say, is, as far as it goes, an exact transcript of Mr. Beard's views. There are persons, however, both writers and painters, who recognize in a cat's or dog's nature something distinct and generically different from their own. When writing about the finest of these animals, they take care to de- scribe them as not human, and to draw the lines of definition. When paint- ing them they delineate dog and cat life, dogs' and cats' faces, but disdain even to suggest a human relationship. They believe, in the first place, that a beast's nature is essentially different from a man's ; and, in the second place, that to confound the two would be inartistic as well as untrue — inartistic, because in violation of the laws of homogeneity. Within the limits of the beast's na- ture they find ample scope for the constructive imagination ; within those limits they are able to disport themselves to the fullness of their desire. In the mingling, blending, or composing, of the two natures, they detect the presence of intellectual weakness and color-blindness; what God has dis- joined they wish no man to put in juxtaposition. " Why," they ask, " should cats and dogs be made to ape the manners of their superiors when their own manners so much better become them and speak for them ? And why need an artist lay himself open to the charge of being incapacitated to discern and to represent the specific nature of a dog? Everything is beautiful in its sea- son, but a man-dog is always unseasonable. Give us the dog as he is," they say ; " he' is a very noble brute ; his character is more varied, subtile, and pleasing, than scores of his so-called betters. Study it well, aud you will see that it is." Mr. Beard indisputably has studied it much, and his pictures are very popular. Mr. J. Appleton Brown was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1844. In 1807 and 1868 he studied with Lambiuet, the French landscape-painter. The year 1874 also he spent in Paris. His works are 118 AMERICAN PAINTERS. landscapes. To the Salon of 1875 he contributed two views of Dives, on the French coast. In the summer of 1878 he exhibited a collection of nineteen of his pictures in Doyle's Gallery in Boston. " A visit to Mr. Appleton Brown's studio,' 1 says a writer in Appletons' Art Journal, " shows us a wall covered with brilliant sketches. He renders his impressions of Nature through great masses of light and shade, rich color, with here and there in significant positions firm and precise outline, or solid, definite drawing. Here are gnarled and bent fruit-trees standing on exposed hill-sides, whose twisted branches are in one portion strongly indicated, and in another vanishing into the misty sil- houette of the tree. You see a stunted greensward in the same picture reflect- ing the heat of a summer sky, or the mist and dampness hug the grass where its pale color rises faintly against an old, dark undergrowth at twilight. In one picture Mr. Appleton Brown has put upon his canvas some stray young willows, whose gawky, rambling arms are thrust out at all points and in va- rious directions, with their thin, scant foliage on the tips of the twigs, that look like fingers, suggesting the thought of dryad transformations where the spirit of some poor soul still lingered under its painful body : _j ' Yet latent life through her new branches reigned, Ami long the plant a human heat retained.' " Mr. Appleton Brown has a charming picture called ' Apple-Blossoms,' and in it is shown the same tender love of Nature. Bound young trees, with their outlines melting into a misty atmosphere, appear the young shoots of branches decked with the pure, filmy pink of the delicate flowers. The trunks are not yet old, nor bent, nor moss-grown, but they are the healthy young trees of orchards such as are so often found in sheltered nooks and in the hol- lows of New England pasture-land, where the low granite hills, with no better growth than juniper and thin grass, protect the fruit-trees, and the kitchen- garden with its vegetables, from the piercing and destructive salt-winds of the sea. The ground here is soft, and often through its spongy surface little brooks creep along lazily to find an outlet somewhere, or they lose themselves in the earth. Other pictures are of the pooly salt-meadows near the sea — places so remote from the ocean that the tide never overflows them, except at spring and autumn floods; but the small creeks are flooded in their half-hidden < «? 2 (T -s a «! w 2 S K ^ W 0. ^3 D. "■tt D 5: W *i I Q J. APPLETON BROWN. I I'.i courses twice a day from the ocean, and long, coarse marsh-grass draggles its heads in the black muck when the creek is empty. '' But it is not alone in these nooks and corners about Newburyport that Mr. Appleton Brown finds his inspiration, for two or three large canvases arc filled by scenes of wild ocean-storms. Darkness, and clouds, and wind, drive in with the great, green waves that come up and break over rock and sand. He has caught the cold, green color of the sea ; but it is not for its beauty as a pigment that his color impresses the imagination most powerfully, fine though the hues, but the tints are an expression of the weight, the density, and the mass, of the water — of the sea in its great throes of fury. Mr. Appleton Brown is a true artist in spirit, and in his painting is entirely separate from the worldly considerations of what subjects will be popular or will take the market. His pictures are a matter of conscience with him, and, though he has a fine and true eye for color, he uses it always, as in the sea-waves we have described, not for its sensuous charm, nor yet as a showy palette, but each tint of blue or white, green or scarlet, is so important on his canvas to carry out his ideas and purposes, that even where we feel the richness and harmony of his tones, the amateur cannot fail to recognize them as used to carry out a thought or a suggestion, and not, as is too often the case with painters, being laid on from vain display, or from the fascination of their sensuous beauty. Mannerism is totally absent from his work ; and whether he draws the details of a tree with pre-Raphaelite care, or slurs into shapeless masses the paint upon his canvas, it is always the scene that is in his mind he endeavors to evolve, and not to make a pedantic display of his own knowledge of painting. His aims as a painter have already met with a responsive symjjathy from some of the most cultivated and appreciative persons in his neighborhood. His first considerable commission was from Mr. Thomas G. Appleton, so widely known from his wit, his writings, and his love of art. Mr. Martin Brimmer, one of the great, energetic lovers and promoters of painting in the United States, and a gentleman of the highest education and culture, is also the owner of a fine picture by Mr. Appleton Brown; while Ernest Longfellow, the artist, and a son of the poet, also possesses a picture of his." Though Mr. Appleton Brown studied with Lambinet, his works betray the influence of Corot. Some of his drawings in black-and-white are exceedingly 29 220 AMERICAN PAINTERS. impressive, rich in the fleeting beauties of light and air, and full of tenderness and sweet mystery. A series of them will be published in Appletons' Art Journal for 1879. Professor Barrett, in his lectures before the London Insti- tute, has shown the existence of an analogy between color and music — a rela- tionship between the vibrating pitch of color and the vibrating pitch of sound. Certainly there is color in these sketches made with the crayon ; perhaps it is not stretching language too far to say that there is music in them. Mr. Francis Hopkinson Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 23d of October, 1838. He belongs to a family of artists. His great-grandfa- ther, Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was an amateur in water-colors; his grandfather, Judge Joseph Hopkinson, was the first President of the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and also an ama- teur painter ; and his father, though not an artist, was at least the cause of one. When a boy, Mr. Smith began to paint, and he has been painting more or less ever since, whenever he has had the leisure to do so. At the age of sixteen years he went into business, but since that time it has been his habit to devote to the fine arts two days in every week, and two summer months in every year. He has made thousands of sketches and studies in the open air, the greater number of them in charcoal, a material for which he has an espe- cial fondness. His well-known " Franconia Notch," a wilderness of scenery — rocks ]>iled up among fallen timber in early morning — was originally a char- coal-sketch. His " Under the Leaves," an effect of light streaming along and above a wood-path under the trees, is owned by Mr. W. D. Sloaue, of New York City. He was an early member of the American Water-Color Society, and is now its treasurer. He is a member of the Etching Club, and was a member of various important committees during the Loan Exhibition of the Society of Decorative Art in the National Academy of Design in 1877. To the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia Mr. Smith sent a large water- color drawing entitled "In the Darkling Wood, amid the Cool and Silence," which \v,is bought by a gentleman of Chicago. His " Cool Spot " in the forest —a brook winding out and spreading itself into a pool in which are the reflec- tions of trees and rocks — is in the gallery of Mr. John Jacob Astor, of New ■■■|^MHHHHB^nHHMg|H § s wHmmKHm ■ '■■■ mk FR A N C I S II <> P K I .V N (i N S U I Tit. 121 York City. His "Lonely Road," a path loading through the woods, the u hole very gray-toned, belongs to Mr. George C. Clark. Another work of his is "The Old Smithy," on a hot August morning, in a misty, hazy atmosphere. A reviewer of the American Water-Color Society's exhibition in 1877 in Apple- tons' Art Journal says: "Mr. Hopkinson Smith is seen at his strongest in charcoal, in which he excels, but his 'Looking seaward' is a well-balanced composition, and not devoid of landscape meaning, with perchance a slighl want of aerial feeling. His ' Old Smithy' is likewise a good example, vigor- ous, broad, and picturesque, although the artist runs the risk of diffusiveness by working over such large surfaces. Many of the drawings in the exhibition are sweet and pleasant, but simply deficient in the main requisites of works of art and faltering in execution. This does not apply to Mr. Hopkinson Smith's charcoals, which are admirable — the more so that their artist ranks as an ama- teur — and assert their power and equality even from the altitude to which most of them have been raised. They display on Mr. Smith's part a sincere feeling for Nature and a comprehension of variety in landscape, which in other parts of the exhibition is not seldom conspicuous by its absence. ' Bald- Mountain Rocks,' 'A Mountain Pasture,' and 'Under the Leaves,' are all dis- tinct in character. The first mentioned of these is the most complete as a com- position by reason of its simplicity ; the second named has a deficiency of color, which suggests winter ; and the latter might be improved by a closer study of tree-form. It is easy, however, to discover flaws, and Mr. Smith's love for art will probably lead him onward." Mr. Smith is not only seen at his strongest in charcoal, but he prefers char- coal to lead, to oils, or to water-colors. Doubtless he woidd not go so far as to call color in a picture a defect and a hinderance, as the elder Kaulbach calls it ; but he certainly would assent heartily to the most appreciative esti- mates of landscape-drawing in charcoal — to this estimate, for example : " The process possesses precious advantages for the skilled draughtsman. It com- bines some of the characteristics of painting with all those proper to drawing with chalk, great felicity, richness of color, and unusual freedom. Besides these merits, passage aufumin has something which may, for want of a better name, be called pathetic in the sobriety, breadth, and severity, of its peculiar aspect. Sentiment is not, of course, to be had ready made by this process^ 1-2-2 A M E RIGAN rAI N T E /.' S . but every one familiar with its results will admit that it lends itself to pathetic touches, and assists in their expression ; that its deep shadows are rich and soft as velvet, and its high and atmospheric lights aerial and translucent as a summer cloud." Mr. Thomas Morax was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, on the 12th of January, 1837. In his seventh year he came to this country with his parents, and in his eighteenth year was apprenticed to a wood-engraver in Philadelphia. He studied water-color art without a teacher, and made some successful pictures. His first oil-painting was a subject from Shelley's poem •• Alastor." In 1862 he visited England, and paid especial attention to Tur- ner's landscapes ; in 1866 he again went to England, and gave his time to the old masters in the English galleries, and in France and Italy. The next year he returned to America, and in 1871 accompanied Professor Hayden's explor- ing expedition to the Yellowstone River, where he made the sketches which he afterward used in painting his celebrated " Grand Canon of the Yellow- stone " — a work for which the United States Government paid him ten thou- sand dollars. Of Major J. W. Powell's expedition to the canon of the Colo- rado he was a member in 1873 ; and his picture of the " Canon of the Colora- do " also was purchased by the Government for ten thousand dollars. The next year he painted his " Mountain of the Holy Cross," from original studies. Other works of his are " The Last Arrow," " The Ripening of the Leaf," " Dreamland," " The Groves were God's First Temples," " The Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior," " The Conemaugh in Autumn," " The First Ship," " The Flight into Egypt," "The Remorse of Cain," "The Children of the Mountain," " The Track of the Storm," and " The Pons de Leon, Florida," which is in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. His wife is also an accomplished artist. A critic who saw Mr. Moran's " Mountain of the Holy Cross " during its exhibition in New York in April, 1875, wrote concerning it as follows: "To tin' technical merits of Mr. Moran's work the highest praise may be awarded. The foreground is charmingly painted, the color is unusually pure and truth- ful, the rocks have all the solidity of Nature, the foliage is crisp and well defined, and there is motion in the water. At the same time, the aerial per- A GLIMPSE OF FRANCONIA NOTCH, NEW HAMPSHIRE. From a Painting by Francis Hopkinson Smith. \>. 122. THOMAS MORAN. 123 spective has been managed with so much skill that the spectator really feels as if the grand mountain, on which shines the glittering cross, were mam miles away. In its general treatment, ' The Mountain of the Holy Cross ' reminds us strongly of the studies of Calame, that almost unrivaled painter of wild mountain-scenery, though at the same time we fully recognize the fact that Mr. Moran's work bears the unmistakable stamp of originality, and we think that it will unquestionably take rank as one of the finest examples of American landscape-art that has yet been produced. Mr. Moran may well be proud of a work exhibiting so much technical skill, combined with such noble simplicity and even severity of treatment ; and all who take an interest in the progress of American art must gratefully recognize the fact that at last we have among us an artist eminently capable of interpreting the sentiment of our wilder mountain-scenery in a style commensurate with its grandeur and beauty." This picture is in the gallery of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Moran is a member of the Society of American Artists. He is extremely felicitous in selecting his subjects, and in bringing them within the conditions of pictorial treatment ; he has a fine sense of the mysterious world of light and shade, and of the color and the glory of Nature; and he has studied Turner probably longer and more faithfully than any other American artist. In a conversation with the present writer he said : " Turner is a great artist, but he is not understood, because both painters and the public look upon his pictures as transcriptions of Nature. He certainly did not so regard them. All that he asked of a scene was simply how good a medium it was for making a picture ; he cared nothing for the scene itself. Literally speaking, his landscapes are false ; but they contain his impressions of Nature, and so many natural characteristics as were necessary adequately to convey that impression to others. The public does not estimate the quality of his work by his best paintings, but by his latest and crazier ones, in which real- ism is entirely thrown overboard. ' The Fighting Temeraire,' for example, which even Ruskin praises so extravagantly, is the most inharmonious, crude, and disagreeable, of all his productions. Its merit lies only in its plan and composition. I think that one of his best pictures is the ' Crossing the Brook,' in the London National Gallery ; it is simple, quiet, gray in color ; the harmo- nies of its grays are wonderful. It is perhaps the most suggestive of Claude 30 124 AMERICAN PAINTERS. of all his canvases. His aim is parallel with the greatest poets who deal not with literalism or naturalism, and whose excellence cannot be tested by such a standard. He tries to combine the most beautiful natural forms and the most beautiful natural colors, irrespective of the particular place he is pre- senting. He generalizes Nature always ; and so intense was his admiration for color that everything else was subservient to that. He would falsify the color of any object in his picture in order to produce what he considered to be an harmonious whole. In other words, he sacrificed the literal truth of the parts to the higher truth of the whole. And he was right. Art is not Nature ; an aggregation of ten thousand facts may add nothing to a picture, but be rather the destruction of it. The literal truth counts for nothing ; it is within the grasp of any one who has had an ordinary art-education. The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a pict- ure. What a picture is, I cannot define any more than I can define poetry. We know a poem when we read it, and we know a picture when we see it ; but the latter is even less capable of definition than the former. " My pictures vary so much that even artists who are good judges do not recognize them from year to year. Two years ago I sent to the National Academy Exhibition some gray pictures, altogether unlike my previous work. My life, so far, has been a series of experiments, and, I suppose, will be until I die. I never painted a picture that was not the representation of a distinct impression from Nature. It seems to me that the bane of American art is that our artists paint for money, and repeat themselves, so that in many instances you can tell the parentage of a picture the moment you look at it. It is not true that the public require such a repetition on the part of the artist. Men who are constantly rehashing themselves do so from sheer ina- bility to do otherwise. There is a lack of that genuine enthusiasm among our artists without which no great work can be produced. I believe that an artist's personal characteristics may be told from his pictures. Who wouldn't know, for example, that Frederick E. Church is a man of refinement? His works are full of refinement — refinement in touch, delicacy of form, delicacy of color. If a man's studio is simply a manufactory of paintings, which shall tickle the ignorant in art ; if he is continually repeating himself in order to sell his pictures more rapidly or easily, this fact will convey itself to every if Mi $ THOMAS MORAN. 125 intelligent mind. The pleasure a man feels will go into his work, and he can- not have pleasure in being a mere copyist of himself — in producing paintings which are not the offspring of his own fresh and glowing impressions of Nature. At the present time there is a revival in American art. Our young men who have been studying in Europe are fully as accomplished as their masters. They understand the technique of their art just as well. It now remains for them to show whether or not they possess invention, originality, the poetic impulse, the qualities which constitute a painter. I myself think they are a most hopeful lot. Some of them make a mistake, I think, in set- ting up a living artist for a model, and imitating him, when only time can test his true value. The grand old painters, whose worth the centuries have attested, are overlooked. The fountain-head of inspiration is ignored. Not only is it a modern man that is set up, but often a second or third rate mod- ei'n man. The Shakespeares, the Dantes, and the Homers of art are forgotten. Of course, Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, did not treat modern themes, and therefore in certain respects are not so serviceable as the present celeb- rities in Paris and Munich ; but all the essential principles of art are immor- tal : the subject is unimportant, the application of those principles is univer- sal ; the same qualities that made their possessors famous in the days of the Renaissance are of paramount importance now. I hold that modern art is not equal to the ancient. " I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic ; all my tendencies are toward idealization. Of course, all art must come through Nature : I do not mean to depreciate Nature or natural- ism ; but I believe that a place, as a place, has no value in itself for the artist only so far as it furnishes the material from which to construct a picture. To- pography in art is valueless. The motive or incentive of my ' Grand Canon of the Yellowstone' was the gorgeous display of color that impressed itself upon me. Probably no scenery in the world presents such a combination. The forms are extremely wonderful and pictorial, and, while I desired to tell truly of Nature, I did not wish to realize the scene literally, but to preserve and to convey its true impression. Every form introduced into the picture is within view from a given point, but the relations of the separate parts to one another are not always preserved. For instance, the precipitous rocks ou the 126 AMERICAN PAINTERS. right were really at my "back when I stood at that point, yet in their present position they are strictly true to pictorial Nature ; and so correct is the whole representation that every member of the expedition with which I was con- nected declared, when he saw the painting, tLat he knew the exact spot which bad been reproduced. My aim was to bring before the public the character of that region. The rocks in the foreground are so carefully drawn that a geologist could determine their precise nature. I treated them so in order to serve my purpose. In another work, ' The Mountain of the Holy Cross,' the foreground is intensely realistic also : its granite rocks are realized to the far- thest point that I could carry them ; and the idealization of the scene consists in the combination and arrangement of the various objects in it. At the same time, the combination is based upon the characteristics of the place. My pur- pose was to convey a true impression of the region ; and as for the elaborated rocks, I elaborated them out of pure love for rocks. I have studied rocks carefully, and I like to represent them." Concerning certain living European artists, Mr. Moran said : " Andreas Achenbach lacks poetry, but he is great in realizing phases of Nature. He is not idealistic at all. Gerome I admire for his conception of his subject, and for his extreme refinement and beauty of drawing. He is infinitely the superior of Meissonier. Meissonier's art is of a lower type, in the sense that a pastoral poem is lower than an epic. Intellectually, emotionally, poetically, Gerome is away in advance of Meissonier. The latter's merits are chiefly dependent upon his technique, and are largely of a mechanical order. In Gerorne's works you lose sight of his methods, and become interested in his subjects and in the people who make them up. Gerome is an idealist ; he uses realistic material, and combines it ideally. Meissonier, on the other hand, is a realist. In mechanical skill he is Gerome's superior ; but Gerome does not try to reach the point that Meissonier does. If he carried technical qualities so far he would injure his pictures. " Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, and Daubigny, are all men of one idea. Diaz, for example, paints forever the forest of Fontainebleau. He is a perpetual copyist of himself. Now, we don't care to live on one dish all our lives. No artist is great who has made a reputation on one idea — and Corot's idea was a very in- definite one at that. I have but a small opinion of his large ' Orphee,' recently SOLITUDE. From a Painting by Thomas Moron. p. 127. THOMAS MOHAN. 127 iii the Cottier Collection. The work is bad in drawing — it is not drawing at all — and certainly it cannot be called color. It has some tone, to be sine, jusl as black-and-white may have tone ; but there is in it no quality that demanded a canvas of that size. It is a small conception of the subject expended on a very large surface. A picture ten inches by twelve would have given all thai this picture contains probably better than a larger one. Indeed, French art, in my opinion, scarcely rises to the dignity of landscape — a swamp and a tree constitute its sum total. It is more limited in range than the landscape-art of any other country. " I am not an admirer of Millet. His pictures are coarse and vulgar in character ; they are repulsive. He shows us only the ignorant and debased peasant ; he suggests nothing noble or high, nothing that is not degraded. His peasants are very little above animals ; they do not look capable of educa- tion, or of being other than what he has made them. In fact, I think he libels the French peasantry. Jules Breton, on the contrary, impresses them with a mentality and vigor that are entirely wanting in Millet's representations, and he is superior to Millet in technique. He is an excellent painter, and, so far as he introduces into his peasants the elements of possible progress, and gives them a character above their station, he is ideal. Gabriel Max repeats himself a little too much to be always interesting. Piloty is a very fine painter, rather Aca- demic, perhaps ; but this is a good failing, if a failing at all — an error that leans to the right side. He is an estimable composer. Carl Hubner is a man of very moderate abilities ; a pretty skillful painter, but his subjects and the character indicated in them are of a low order. No refined connoisseur can tolerate pictures of this kind. Detaille is a thorough artist ; he infuses a wonderful amount of character into his works. His soldiers are distinct and masterly types. Meyer von Bremen is too small to express an opinion upon. I place Verboeckhoven substantially in the same category. Bouguereau is a very fine painter — a little sentimental in contradistinction to dealing in sen- timent — and lacks vigor, but his works are certainly of a very unobjection- able kind. Many of his earlier pictures, which are his best, are very beau- tiful from every point of view. The same is true of Merle. Troyon's paint- ings are rather coarse in character, though always fresh in color, while not strictly pictures of color. He uses very few and simple pigments, and hence 31 128 A M E Rjc A -V PAINTER S. obtains tonality with ease. I shouldn't call him a colorist, by any means. Van Marcke is a better artist ; his imagination is more lively and more va- ried. Modern English landscape-art is wanting in great names. Leighton and Poynter in figures are admirable." The ancestors of Mr. Ashee Brown Durand, who are said to have been of Huguenot origin, came to this country in 1680. Two brothers, one of them a surgeon, settled in Connecticut. Samuel Durand, the grandfather of the artist, established himself in what is now South Orange Township, in New Jersey, in a village named Jefferson. His son, John Durand, the father of the artist, was an ingenious mechanician, and, though a farmer, coidd repair his neighbors' watches. The mother of the artist was the daughter of a Hoi- lander. She had eleven children, of whom Asher Brown Durand, born on the 21st of August, 1796, was the eighth. In his boyhood he used to beat out copper cents in order to get plates on which he could make engravings, the village blacksmith occasionally lending a helping hand. A Frenchman, living at Elizabethtown, near by, having seen the young engraver's efforts, lent him one day a snuff-box, on which was a miniature portrait, in order that he might make a copy of it. Mr. Smith, a lawyer, took him to New York to call on a Mr. Leney, an engraver, who offered to admit the youth into the mysteries of his craft for the modest sum of one thousand dollars. Not long afterward an engraver in Newark, New Jersey, took him as an apprentice, and saw him excelling his new master. An engraving of an old beggar, from a head painted by Waldo and Jewitt, attracted the attention of Colonel Trumbull, and brought from that gentleman an order for an engraving of his painting, "The Declaration of Independence." The price named was three thousand dollars ; the time consumed was six years ; the best result was the establishment of Durand's reputation. Orders for prints came in abundance, and the success- ful artist proceeded to engrave original portraits of celebrated clergymen — of Romeyn, Macleod, Boudinot, Summerfield, and others. To the National Por- trait Gallery he made important contributions. He furnished plates annually to the Talisman. But perhaps his most notable achievements with the burin were the celebrated ideal figures, "Musidora" and "Ariadne," which he en- BROOK, AND VISTA IN THE MOUNTAINS. From a Painting by Asher Brown Durand. p. 129. AS HER BROWN BUR AND. 129 graved from designs of his own, and in which his success in the representation of flesh was almost marvelous. As early as the year 1830 Mr. Durand had turned his attention to paint- ing, and in 1840 he went to Europe to prosecute his studies in that direction, staid a year, and made copies of some Titians and Rembrandts. On his re- turn, his first preference was for historical figure-painting, but the general absence of models, costumes, and other facilities, having discouraged him, he resolved to try himself in portrait-painting — not, however, until he had pro- duced his " Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant," now in the New York Historical Society's gallery, and other works. His portraits became very popular, and he received orders sufficient to have occupied all his available time. He was on the road to wealth. He found that every American, who had a hundred dollars to spare for pictures, wished to get portraits of a wife and child. But, as he had abandoned the burin for the brush because he desired larger artistic liberty and opportunity, so, for the same reason, he discarded the lucrative painting of portraits for the painting of landscapes. He had already produced verisimilitudes in oil of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, James Madi- son, Edward Everett, William Cullen Bryant, and Luman Reed, who was one of his earliest and most generous patrons, and had been a faithful friend to Cole and Mount. " Did you ever find a man," once asked Mount of Durand, " who entered into your feelings as Mr. Reed does ? " The pictures of Adams and Madison are hanging in the rooms of the Century Club of New York City. The mention of Mr. Bryant's name suggests the fact of a resemblance between the aims and the methods of Mr. Durand and those of the author of " Thanatopsis." The works of each are replete with American woodland feeling, which tells not only of the observant eye, but also of the sensitive soul. They are the outcome of personal communion with Nature, the expres- sion of the man's sentiments in the presence of the stillness and the solitude of insensate things. They are poetry " inspired by love and delight in that benignant, bounteous, and beauteous Nature which, all over the earth, repays with a heavenly happiness the grateful worship of her children." Mr. Du- rand's " In the Woods," owned by Mrs. Jonathan Sturgis, of New York, and his " Primeval Forest," in the gallery of Mrs. E. D. Nelson, of the same city, ^30 AMERICAN PAINTERS. are " Forest Hymns." They are not views or landscapes in the ordinary sense of those words. Even his studies in the White Mountains, in the Cats- kills, in the Adirondack^, on the Hudson River, and on Lake George, are not actual representations, but compositions arranged and selected so as to pro- duce special impressions. " Where did you get that ? " asked a fellow-artist one day, while looking at an elaborate study in Mr. Durand's collection ; " I never saw that place.' 1 Of course, he had never seen it before. It had been made to order. Some of Mr. Durand's pictures are considered to be too green in tone ; but the painter of them replies that in our American landscapes green predominates : our mountains are covered with trees, while in Europe the peaks and crests are often all rock. Mr. Durand has long had great pleasure in the appreciation and friendship of his brother-artists. When he was seventy-six years old, a number of these gentlemen and their wives planned a surprise-party at his home in South Orange, New Jersey. The intention was to have a picnic in the woods, but when the day arrived — the 8th of June, 1872 — the rain was falling fast, and they set their table in the wide piazza of the charming house. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Jervis McEntee, Mr. Sanford R Gifford, Mr. George H. Hall, Mr. and Mrs. William Hart, Mr. and Mrs. David Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Eastman Johnson, Mr. Launt Thompson, Mr. J. Q. A. Ward, Mi - . J. Volmer- ing, Mr. J. R. Brevoort, Mr. J. M. Falconer, Mr. W. J. Hays, Mr. R, W. Hub- bard, Mr. J. F. Kensett, Mr. and Mrs. E. D. Palmer, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hicks, Mr. and Mrs. Worthington Whittredge, Mr. William Page, Miss Bas- comb, and several other ladies. Mr. William Cullen Bryant also was present, and made one of his felicitous speeches. Other speakers were Messrs. Palmer, Gifford, E. Johnson, Hicks, McEntee, Kensett, Page, Falconer, Brevoort, and F. B. Mayer, who tendered the congratulations and best wishes of the com- pany to the venerable artist. Of sports of various sorts there was an abun- dance. The occasion was one that will not soon be forgotten by the persons who brought it into existence. No other American painter, perhaps, has ever been the recipient of such a token of affection and esteem. Twenty-five years ago Mr. Durand wrote a series of letters to a young landscape-painter, and published them in The Crayon, an art journal, owned by his sun, Mr. John Durand. The following extracts from those letters are Id J m < <-> U) D s? < ■*• u •^ >■=> I H s a h £ s * m bn X Z .J < < 01 > Z 1 z D V) ASHER BROWN DURAND. 131 competent representatives of his views on the functions of art: "I maintain that all art is unworthy and vicious which is at variance with truth, and th.u that only is worthy and elevated which impresses us with the same feelings and emotions that we experience in the presence of the reality. True art teaches the use of the embellishments which Nature herself furnishes ; it never creates them. All the fascination of treatment in light and dark and color are seen in Nature ; they are the luxuries of her storehouse, and must be used with intelligence and discrimination to be wholesome and invigorat- ing. If abused and adulterated by the poisons of conventionalism, the result will be the corruption of veneration for and faith in the simple truths of Na- ture, which constitute the true religion of art, and the only safeguard against the inroads of heretical conventionalism. If you should ask me to define conventionalism, I should say that it is the substitution of an easily-expressed falsehood for a difficult truth. But why discuss this point ? Is it not a tru- ism admitted by all ? Far from it. Or, if it be admitted as a principle, it is constantly violated by the artist in his practice, and this violation sanctioned by the learned critic and connoisseur. The fresh green of summer must be muddled with brown ; the pure blue of the clear sky, and the palpitating azure of distant mountains, deadened with lifeless gray ; while the gray, unsheltered rocks must be warmed up and clothed with the lichens of their forest brethren — tricks of impasto or transparency without character ; vacant breadth and unmitigated darkness ; fine qualities of color without local mean- ing, and many other perversions of truth, are made objects of artistic study to the death of all true feeling for art — and all this under the name of improve- ments on Nature. To obtain truthfulness is so much more difficult than to obtain the power of telling facile falsehoods, that one need not wonder that some delusive substitute holds the place which Nature should hold in the artist's mind. " Every experienced artist knows that it is difficult to see Nature truly ; that for this end long practice is necessary. We see yet perceive not, and it becomes necessary to cultivate our perception so as to comprehend the essence of the object seen. The poet sees in Nature more than mei'e matter-of-fact, yet he does not see more than is there, nor what another may not see when he points it out. His is only a more perfect exercise of perception, just as the 32 132 AMERICAN PAINTERS. drapery of a fine statue is seen by the common eye and pronounced beautiful, and by the enlightened observer who also pronounces it beautiful ; but the one ascribes the beauty to the graceful folding, the other to its expression of the figure beneath, while neither sees more nor less in quantity than the other, but with unequal degrees of completeness in perception. Now, the highest beauty of this drapery consists in the perfection of its disposition so as best to indicate the beautiful form it clothes, not possessing of itself too much attractiveness, nor losing its value by too strongly defining the figure. And so should we look on external Nature. Why have the creations of Raphael conferred on hint the title of ' divine?' Because he saw through the sensuous veil, and embodied the spiritual beauty with which Nature is animate, and in whose presence the baser ' passions shrink and tremble and are still. 1 "All that has made Claude preeminent is truthfulness of representation in his light, and atmosphere, and moving waters — if other portions of his works were equally true, he would be still greater. And why have the nobler compositions of Gaspar Poussin given him only an inferior rank, unless it is because they lack in corresponding truthfulness ? I might instance hundreds of others, ancient and modern, who owe their reputation to the degree of rep- resentative and imitative truth which distinguishes their works. All the license that the artist can claim or desire is to choose the time and place where Nature displays her chief perfections, whether of beauty or majesty repose or action. There is not a tint of color, nor phase of light and dark, nor force nor delicacy, nor gradation nor contrast, nor any charm that the most inventive imagination ever employed, or conceived worthy to be regarded as beautiful, or as in any other respect fitting to the aim of art, that is not to be seen in Nature, more beautiful and more fitting than art has ever realized or ever can. Pictures abound which display the complete mastery of all the technicalities of art, fascinating by the most dexterous execution and brilliancy of color, yet false to Nature and destitute of all that awakens thought or inter- ests the feelings. " Much has been said by writers on art as well as artists, in disparage- ment of what they call servile imitation of Nature, as unworthy of genius and degrading to art, cramping invention, and fettering the imagination — in short, productive only of mere matter-of-fact works. What is meant by 'servile MORNING. /■>«/« a Fainting by Horace Wolcott Robbins p 188. HORACE WOLCOTT ROBBINS. 133 imitation,' so called, is difficult to understand. If its meaning is limited to that view of realism which accepts commonplace forms and appearances, with- out searching for the ideal of natural beauty, the objections are valid ; but if it comprehends the faithful representation of all that is most beautiful and best fitted for the entire purposes of art, really existing and accessible, and ever waiting to be gathered up by earnest love and untiring labor, then it is an utter fallacy, born of indolence and conceit. It is by reverent attention to the realized forms of Nature alone that art is enabled, by its delegated power, to reproduce some measure of the profound and elevated emotions which the contemplation of the visible works of God awaken." The evening of his life Mr. Durand is passing in his charming country- home, within the shadow of the Orange Mountain, in the presence of all man- ner of comfort and luxury, amid the constant oblations of the fondest and most considerate filial affection, his eye undimmed, his brush still active, his fame secure, his retrospect unperturbed, his prospect sunny as the landscapes that he loves, himself and his surroundings a subject to allure a painter. Whom the gods love do not always die young. Mr. Horace Wolcott Robbins was bom in Mobile, Alabama, on the 21st of October, 1842. His father and mother, who were natives of New England, removed to Baltimore in 1848, and in a few years placed him in Newton University in that city. After taking lessons in drawing of August Wei- denbach, a German landscape-painter, he went to New York and entered the studio of Mr. James M. Hart. In 1863 he was elected a member of the Cen- tury Club, and in 1864 an Associate of the National Academy. In 1865 he visited the island of Jamaica in company with Mr. F. E. Church, and sketched industriously for several months. Then he crossed the Atlantic to England ; spent many weeks in Holland in the presence of the landscapes of Ruysdael, Hobbema, and other masters, and opened a studio in Paris, where he was for- tunate enough to receive some instruction from Rousseau, and to meet Fro- mentin, Diaz, and similarly distinguished men. " It is always a problem," says Mr. Robbins, " to determine how far or how much a favorite painter may be studied. One's temperament, of course, must be taken into consideration. !34 AMERICAN PAINTERS. A mind too easily impressed is with difficulty able to resist the fascinations that beset it, and the result may be a sickly dilution of a great man's manner- ism, without his ability or originality. I have tried to be myself, and to rep- resent Nature as she impresses me. While a firm believer in the doctrine that an artist must be an interpreter of Nature, I believe also that long years of close study of facts and details, of careful drawing and local coloring, are requisite to accomplish this successfully. It is the well-trained artist alone who is competent to give his ' impressions ' or ' renderings ' of Nature's moods, to paint ' broadly ' and ' suggestively ; ' and, as a matter of fact, it has been observed that good artists paint more broadly as they get older. There is a facility that is fatal to permanent success in art — that makes close study seem torture and improvement impossible. The world appears to forget that even men like Corot, whose work is characterized by breadth and freedom, did, in the earlier period of their lives, make laborious and faithful transcriptions from Nature. Having for years studied her anatomy, her material form and parts, they became able, later in life, to give original expression to her subtile moods and phases." In 1866 Mr. Robbins sketched in Switzerland, and again took a studio in Paris. The next year was the year of the great International Exhibition in that city — a season of unusual opportunities, which he proceeded to make the most of. He returned to New York in the autumn of 1867, and has painted seven or eight landscapes annually ever since. His summers have been passed principally in the Farmington Valley, in Connecticut, where he found the materials for his "Roadside Elms " and "Mount Philip," which were exhibited in the Goupil Gallery in New York. His views in Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Jamaica, Germany, France, and Switzerland, embrace land- scapes of widely-varied beauty. Mr. Robbins is the Secretary of the Artists' Fund Society, and the Treas- urer of the American Water-Color Society. To the exhibition of the latter organization in 1878 he contributed a picturesque old New England home- stead at Simsbury, Connecticut, and to the National Academy Exhibition in the same year a large picture of " Harbor Islands, Lake George." These works represented him also in the Paris Exhibition of 1878, soon after his election as an Academician. He is a member of the New York Etching Club. THE INDIAN CHIEF. From a Painting by Joseph Rusting Meeker. p. 18B. JOSEPH RUSLING MEEKER. 135 Messrs. W. S. G. Baker, William Keyser, and George H. Small, of Baltimore, own some of his important landscapes. The gallery of Mrs. Attwood, <>f Pougbkeepsie, contains bis " Roadside Elms." Messrs. George D. Pbelps, Jacob Vanderpoel, D. C. Blodgett, and F. N. Otis, of New York, have boughl other of his paintings. The " Aiguille du Midi," once in the Goupil Gallery, is now in the collection of Mr. Trevor, of Irvington, New York, and the "Blue Hills of Jamaica" in the collection of Mr. Sheldon, of Philadelphia. His works are spirited and refined, his artistic sympathies are in a line with those of Mr. F. E. Church and Mr. Sauford Gilford, and his style is descriptive and original. The literary tastes of Mr. Joseph Rusleng Meeker, of St. Louis, are not less marked than his artistic tastes. He is a writer for the magazines as w T ell as a landscape-painter. In the January-February number of The Western for 1878, a periodical published in that city, is an article by him, entitled " Some Account of the Old and New Masters ; " and in the December number of the same review for 1877 a paper on Turner, from which is taken the following extract of a criticism on that artist's picture " Heidelberg," which possesses au- tobiographic interest : " Search the whole composition through, and you will not find a square inch that is not filled with infinite detail. Passing to other qualifications which belong to this grand composition, we note one which de- termines the merit of the whole work — which involves the harmony of lines, the contrast of light and shade, and the entire value of the tones. This is the quality of unity, which dissipates all crudeness, causes an harmonious jux- taposition of light and dark, and compels all the lines in the picture to flow so gently one into another that the eye shall receive no offense. When there is perfect unity the composition is perfect. Each object assumes its proper rela- tive position ; the colors are disposed so as to produce the utmost harmony ; and the major and minor lights and shades are so arranged that the tone of the work shall give a satisfying sense of completeness — a high light here, a lesser light there, and so on through the scale, repeating a like gradation in the darks, and at last carrying the eye by deft combinations of line and tone to the final element of repose beyond all. Another quality will be discovered 33 13(3 AMERICAN PAINTERS. which belongs to all great art, and is quite as essential to the completeness of a picture as either of the others named. This may he termed the quality of mystery. Understanding the value of this, the artist vaguely defines such of his outlines as would offend the eye by their boldness, and by the use of mists and nimbus clouds lending obscurity to portions of the picture suggestive of something more than can be seen, making us wish to explore the half-hidden vistas. In this element of mystery lies much of the. poetic sentiment of a work of art, and no work can really and truly inspire the soul with lofty aspi- rations unless it possesses this quality. " We now come to an element which is perhaps the most important in a composition — the element of repose, where the eye finally rests, quietly and peacefully, in refreshing indolence, after scanning the multitudinous detail. This valuable element is introduced or heightened by a sun-burst, a bank of light clouds, or a rainbow, the eye always naturally seeking this one brill- iant spot. A picture generally contains two or three points of repose, though the final one in the sky must be the most prominent and attractive. In the 'Heidelberg' we find one quite important point of repose in the bridge that crosses the Neekar, and another lesser one resting in the castle on the hill-side. But the final one which the eye seeks with the greatest delight is in the rain- bow which rests on the top of the mountain and loses itself in the darkness of clouds at the top of the picture. I have seen several hundreds of engrav- ings after designs by Turner, and I might almost assert that one-half of them had rainbows in the sky, which were put there by the artist for no other pur- pose than to gain that charming element of repose. " Turner's first studies were made among the ruins of old castles and abbeys in England, and thus there became deeply implanted in his nature a love for the picturesque. So strong did this passion become, that he was for- ever introducing into his pictures rugged and broken forms, which he used as contrasting lines to the elements of repose. It is impossible to view any dilapidated, moss-grown structure, whether of wood or stone, without a feeling of sadness and melancholy stealing over the heart ; it is natural, and belongs to all ruin and decay. That is why Ruskin, seeing Turner's works through Ins own imagination, discovers a vein of sadness in them which did not actu ally exist. Analyze the faces of the two men: you will find the former full of <4-H^fe&i*5S» NEAR THE ATCHAFALAYA. From a Painting by Joseph Rusling Meckel. p. 187. JOSEPH RUSLINQ MEEKER. \ : -- n sorrowful longing for something unattainable, while the latter contains an expression of general good-nature and an entire freedom from anything like woe. It is certain that Turner painted with the childlike, unpretending sim- plicity of all earnest men, and did what he loved and felt, and sought what his heart naturally sought. And so every artist ought to paint what he him- self loves, not what others have loved. If his mind he pure and sweetly toned, what he loves Avill be lovely. All true art is the production of the age, the country, and the climate. Neither the antique nor religious art can ever be reproduced. ' The times are out of joint ' for any revival of what the great masters did. In the palmy days of Greek art the imitators all failed, and even the schools of religious art dwindled into insignificance because their fol- lowers had not strength enough to be original. There is a future for art yet. Give America another hundred years, and genius, born and educated on her own soil, will outstrip the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose there is no high art produced in these modern times. However humble the theme, the touch of genius ennobles it, and we are forced to gaze in astonishment, some- times, at the power exhibited in subjects very far removed from the antique." Mi'. Meeker was born on the 21st day of April, 1827, in Newark, New Jersey. His paternal ancestors came from Belgium in 1640 to Norwalk, Con- necticut. His maternal grandfather, an artist of some pretensions, made a sketch of Washington on horseback in 1775. His mother's brother, Andrew Joliue, was also an artist. The charming pastoral scenery of Cayuga and the surrounding counties, where Mr. Meeker spent his boyhood, impressed itself on his mind, and at the age of eight years he was dabbling in water-colors and stealing time during school-hours to draw on his slate, receiving many repri- mands therefor from his teacher. At about sixteen he and Mr. George L. Clough occupied a studio together, and struggled at once to gaiu bread and knowledge. Thomas J. Kennedy, a decorator, was of great assistance to him in those days, lending him colors, and giving him much good advice. In 1845 he found himself in New York, busily drawing from casts in order to gain a scholarship in the Academy of Design. His efforts were successful. His first commission was from Mr. Hoyt, a teacher whose kindness he holds in remem- brance. After living three years in New York he became discouraged, and re- solved to try the West. The autumn of 1849 found him in Buffalo, where W. 13 8 A M E u IC AN PAIN TER S. H. Beard and Thomas Le Clear were then painting. Here he found some ex- cellent friends, his pictures went up to paying prices, and the American Art Union purchased them occasionally. In 1852 he removed to Louisville, and remained there seven years. In 1859 he pitched his tent in St. Louis, where the Western Academy of Art had been formed, and the outlook for artists was inviting. The war of the rebellion came, and he entered the United States Navy as a paymaster. It was during the time he was on a gunboat in the Mississippi squadron that he had opportunities for making those sketches of Southern swamp and bayou scenery which have made his name well known in the Southwest. Since the war Mr. Meeker has exhibited at the Academy of Design in New York, at the Boston Art Club, and in various other cities East and West. Some of his pictures have been engraved. He was active in establishing the St. Louis Art Society, the St. Louis Sketch Club, and the St. Louis Academy of Fine Arts. He has been thrice elected President of the Art Society. Mr. Meeker's most popular pictures are his Southern swamps, with cy- presses and hanging moss. Many of his landscapes, especially those concerned with the scenery of the Osage, Gasconade, and Missouri Rivers, betray the in- fluence of Mr. A. B. Durand, who was President of the National Academy when Mr. Meeker was a student in New York, and in most of them are seen sycamores. Benjamin F. Reinhaet, portrait, genre, and historical painter, was born near Waynesburg, in Western Pennsylvania, on the 29th of August, 1829. At the age of fourteen, and with scarcely any previous instruction, he began to exercise himself in portraiture, succeeding so well that by the time he was twenty-one years old he had laid up money enough to obtain the immediate goal of his desires, namely, a visit to Europe. For three years thereafter he studied art in the schools of Diisseldorf, Paris, and Rome. On returning to America he resumed the practice of portrait-painting, and was invited into service by the friends of Pesident Buchanan, Vice-President Dallas, Judge Coulter, and many other distinguished men, both in the North and South, including oilicers in the Confederate army and navy. In 1861 he went to KATRINA VAN TASSEL. From a Painting by Benjamin F. Reinhart. p. 138. BENJAMIN F. REIXIIAHT. , ; m, England again, and staid seven years in and near London. When he found himself in New York, he received orders from the Geographical Society for a portrait of Judge Charles P. Daly, and from the Bar Association for a portrait of Charles O'Conor. For the last fifteen years he has traveled extensively in this country, and has transferred to canvas the verisimilitudes of hundreds of persons, besides devoting a good deal of time to the delineation of genre and historical subjects. One of these subjects is " Katrina Van Tassel," which we have engraved. It is painted entirely with black and white pigments, and is a sweet, simple, and piquant representation. Katrina looks as Washington Irving describes her, " a blooming lass of fresh eighteen, plump as a partridge, ripe and melt- ing and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches, and universally famed not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations ; she was withal a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms ; she wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold which her great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam, the tempting stomacher of the olden time, and withal a provokingly short petticoat to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round." Beyond the open window is seen Ichabod Crane, her suitor, who, as he approaches the house, lifts his hat gracefully to her father sitting on the porch. Her back is turned to him, but she knows that he is coming. The scene is vividly compressed and presented ; the young girl is an admirable piece of portrayal, and both the composition and the treatment are skillful and pleasing, the painting being especially solid and sound, and the technical ability in general of no mean order. Mr. Beinhart has been unusually successful with some of his genre pictures. His " Morning Greeting," tor example, a little girl lying in bed under the counterpane, and receiving the salutations of a big dog who stands on his hind-legs beside her, is known very widely. Two hundred thousand chromos after it are said to have been sold. His " Spring " and " Autumn " are simi- larly charming works; and the same is true of his "Nymphs of the Wood" and his " Out among the Daisies." One of his latest canvases is " Pocahon- tas," at the head of a file of Indian maidens approaching through the forest directly toward the spectator. The figures are vigorously drawn, in full relief, 34 140 AMERICAN PAINTERS. and winning in expression, Pocahontas herself being the ripest and fairest of them all. Mr. Fletcher Harper, Jr., is the owner of Mr. Reinhart's fine char- acter-study called '' Evangeline," which, like the " Katrina Van Tassel," is painted entirely in black and white, and exemplifies his best traits. " If you have neither taste, imagination, nor much technical skill," said an English lecturer recently to a class of art-students, " it will be well for you to turn your attention to portraiture or to landscape-painting, for in neither of these departments are those equalities required." In this country landscape-painting can defend itself. It is the one domain in which American art has become celebrated throughout Christendom. But portraiture is not so well off, in spite of the indisputable triumphs of Daniel Huntington, George A. Baker, Thomas Le Clear, Eastman Johnson, and young artists so masterly as Julian A. Weir, Walter Shirlaw, and Wyatt Eaton. The limits of the present essay do not permit justice to be done to these and other later and most promising painters, to Frederick Dielman, for instance, to William Sartain, to Charles S. Pearce, to William H. Low, to W. H. Macy, and to John D. Sargeaut, some of whom are already in the front rank of our artists. What we were say- ing, however, is that portraiture on this side of the Atlantic has not yet won for itself the name that landscape-painting has ; and there is some propriety in the English lecturer's advice, so far as this pertains to the portraits that our native school has produced. Many of them certainly do not display a great deal of taste, imagination, or technical skill ; but Mr. Reinhart's works are not among these. His perception of character is facile and penetrating ; his exe- cution is straightforward and competent. The portrait of Alfred Tennyson, which he painted in England from life, is an exceedingly interesting perform- ance. It hangs in his studio, and reflects credit upon the genuine artistic gifts of the draughtsman and the colorist. The representation of a daughter of one of our most distinguished generals, which Mi*. Reinhart has lately pro- duced — a life-size, three-quarter canvas — is a striking and pleasing delineation ; and if all his delineations are not so happy as are these two, a similar remark may be made concerning the works of many of his peers. Mr. Reinhart some- times, it must he admitted, seems careless of his reputation. He has painted so many portraits in so many places and at so many periods of his growth, that occasionally the desire of excelling is not conspicuously before the spec- BY THE SAD SEA-WAVES. From a Painting by John G. Blown. p. 141. JOHN 0. BRO WN. 14 ] tator of theni, and was not perhaps a vital force in his own mind. In parts of the country where the best art is not much known, and where the price paid for a verisimilitude in oil is a matter of tradition rather than of special worth, the temptation is strong to paint cpiickly and superficially. One does not trouble himself to cast his pearls before a low species of animal, even if he has plenty of the former in his possession. But of Mr. Reinhart's " Alfred Tennyson" the critic can speak without reluctance or regret. It is a portrait forcible and rich in tone and color, expressive in calmness and reserve, and truly refined and honest in treatment. It recalls the poet at once to those who have seen him, or a photograph of him, and at the same time contains much more than the best efforts of the camera-ohscura. " Art," said Mr. John G. Brown, while talking with the writer, " should express contemporaneous truth, which will be of interest to posterity. I want people a hundred years from now to know how the children that I paint looked, just as we know how the people of Wilkie's and Hogarth's times looked. I paint what I see, and in my own way. With Munich art I have no sympathy ; you can't go out to Nature and find the things the Munich artists produce. And this is the test of the merit of a picture. Suppose that I wished to paint a horseshoeing scene : I would go where they shoe horses ; I would study the performance on the spot, and endeavor to reproduce it faithfully. I desired to paint some Grand Menan fishermen, and I went to Grand Menan and painted them from the life — their fish, their clothes, their boats. In other words, I did precisely what a good newspaper reporter would have done, and the result differed only in the means by which it had been obtained. Of course, I embellished my fishermen : I did not copy them as they stood before me as models. I put J. G. Brown into them. And a good reporter in like manner would have put himself into them. " Half of the foreign stuff that is sold here I feel is a swindle on the public. The works of Jules Breton, L. Knaus, Oswald Achenbach, Meisso- nier, and Gerome, are admirable, to be sure ; but I can't think anything of Corot, I can't understand him ; I can't understand how an intelligent being can paint clearly the windows in a house across a river, and then make the 142 AMERICAN PAINTERS. trees on this side of the same river look like smoke. The trees are nearer than the windows, but they are all blurred and obscured. Corot's ' Orphee ' does not seem to me to be even an idealization of Nature. Diaz, while not true in his facts, is nevertheless beautiful in color. But I can't see anything in a Corot. " Morality in art ? Of course there is. A picture can and should teach, can and should exert a moral influence. Carl Hlibner's ' Poacher ' — a man shot simply because he stole a hare — revolutionized the game-laws. It made their cruelty and injustice so obvious that they were wiped otit. Millais's ' Huguenot Lovers ' — you can't look at the picture without being better for it, can you ? Landseer's ' Chief Mourner ' — a dog resting his head on his master's coffin— is finer, more pathetic, than anything that ever was written. French views on this subject, I know, are altogether of another sort ; but a French- man's education and training are different from an Anglo-Saxon's. Neverthe- less, there is a moral in everything — in the way a man looks and talks, and his work ought to have this in it, and will have it in it. Detaille and Bou- guereau I admire : every figure in one of Detaille's paintings is a bit of char- acter ; if he introduces a piece of landscape, it is just as good as any one can paint anywhere. In the catalogue of the recent Cottier collection of pictures, I marked at least fifty canvases that had been painted right from Nature, and were fresh and unconventional. And I don't condemn an artist because he belongs to a particular school. If you look sharp, you will find good in any work of an earnest man. Beauty in tone, in harmony, we can all recognize at a glance, but I can't see where Corot's ' Orphee ' has it, although the picture is valued at ten thousand dollars. How is it ? Am I mistaken ? I must be. Yet my eyes are always freshened by Nature every twenty-four hours, and it seems to me that I should see something in these men if they have it in them. I can show you in Whittredge's studio some of the most beautiful studies ever made — studies that will compare favorably with the work of any landscape- painter in the world — studies of American scenery seen with his own eyes. Why don't we worship Whittredge instead of worshiping foreigners ? " People like to be gagged a good deal — perhaps that is the reason — and the picture-dealers are the ones that do it. They have made it fashionable to buy European works. They have caused it to come about that Americans CLIFFS OF IRONBOUND ISLAND, MAINE. From a Painting by Alfred Thompson Bricher. p. 148. joiin a . rh o un. 143 who profess to enjoy the sight of American pictures are considered to be ' off color;' so that, according to the ideas of the last ten years in this country, there cannot be anything more degrading than to be an American artist. Why, if Whittredge had gone to England and lived there, he would have made a fortune! That is what Boughton did. Some of his beautiful little winter-scenes, painted while he was in New York, brought here only fifty dol- lars. They are selling in England for five hundred. He never would have gotten thirty per cent, of his present prices if he had staid here. Winslow Homer, one of our truest and most accomplished artists, has never been ap- preciated in this country ; but he carries things in his pictures a thousand miles farther than Corot ever did. " The fact is, that an artist should go direct to Nature and use his own eyes — or his glasses, if he has to wear them. I teach my pupils to see — that is all. First, I set them to drawing things that are still, that don't change ; in this way they learn textures. Meanwhile, I let them paint a little in order to rest themselves till they draw again. Beginning early, they get to handle the brash as easily as they breathe. Next, I put before them flowers and fruit, things that do change ; then I take them out-doors to Nature, and let them draw objects that are changing every moment in the sunshine — and that is all there is in teaching art. Geometry and mathematics the pupils can learn at home at night. Guy is one of the best painters in his knowledge of these branches, which are indispensable in the delineation of perspective. I never let a pupil paint from one of my pictures ; no one of my pupils ever copied a picture of mine, or ever desired to. Hence their paintings have individuality; they paint like themselves, not like Piloty or any other man. Technique I don't teach ; it comes by practice. Here are two studies by Mr. Gilbert Gaul, which are equal to anything they bring over from Europe. I taught him simply how to see, not how to put on the paint." Mr. J. G. Brown was born in Durham, in the north of England, on the 11th of November, 1831. His earliest pictures were portraits of his mother and a little sister, and were painted when he was nine years old. When in his teens he had a strong prejudice against schools of art ; but having seen in his eighteenth year how superior to his own were some drawings made by a comrade who had attended school, he entered the government art-school at 35 144 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, then under the direction of W. B. Scott, "God bless him, the fine old fellow ! " For one year he studied in the Edinburgh Royal Acad- emy, and received a prize in 1853. He went to London, painted a few por- traits, in the autumn of that year came to this country, and in 1856 opened a studio in Atlantic Street, Brooklyn, where he resumed his portrait-painting. In 1860 he took Mr. Boughton's studio in the Tenth Street Building, New York City. He was elected an Academician in 1863, and has been a Vice- President of the Academy and the chairman of its school committee. He is now a Vice-President of the Artists' Fund Society, and a member of the Academy hanging committee. Mr. Robert Gordon, of New York City, owns Mr. Brown's " Curling in Central Park ; " Mr. J. J. Stuart, of New York City, his " Marching along," children playing soldier and crossing a rustic bridge ; Mr. Denis Gale, of Phil- adelphia, "The Passing Show," boys standing on the curbstones and watching a traveling circus, each face being a study of character ; Mr. Hurlburt, of Twentieth Street, New York City, his " St. Patrick's Day," a little girl pinning a green rosette on the lapel of a boot-black's coat ; Mr. Fairbanks, of New York City, his " Hiding in the Old Oak," three children in the hollow of a tree, which the sunshine warms ; and Mr. Guild, of Boston, his " Little Stroll- ers," young Italian musicians with harp and violin in the snowy street. All Mr. Brown's pictures are stories. Concerning "The Passing Show," which was in the Paris Exhibition of 1878, the London Athenceum said, "The painter has set himself to portray a bit of genuine Nature in a careful, natural man- ner, and he has succeeded in calling forth corresponding sympathies in the spectator." " By the Sad Sea- Waves," which we have engraved, was exhib- ited at the National Academy Exhibition of 1878. Mr. Alfred Thompson Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hamp- shire, in 1837, and during his boyhood he lived in Newburyport, Massachu- setts. He was a clerk in a dry-goods house in Boston. At the age of twenty- one lie .iliandoned the counting-room for the studio. He made sketches on the coast of Maine, and in the neighborhood of Newburyport. In 1868 he removed to New York City, where he has a studio in the Young Men's Chris- THE MILL-STREAM. From a Painting by Alfred Thompson B>i< her. p, 146. ALFRED THOMPSON BRIGHT EH. \ \ ;, tian Association Building. Tlie most of his pictures are marines in water- colors and in oils. To the annual exhibitions of the American Water-Color Society he usually sends several large and important drawings. He is a lead- ing member of that organization. He is fond of depicting the indolent and easy swaying of the summer sea in the Grand Menan region; the, rocks ami weeds along the coast ; the sunlit stretch of waters, necked with distant white sails. " His first sketching season," says a writer in Appletons' Art Journal for November, 1875, "was passed on the island of Mount Desert, coast of Maine, and while there he fell in company with William Stanley Haseltine and the late Charles Temple Dix. These artists were men of genius, and young Bricher derived great benefit from their kindly advice. After the sea- son spent at Mount Desert, Mr. Bricher turned his attention to the bays, creeks, and pastoral scenery, in the neighborhood of his early home at New- buryport, and many of his most successful pictures have been painted from sketches made there. He pursued his profession with considerable success in Boston, but, with a desire to seek a wider field for the development of his genius, he removed to New York. One of his first pictures in the latter city was in the exhibition of the National Academy of Design in that year. It- was a study ' On a Mill-Stream at Newburyport,' and attracted considerable attention, owing to the beauty of the subject and the fresh and truthful style of its treatment. From that year he became a constant contributor to the Academy exhibitions, but from the character of his work he is, perhaps, bet- ter known as a marine painter than a painter of landscapes. In 1873 he became interested iu water-color painting, and in that year contributed his first drawing to the exhibition of the American Society of Painters in Water- Colors, and was at once elected a member of the institution. His water-color works are noticeable for their force and brilliancy of tone. In the delinea- tion of ' Ironbound Island, Mount Desert, Coast of Maine,' Mr. Bricher has softened the inhospitable character of the place by the introduction of a brill- iant sunset effect, which lights up the distant sea, and shimmers upon the breaking surf in the foreground with great power and beauty. The sky, with its cloucl-curauli, is particularly pleasing, and exemplifies in a marked degree the poetical power of his pencil. ' The Mill-Stream at Newburyport ' is re- markable for its beauty, and the subdued yet brilliant way in which it is 146 AMERICAN PAINTERS. treated. It is a midsummer scene, as the boating-party on the left and the rich and luxuriant foliage of the overhanging trees evince ; and the broken forms of the clouds and the shadows upon the water lend to the view an idyllic charm. 1 " Mr. Albert Bierstadt, one of the most widely-known American painters, was born in Diisseldorf, Germany, in 1829, and came to this country in 1831. In early manhood he returned to Europe and studied in the city of his birth and also in Rome. When General Lander's expedition to the Rocky Moun- tains was organized, he became a member of it, and made his reputation as an artist by painting some of the striking scenery of that region. His celebrated " Rocky Mountains " was displayed in public for the first time at the great Fair of the Sanitary Commission in the city of New York in 1863, where it and Mr. Church's " Heart of the Andes " were the principal pictorial attrac- tions. In 1878 Mr. Bierstadt left America for an extended journey in Europe and the East. His " Mount Corcoran, Sierra Nevada," recently purchased by the trustees of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and engraved for this volume, has been described as follows : " The peak rises to a height of fourteen thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven feet, and is about five miles distant from the little lake fed by the snows of the mountain-range. The picture is considered to be a happy combination of the best points in Mr. Bierstadt's style, and, while treated with a bold, broad effect, abounds in finished truthfulness of form and color. The engraving well conveys the impression made by the drawing, but none of the effect of the fine local and aerial color in the rolling mass of clouds, the gigantic trees, the exquisite green depths of the water into which recede the submerged rocks and trees of the foreground, and the yellow curve of the shore dotted with the scarlet dwarf willows. From the sombre u ■v. < ! a -3 k ^ ^ £> tn Z < -i K 8 2« U ^ K * | h Z D 2 ALBERT B I ERST AD T. 1 19 painter asked fifteen thousand tbalers. ' I will give you twenty thousand if you will set to work to-day.' Every child knows the story. Such arguments were irresistible; those were halcyon days for artists. But artists, even the ablest, are but men. You know the inglorious nickname which the Clevel- and light-hearted mannerist, Luca Giordano, bears in history ? Well, our artists were in those years, almost without exception, fa 'presto. In the spring of 1873 came the recoil. The millions proved but glittering bubbles, or rather something much worse. Like exploding shells, they scatt erei I about death and destruction. The palaces, which had been conjured out of the earth, certainly remained in their places, though they passed into other hands ; but the costly marble statues and the priceless pictures — a legend was current that, in the hours of darkness, the portals of those palaces opened, and strange fune- real processions passed through the still streets to some picture-dealer or other who had not yet lost all heart, and, in hope of better days, was willing to risk a bit of capital. And that, unfortunately, was not mere idle rumor. The pri- vate galleries which came into existence between 1870 and 1873 have almost all been privately sold, or publicly dispersed under the hammer. For artists the fat days of the ' Promoters ' have been followed by the lean days of the ' Great Crash.' The artists had, and alas ! they still have, plenty of time to reflect upon their sins during those years, and to paint better pictures. To their credit be it said, they have used the opportunity well. The last great Academy Exhibition showed this. The characteristics of the display were earnest effort and conscientious industry." With but few exceptions, the words written concerning Germany are descriptive of America also. Mr. Bierstadt is a believer in Wagner's principle of the value of mere quantity in a work of art. He has painted more large canvases than any other American artist. His style is demonstrative and infused with emotion ; he is the Gustave Dore of landscape-painting. With Mr. Cross, the English Home Secretary, he doubtless holds that art from beginning to end is noth- ing more nor less than imitation — imitation inspired (if not controlled) by veracity, refined by taste, and, we may add, assisted by artifice ; and, with the sculptor, he likes a subject that is noble in itself, and disdains to illumine common things. 150 AMERICAN PAINTERS. On the occasion of the successful Loan Exhibition under the direction of the Young People's Association of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, iu Brooklyn, in 1878, twenty-four of Mr. Frederick A. Bridgman's paintings were hung side by side in what was called the " Bridgman Gallery." The series comprised his first work in oil, namely, a head of a boy ; his " American Circus in France ; " his " Prayer in the Mosque," owned by Mr. Edwin Pack- ard ; his " Rameses II.," " Fete in the Palace of Barneses," and portrait of himself, owned by Mr. B. Sherk ; and his " View on the Upper Nile," " Tete- a-tete," " Pride of the Harem," " Woman of Kabzla," and " Normandy Peas- ant-Girl." Large and beautiful as was the Loan Exhibition, containing as it did bronzes, laces, embroideries, water-colors, and many foreign and domestic oil-paintings, Mr. Bridgman's collection was one of its most attractive and notable features. The young artist appeared with distinction in the pres- ence of the friends of his boyhood. Having been for several years a pupil of the celebrated Gerorne, and an enthusiastic disciple of that master, it is not strange that the influence of the latter should be visible in many of Mr. Bridg- man's pictures. The work that we have engraved does not suggest Gerorne strikingly ; but others, in subject, in composition, and in coloring, reveal very clearly the source of their inspiration. In the recent exhibition of the Society of American Artists, for example, Mr. Bridgman was represented by his "Fete in the Palace of Rameses," certain parts of which remind one easily of the painter of" L'Almee" and " C16opatre et Cesar." But a similar remark might be made concerning four-fifths of the contributions to that exhibition, and in general concerning nearly all of the first productions of Americau artists who have studied in the ateliers of Europe. In such cases the intelligent spectator is little inclined to find fault. He remembers how closely Raphael's earlier Madonnas resembled the creations of his teacher, Perugino, and how natural it is, for a child that is learning to walk, to lean upon somebody or something. A beginner in art must begin with copying ; and, the more slav- ishly he copies at first, the better is he likely to become. His initial works are, or should be, exact transcriptions of natural facts, and of selected models. The results of elaborate convention, the penetration of imaginative conception, the personal impress stamped upon the canvas or the clay, come afterward. Imitation first, and then originality. h (J) U > e < x a x h E b. 2 2 K H U E tn h 2 < <: w 0. to u w 2 Id (S >< 0. FREDERICK A. BRIDGMAN. 15j The " Pyrenees Peasants returning from the Harvest-Field " was painted by Mr. Bridgman for the French Salon of 1872, and bought by Mr. A. A. Low, of Brooklyn, in whose gallery it now hangs. In the evening sunshine, and along a picturesquely winding and bordered road through a rolling region of country, a pair of oxen is drawing a wagon-load of garnered grain, upon which are seated two Avornen, apparently much more weary than the faithful beasts in front of them, or the bright young fellow who leads the procession. By the side of the wagon another woman trudges on, her face wearing an expression of ill-humor and disrelish. She and her sisters, evidently, have been working harder than either the oxen or the driver. She is barefoot, too, while the man and the animals are shod. Beyond the shadows of the middle distance the hill-slopes lie in brightest light, which glows also on the distant landscape and the horizon. The principal elements of the scene are empha- sized so as to make a picture of them — and a very pleasant picture it is, sound and harmonious, without showiness and without triviality. Mr. Bridgman's "Burial of a Mummy" had the honor of bringing to the artist a third-class medal in the Salon of 1877, and of receiving from the French critics an award of praise unusual for an American work. The nov- elty and richness of the incident, the freshness and courage of the treatment, the relief and distinctive characterization of the principal figures, and the decidedly scenic handling of the subject, are easy of discernment in this suc- cessful pictm*e. It was in the American department of the Paris Exhibition for 1878, where it elicited from the London Athenwum highly-favorable com- ment. "The scene," says the Athenwum, "represents the Nile, with the dead being transported by water to their place of burial. The centre of the composition is occupied by a barge, on which is fitted a sort of catafalque, whereon rests the mummy-case ; at the head and feet are two figures, who may be supposed to be the mother and son of the deceased; an altar, with priests and some musicians, occupies the fore-part of the barge, the stern being filled with a group of lamenting women ; the barge is towed across the river by a boat manned by a body of rowers. Another barge, with similar freight- age, is seen in advance. All the details of costume and accessories are thor- oughly studied, and the drawing and painting are deserving of high commen- dation, as will be understood by those who remember Mr. Bridgman's ' Nile- 37 152 AMERICAN PAINTERS. Boat ' iu the last year's Academy Exhibition. Especially beautiful is the landscape, showing the mountains, with the last rays of the setting sun light- ing up their tops, and the stretch of river beneath reflecting cool and pellucid sky-tints." Mr. Bridgman's contribution to the Salon this year is a representation of an Assyrian king killing lions in the amphitheatre. " The monarch," says the Paris correspondent of the Art Journal, " has just bent his bow, and is in the act of launching his shaft at a superb lion, who has been released from one of the two clumsy wooden cages dimly visible in the background, and who, with extended tail and lip upcurled in a portentous snarl, is evidently meditating an attack." A dead lion lies on the ground. The sky is seen through an opening at the left of the crowded amphitheatre. One of the artist's latest works is a view of an old-fashioned diligence, with six galloping horses, entering a village on a bright summer morning. His feeling is strong for the literary aspects of his subjects — for stories that tell themselves, and are interesting, if not startling, in the telling. His principal works thus far have been concerned with reproducing the customs and the types of the ancient Egyptians and the modern Turks. A contributor to Appletons' Art Journal for February, 1876, writes : " Visitors to the exhibition of the National Academy of Design, last spring, were struck by a very spirited painting of a circus exhibition, described in the catalogue as ' An American Circus in France.' The painter is Mr. Frederick A. Bridgman, an artist yet in the youth of his career. Mr. Bridgman was born iu Tuskegee, Alabama, in the year 1847. He showed a strong love for the arts at an early age. His father having died, his mother removed North with her children, and decided to apprentice her son to bank-note engraving. Accordingly, he began work with the American Bank-Note Company in 1862. During this period he painted at home, and in the winter season studied in the art-schools in Brooklyn. After remaining in the employ of the Bank-Note Company nearly four years, his engagement was canceled, at his own solicita- tion, that he might go to Europe to study painting. He sailed for France in May, 1866, and on landing went direct to Paris. After entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he began his studies under Gerome, who gave him much kindly advice, and has since that time taken great interest in his progress. "5 FREDERICK A. RRIDOMAN. 153 During the first three years spent abroad, he experienced the usual discour- agement of young artists struggling for recognition, notwithstanding that Le Monde Illustre had engraved a number of his paintings, which was an honor ; but in the fourth year he painted his ' Circus ' and ' De quoi partent les Jeunes Filles,' the success of which at once brought him into notice. At this time his pictures were well hung in the Salon, and the Messrs. Goupil, of Paris, purchased many of his works. Young Bridgman spent his summers in Brit- tany, in the little town of Pont-Aven, the quiet resort of a little colony of artists, and his winters in Paris. The winter of 1870-71, however, found him, together with a number of American, English, and French artists, again in Pont-Aven, the war interfering with arts in the cities. This happening to be an unusually severe winter, there were two weeks of snow and ice — a thing unprecedented in the annals of Brittany. Taking advantage of this opportu- nity, he and other Americans extemporized skates at the village blacksmith's, and astonished the peasants by their manoeuvres on the ice. It was at this time that he painted ' Girls in the Way,' ' Up Early,' and other works. The summer following the war he went to England, but, not liking the fog of London, after a brief sojourn of a month or two, he returned to Paris. It was in London that he conceived his ' Apollo bearing off Cyrene,' finishing it in Paris. This picture was hung between two of the famous masters of France, Jules Breton and Bonnat. He then journeyed south and settled in the Pyre- nees, on the Spanish border, where he met Fortuny and other painters, and spent two years, being charmed with the country and costumes. It was from this place that he sent one of several pictures to Mr. A. A. Low, of Brooklyn. Thence he went to Algiers, staying for a season. The winter of 1873-74 he spent in Egypt and Nubia, among the temples and obelisks, taking this occa- sion also to make an excursion up the Nile as far as the second cataract, engag- ing a boat and crew, in company with several painters. Returning from the Orient in the spring of 1874 to Paris, he brought with him three hundred sketches in oil, water-colors, and pencil, mostly of landscapes and the ruins of temples, as only a few models were to be had, owing to the religious scruples of the Mohammedans. With the aid of these sketches, together with the cos- tumes and curiosities which he had also secured, he was enabled to finish, after his return to his studio in Paris, some fine Oriental subjects. One of the most 15 4 AMERICAN PAINTERS. important of these subjects was entitled 'The Interior of a Harem, or the Nubian Fortune-teller.' It was in the last Salon. Mr. Bridgman's ' Circus ' was painted when he was scarcely more than a student, and, when exhibited, the masterly character of the composition and its brilliancy of coloring excited general admiration, even among the critics of Paris. The scene represents the interior of an American circus. A famous athlete and woman rider are per- forming a ' two-horse act,' as described in the bills of the day. The trained horses are making their round of the ring in a gentle canter, urged by the crack of the master's whip ; and the so-called ' trick-clown ' and his compan- ion the jester are engaged in their usual antics for the delectation of the crowd. In the original painting this central tableau forms a superb study of color. The athlete, in crimson jacket and buff trunks, and the woman in her gauzy costume glittering with spangles, together with the sturdy horses, and the clowns in their raiments of many colors, was a bold subject for so young an artist to handle, but it was successful. As a study of character, the little group of rustics on the left can scarcely be excelled. In the faces the differ- ent emotions are ably expressed. There are the woman spectator, with her hands clasped, and spellbound at the equestrian act, and the fellow behind her, with a different temperament, clapping his hands at the vulgar antics of the clown. Again, the lout seated near the tent-pole has more admiration for the woman at his side than the performance in the ring. In the background the usual mixed audience is shown, with the band throwing out its sweet strains to the measured tread of the horses, and the ' Rocky Mountain Indian ' seated in the broad light near the grand entrance. This painting is in the gallery of Mr. Edward F. Rook, of Brooklyn." Until middle life, Mr. John W. Casilear was an ena;raver. He was born in New York City ; in his sixteenth year he went into the atelier of the late Peter Maverick ; he afterward studied under Mr. A. B. Durand. At one time In' was a partner in the firm of Toppan, Carpenter & Company, bank-note engravers. One of his principal efforts with the burin is a reproduction of Mr. Daniel Huntington's oil-painting, " The Sibyl," which was published by the American Art Union. In 1840 he went to Europe with Messrs. Durand, MOONLIGHT IN THE GL-EN. From a Painting by John W. Casilear. p. 154. JOHN W. CASILEAR. I 55 Kensett, and Rossiter, and directed his attention to painting ; and, like Mr. Durand, Mr. Kensett, and many other celebrities whose careers began in the workshop of the engraver, abandoned the burin for the brush. He came back to New York with a good number of original sketches, and with a deter- mination to paint, although it was many years later that he finally relin- quished his hold upon wood and steel. He passed his summers in the moun- tains of Vermont and in the adjoining States, made studies industriously, for- warded some of them to the Academy exhibitions, and in 1835 became an as- sociate of that body, which, Mr. Casilear modestly though rather ambiguous- ly says, " took in anybody at that time ! " His first painting exhibited there was a simple storm-effect upon a summer landscape. It was a cabinet-picture. His works are usually small in size, measuring about two feet by three. He went to Europe again in 1857. Switzerland was his chief attraction on that continent, as Lake George and the Genesee Valley, in Western New York, have been on this continent. His success has been most conspicuous in the portrayal of simple pastoral scenes. If he abandons them, and paints a sub- ject like "Niagara Falls," the public response is imperfect. His name has be- come identified with sunny, peaceful " river-sides " and meadows. He is an Academician, and a member of the Artists' Fund Society. Although the influence of an engraver's mental and manual habits is apt to appear in his oil-paintings, exceptions to this rule, as to all others, occur, of course. Mr. Shirlaw's canvases, for example, discover no traces of his early devotion to steel and copper plates. The engraver who is compelled to repre- sent aerial perspective by the fineness and coarseness of his lines, and by the varying distances between them, is liable when using the brush to be ham- pered consciously or unconsciously by restrictions similar to those that beset him when using the burin ; and that very precision of touch which in one sphere of work is an excellence becomes in another sphere a positive demerit. Moreover, while the art of engraving is essentially an imitative art, the art of painting is essentially interpretative, and interpretative chiefly by means of the qualities and tones of colors. So little imitative is it that the professed design of some of the greatest painters is the faithful representation of nothing in heaven, air, earth, or sea. They imagine a harmony of colors and lines, and they set forth simply their imagining. If the record of it gives the spectator 38 15 g AMERICAN PAINTERS. merely a part of the pleasure which the original gave thein, they are more than satisfied. If he receives no pleasure at all, they can only pity him, and pro- ceed to paint something more of the same sort. It would be too much to say that Mr. Casilear's landscapes are entirely free from reminiscences of his early craft. Their excellence, however, is very well defined. Mr. William M. Chase was born on the 1st of November, 1849, in Franklin County, Indiana. In the year 1868 he studied portrait-painting under the direction of Mr. B. F. Hayes, and in 1869 became a pupil of Mr. J. O. Eaton, of New York, and attended the school of the Academy of De- sign. In 1871 he removed to St. Louis, and painted fruit and still-life for one year, and at the expiration of that time went to Europe. He staid six years in Munich, with the exception of thirteen months spent in Venice, and was a student in the Royal Academy. His first picture sent thence to this country was " The Dowager," and his next " The Court- Jester," which we have engraved. A picture entitled " Feeding the Pigeons " went to St. Louis, and is now owned in New York. " The Apprentice," " The Poacher," and the " Ready for the Ride," were hung in the Kurtz Gallery Exhibition, in New York, in the spring of 1878. Mr. Chase is a teacher in the rooms of the Art-Students' League. To the National Academy Exhibition of 1875 Mr. Chase, Mr. David Neal, Mr. J. Alderi Weir, Mr. Wyatt Eaton, and other young artists, contributed a series of works which possessed features so new and striking that public atten- tion was directed to them at once. In breadth and freedom of treatment, in tone, in a certain freshness and vitality of conception, these pictures were altogether apart from most of those that surrounded them, and that the traditional visitor to the Academy expected to see. It was on this occasion that some of the rising young members of the present Society of American Artists made their first appearance in public. Not long afterward, in the rooms of Messrs. Cottier & Company, in New York, a similar collection was displayed, Mrs. Helena De Kay Gilder, Miss Oakey, Mr. Francis Lathrop, Mr. A. II. Thayer, and Mr. Albert Ryder, being also contributors. In the Acad- emy Exhibition of 1 >■ 7 7 the young artists had a fine representation, and THE COURT-JESTER. From a Painting by William M. Chase. p. 156. WILLIAM M. CHASE. 157 were treated with unusual courtesy by the hanging committee ; and the next year, though many of them sent works to the regular Academy Exhibition an exhibition of their own was organized in the Kurtz Gallery, in the same city. Notable among the artists there represented were Mr. W. H. Low, Mr. William Sartain, Mr. Thomas Eakins, Mr. Thomas Moran, Mr. William E. Bunce, Mr. Charles H. Miller, Mr. William M. Hunt, Mr. John S. Sargent, Mr. W. S. Macy, Mr. R. Swain Gifford, Miss Elizabeth Booth, Mr. Frank Duveneck, Mr. W. Twachtmann, Mr. Charles S. Pearce, Mr. T. W. Dewing, Mr. A. H. Wy- ant, Mr. Charles G. Dyer, Mr. John La Farge, Mr. Samuel Colman, Mr. Louis C. Tiffany, Mr. James M. Whistler, Mr. Homer D. Martin, Mr. J. C. Beckwith, Mr. J. McClure Hamilton, Mr. C. B. Comans, Mr. Frederick Bridgman, Mr. George Inness, Mr. George Inness, Jr., Mr. Frederick Dielman, Mr. William Dannat, and Mr. Olin L. Warner, in addition to the artists already mentioned. The portrait-studies of Mr. J. Alden Weir received especial attention. Con- cerning one of them, which Mr. Weir elaborated into a life-size representation of his father, Professor Robert W. Weir, and sent to the National Academy Exhibition, the writer said, at the time : " Mr. J. Alden Weir's portrait of his father is an exceedingly artistic work, well worthy of serious study on the part of visitors to the exhibition. It has not been treated very favorably, nor, we think, fairly, by the hanging committee, but that makes absolutely no difference whatever, so far as its reception by intelligent men and women is concerned. If the hanging committee think that this picture is inferior to a score of other productions hung upon the line, the hanging committee are greatly to be pitied. If, on the other hand, they conceive it to be their duty to honor the Academi- cians simply for the reason that the latter are Academicians, they should say so at once, and let the public understand the matter. Mr. Weir's portrait, however, can be seen quite well where it is. It discovers a sensitive and refined perception of character, a naturalness, zest, and individuality of treatment, and a robust nobleness and severity of purpose which are not less delightful than rare. With mere superficial cleverness, with paiutiness, pret- tiness, and polish, it has no concern. The subject is handled as an organic whole — handled broadly, and at the same time with sufficient attention to details. Look, for instance, at the modeling of the hands — how faithfully, intelligently, and solidly it has been done ! and consider how miserably it is 15 8 AMERICAN PAINTERS. usually done in modern portrait-painting. The picture has feeling and soul ; it depicts a live man, a real man, who thinks, and whose thoughts are worth something, who has a brain and a heart, and whose experience is of value. Of how little need are elaborate and carefully-arranged accessories in a work like this ! What accessories, indeed, could be fewer or simpler than the ones in use here '. The representation is sculpturescpie in its simplicity and dig- nity. Everything transient, accidental, and unimportant, has been passed by in order to concentrate the unity and the force of the impression intended to be transmitted. The artist has seen his subject, not in parts but in mass, and his treatment of it is free from studio-tricks. High art is not often popular art, because, in order that a work shall be popular, its excellences must be, to a certain extent, obvious ; and obviousness is usually the very last element of aesthetic merit. In ancient times a pig was considered to be the proper sacri- fice to the goddess of the lower world, and figures of pigs were dedicated to her in this world. Now, a pig is the most obvious of creatures. His attri- butes, being all on the surface, can be appreciated at once. But sometimes high art is popular too, probably for the reason that there are exceptions to every rule. Mr. Chase's ' Apprentice,' for example, in the Society of American Artists' Exhibition last month, was high art, yet almost everybody seemed to like it. Mr. Weir's portrait also contains certain elements of popularity which commend it to the common throng. The greater number of visitors to the Academy, doubtless, are struck by it and pleased with it. We wish that they could be induced to study it under the direction of a competent expounder. They would learn excellently well the nature and the value of a really artistic portrait." The earlier works of Mr. Albert F. Bellows were painted in oils ; the later ones almost exclusively in water-colors. His ancestors came to this country from England in 1034. When sixteen years old he was apprenticed to a lithographer in Boston. After a course of instruction in Europe, he painted "The First Pair of Boots," " The City Cousins," " The Sorrows of Boyhood," and other geiwe pictures, and in 1861 was elected an Academician. In 1865 he crossed the Atlantic again, and spent many months in the study A BY-WAV NEAR TORQUAY, DEVONSHIRE. From a Painting bv Albert F. Bellows. p. 158. ALBERT F. BELLOWS. I59 of the English water-colorists, making sketches of farmhouses, hamlets, and country lanes, which he used in such pictures as "A By-way near Torquay, in Devonshire " and " Devonshire Cottages." He is one of the principal con- tributors to the regular exhibitions of the American Water-Color Society. His studio was in Boston, and is now in New York. A recent biographer in Appletons' Art Journal writes : "Mr. Bellows has been a constant and large exhibitor in the New York exhibitions, and probably no class of subjects finds so much favor in the eyes of connoisseurs and the public as that presented by him. To the recent exhibition of the American Society of Painters in Water- Colors he sent several charming pictures, two of the most important of which are engraved here, both illustrating English rural scenes. To many admirers of art the ' By-way near Torquay ' will be accepted as one of Mr. Bellows's most delightful pictures. The subject gives a view of a farm-lane embow- ered in trees, leading, perhaps, from the village street, where the cottages clus- ter in the distance, to the foreground brook. Across the pool a huge log has been thrown, and another projects over the water, and from this causeway two girls with rods and lines are fishing. The subject has no sensational feature to commend it to favor ; its success consists solely in its simplicity of treatment and the presentation of a real scene drawn from Nature — one which not only embodies a pleasant expression of sentiment, but appeals to the heart. The stretch of cool, transparent water in the foreground, and the bit of blue sky which shows above the house-tops in the distance, together with the sparkling effect of light and shade which intervenes along the shaded lane, will be appreciated by all as beautiful incidents in the composition. In the picture of ' Devonshire Cottages ' is a group of cottages with thatched roofs and rude chimneys, poor and unpretending structures, but so embowered in running vines and shrubbery that they assume striking features of beauty and pictu- resqueness. There are no children here, but, as an evidence of life, an English matron stands in the door of her cottage, and is apparently watching her flock of geese on their march to the foreground pool. There are but few American artists whose works are more popular than those of Mr. Bellows, and this is due not only to the taste shown in the selection of subjects, but also to their artistic treatment." 39 160 AMERICAN PAINTERS. In a conversation originally reported in the New York Evening Post, Professor Robert W. Weir, recently of West Point, said to the writer, while showing his picture of " Christ in the Garden " : " The age is materialistic, but tew persons buy religious pictures; and then, not every painter is in a condition to paint them. Haydon, you remember, tried a Christ, and, as somebody said of it, the head he produced resembled his own, ' with red hair and a mouth like a letter-box.' The tenderness of Christ always seems to me to have been his dominant characteristic ; and I prefer to represent him as in the act of saying, ' Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me,' rather than as in the act of commanding the winds and the waves to be still. Very touching are such words of human sympathy. Yet to delineate his character is impossible. A year or two ago I painted the two Marys at the tomb, and left the figure of Christ to be imagined. I have often so left it. One feels a delicacy in even attempting the delineation." " Is not the modern landscape," I asked, " with its presentation and inter- pretation of the beauty of Nature, truly a religious work?" " Undoubtedly it is," he replied ; " it raises the aspiration of the beholder from earth to heav- en ; it lays before us the work of the Creator. Nature — truth — gives the value to all works of art. A very ordinary subject, when treated truthfully, is always impressive. Sometimes the sight of a cloud in the sky brings tears to my eyes. I have tried to connect the sight with something I have seen before ; but the effort was useless. The emotion was simply spontaneous — beyond my control." " Turner's ' Slave-Ship,' " observed the professor, " is a wonderful piece of painting, but it tells no story whatever, and was not intended to do so. It is simply an effect of color, and of light and dark ; and as such it is the very cream and poetry of painting. Thackeray said of Turner's ' Temeraire,' ' If that picture could be translated into music, it would be a national anthem;' and a similar remark might be made concerning the ' Slave-Ship.' Turner, in my opinion, painted rapidly from the inspiration of the moment, laying on his colors furiously, with perhaps only a knife or trowel. When he had done enough to suggest a thought, he would stop, and then tack on a name to the canvas — any name that his fancy dictated, or a quotation from some poem like the ' Fallacies of Hope,' fur example, a poem which never existed. In his $fffe&-> DEVONSHIRE COTTAGES. From a Painting by Albert F. Bellows. p. 160. ROBERT W. WEIR. \Q\ ' Slave-Ship ' the black figure in the foreground lias a leg ten feet long, the fish have eyes as big as dinner-plates, and iron is made to float on the water. He fastened a manacle around that leg, and called the picture the 'Slave-Ship.' He didn't know what he intended to do when he began to paint it." The professor proceeded to illustrate how, in his opinion, the work had been done. From a corner of his studio he brought out a marine of his own — gray-toned, cloudy, stormy, the sun setting behind a bank of dark cloud, and tipping some of the troubled waves with light, the whole scene expressive of immensity and of desolation. " I painted that," said he, " in an hour one morning, after looking at the ' Slave-Ship,' just to illustrate for myself my own idea of Turner's process ; I mixed my colors hurriedly on the palette and transferred them to the canvas with a small trowel. I did not once use a brush. Now, if I wanted to give the picture a name, I shoidd put some object on the canvas, and append a title in accordance with it. Ruskin, you remember, observes that no two inches of Turner's pictures have the same tint. In that respect they are just like Nature ; and this result can be produced in no other way than that I have described." The professor's humor played brilliantly around his philosophy of Turner, and it was pleasant to hear his version of some stories about his English brother — the story, for instance, of the lady looking over Turner's shoulder, and telling Turner that she didn't see anything in what he was doing. " But don't you wish you could, though '{ " replied the painter. " Somebody," con- tinued the professor, " once remarked that a marine of Turner's at the Royal Academy Exhibition iu Loudon was ' too cool.' It was hanging beside a very warm landscape by Constable, and opposite it, on the other side of the room, was a representation of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, dancing in the fiery furnace. The criticism was repeated to Turner. It seemed to nettle him. Soon afterward he threw a fistful of bright-red pigment into one cor- ner of the ' too cool ' picture. One of the artists at the exhibition remarked that a coal had popped out of the fiery furnace opposite. In a day or two Turner shaped the coal into a buoy, which shed red light upon the neighbor- ing waves. The whole tone of the picture was transformed ; and Constable's picture became the one that was ' too cool.' " When American artists were touched in the conversation, the touch was Ig2 AMERICAN PAINTERS. always generous and gentle. The veteran had no bitterness of spirit. Jeal- ousy and envy simply had no place. I wish that I could transcribe all his tributes and his estimates. Many of his observations on foreign painters, also, would bear repeating. Geronie has immense technical power, he thinks, but lacks refinement of feeling, and is fond of the theatrical. His " Cleopatra before Caesar " was admirable in background ; but the frail cpieen herself was miserably doue. The "Circassian Slave" dancing was vulgar, coarse, badly drawn, and hard and resonant as porcelain. " Knock it, and it will ring." But here, again, the background was beautiful. The " Sword-Dance," how- ever, was a very remarkable piece of execution, and a truthful representation of the scene, the figure of the woman being delightfully managed so that the green veil which floats about her does not injure the rest of the color. Still, in general, Geronie's productions have in them more of work than of pleasure. Wilkie's honest scenes were rich in sentiment and masterly. " Meissonier is all very well ; gets enormous prices for his pictures, far beyond their worth. I suppose he is so well known that everybody who has a collection wants one of his pictures. But his ' Man smoking a Pipe ' — what is it ? Wonderfully made out ; no one could have executed it better : a piece of ingenuity, like that of a man playing a trick, who does something you can't comprehend, almost. He doesn't come out with human feeling, like Wilkie in his ' Gentle Shepherd,' for example. Wilkie's work always has in it that ' one touch of nature ' — human nature — which interests, brightens, awakens the sympathy. The heart is the object that a work of art appeals to. The appeal to the intellect is only incidental. That is why Meissonier is not so great an artist as Wilkie. At the same time a work of art should elevate as well as excite the emotions." The professor was getting upon delicate ground, and I re- solved to ask him point-blank whether the infusion of a moral design into a work of art is artistically legitimate. His reply was cpiick and clear. " A moral end is legitimate," he said; "painters have immoral ends, why can't they have moral ones? A good deal of modern art-work is a prostitution of art. A good many pictures excite immoral feelings in the spectator. They have this effect, whether they were intended to or not. Why should not a painter aim to excite moral feelings ? Much of the present representation of the nude is all wrong, and has no reason for existing. Take any young girl with you < z < < ►4 < IS) o Z D w I H w a o u. w m Cfl D CQ S D J — — =^ ROBERT W. WEIR. 163 into a room where some French figure-pieces are hanging, and she will with- draw her arm from yours and walk out. In Europe, of course, they are more accustomed to this sort of thing. But a great deal of French art is really lewd and immoral, whatever people may say they think about it, and its cleverness does not excuse it. After all, a picture is a register of the artist's own moral state. A vulgar mind cannot produce a refined picture. Most of Stuart's portraits contain an expression that he had on his own lips — yet they are all good portraits. He reflected himself in his works — and he couldn't help it." " What is art ? " I asked. " Art," he replied, " is man's interpretation of beauty, expressed not only in form and color, but in every truth which can be represented or suggested by poetic words or by pictorial skill. It is the chiseled, colored, or written index of the mind ; and for this reason, in its purity, in the integrity of its purpose, it is a strong incentive to good. To study the language which all visible objects speak, and by this means to bring out the higher relations which they bear to human thought and life, is the poetry of art." Professor Weir's modesty prevented me from hearing much about his own pictures. He read me a sketch of the history of painting, which I should like to see in print — the subject is so dull and has been so often " botched," and he treats it so gracefully and so luminously. The variety of his sub- jects in painting and the charm with which he handles them are too well known to justify extended description at this time. In " A Child's Dream," one of his latest unfinished pictures, the scene is very simple — a little naked boy lying on his side on a bed, his left arm under his head, and his right resting on some flowers that have fallen from his hand. He is as sweet and pretty as one of Bouguereau's children, and his dream is of an angel stand- ing by him and attended by three cherubs — the boy's dead sister and broth- ers. The blue eyes of one of the brothers express the tenderest solicitude for the little sleeper ; and the arm of the angel is raised in benediction. In truth of expression, in dramatic force, in absence of studio-marks, in pathos, in unity, in softness and delicacy of flesh-tints, the picture is obviously rich. " You will finish it ? " I asked. " Well, perhaps so — for the next Academy Exhibition. It requires some stock of health to do so and a good deal of 40 164 AMERICAN PAINTERS. study ; " and then be added in an undertone, " Art with me is not a play- thing." As I turned to leave the studio, with its easels, its hanging-casts of feet, arms, legs, and heads, its pictures on the walls and on the floor, its large, old cabinet of carved wood, its high-backed, comfortable chairs, its rug before the cozy fireplace, its loaded bookcases, its store-boxes for paint and brushes, its standing groups of spears, swords, and bows, its collections of armor and num- berless curiosities, its general air of pleasantness and full equipment, the artist accompanied me to the door, and when he opened it there were the cloudless azure and the honest sunlight of a perfect September day. As he stood with one hand grasping the knob, the other resting in his trousers' pocket, and his face illumined with a smile to speed the parting guest, I forgot that he had told me he was seventy-five years old. It was noon out-doors, and the foliage was ripe but not yet faded, beneath a firmament gradationed from zenith-sap- phire to horizon-gray. To me it seemed that it was high-noon also in that serene and generous soul, amid the glory and the fruitage of autumn without a withered leaf. Mr. K. W. Weir was born at New Rochelle, New York, on the 18th of June, 1803. He studied art in Europe, and was the successor of the painter Leslie as Professor of Drawing in the United States Military Academy at West Point. His works are principally historical and genre. Among them are " Columbus before the Council of Salamanca, 1 ' " The Embarkation of the Pilgrims," " Christ and Nicodemus," " The Landing of Hendrik Hudson," " Pa3stum by Moonlight," " View of the Hudson from West Point," and " Child's Evening Prayer." One of his latest pictures is a delightful cabinet marine, in the possession of Mr. Isaac Henderson, Jr. Mr. Alexander H. Wyant, the landscape-painter, was born in Port Wash- ington, Ohio, in 1839. For several years he was a sign-painter in that village. He removed to Cincinnati and painted some pictures, which commended them- selves to the art-patrons of the city, and brought him money enough to go to Europe with. At Diisseldorf he studied under the direction of Hans Gude, and became slightly acquainted with Lessing — "a strange, silent man," he gays, " wlio, when I called on him, sent his portfolio to me, and went off into h < a a h W K a a S g D en Q i < ^ ^ ALEXANDER IT. WYANT. 165 the woods shooting." The Diisseldorf school seems to have made no impres- sion upon the young artist. He held his sympathies in reserve until he saw the landscapes of Constable and Turner in London. He returned to America, opened a studio in New York, and contributed to the Academy Exhibition of 1865 some scenes in the valley of the Ohio River. In 1868 he was elected an Associate of that institution, and in 1869 an Academician, when he exhibited his " View on the Upper Susquehanna." The Adirondack^ are his favorite resort ; he speaks enthusiastically of the rich hues of the Northern woods. "A Midsummer Retreat" and "On the Ausable River" are studies of Adi- rondack scenery. Mr. Wy ant's landscapes in recent years have received a great deal of atten- tion and intelligent admiration, and the spectator who appreciates them would think it almost incredible that their maker ever studied at Diisseldorf. The works of no painter in this country are farther away from the aims and results of the Diisseldorf school. Mr. Bierstadt, one might say, is a typical Diissel- dorfian, and Mr. Wyant is the negation of Mr. Bierstadt. It is to the influ- ence of Constable primarily that the pictures of Mr. Wyant, like those of the best French landscapists, owe their breadth and freedom of treatment ; and Mr. Wyant would be the last person in the world to forgive a critic like Mr. Dawson for speaking of " the dauby and impudent Corot kind." He is em- phatically a painter of wholes, of effects. He looks for, finds, and grasps the specific, essential, permanent truths of a scene, and when he portrays them he knows how to illumine and amplify them. His soft, far distances, and imme- diate foregrounds, are alike impressive in contradistinction to being didactic. The modern pre-Raphaelites are his aversion ; the decorative school is his abhorrence ; and all mere cleverness of composition and technique, all super- ficial artifices, everything that might come between the spectator and the true spirit of the scene, are an offense in his eyes. And his art, like all good art, is delicate, simple, and direct. The principal failing of the modern impressionists, as they are called — and Mr. Wyant's sympathies are decidedly with the inrpressionists — is their frivol- ity, or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold woidd put it, their lack of intellectual serious- ness. The spirit of their invention is groveling. Take, for example, M. Gus- tave Moreau's picture, " L' Apparition," which was a " sensation " in the Salon 166 AMERICAN PAINTERS. a few years ago, concerning which a critic who saw it said : " It possesses a certain intensity and fascination which prove the artist to have been genuinely inspired, but his vision is keenest in regard to truths that the noblest order of design would take but little heed of. The gesture of the dancer, as she pauses in sudden terror at sight of the pale and bleeding face appearing, not as she had asked for it, but with a spectral presence, is strongly dramatic, and is finely contrasted with the unmoved calm of those who sit around. But it may be seen that even here the success belongs rather to a vivid picture of manners than to any deep penetration into individual character. We seem to realize the scene, with its rich dyes of furniture and costume and glittering jewels flashing out from the deep gloom of the interior, much as if it had been rendered by a painter in the court of Herod. The invention cannot escape from the sensuality and cynical luxury which it contemplates ; and so closely has the artist identified himself with the very atmosphere of the life he strives to interpret, that what might have been a great ideal design sinks to the por- traiture of a degraded court. If M. Moreau presents the limitations of the modern artist's imagination, he also illustrates with most remarkable effect the technical skill and taste of the modern French school." Now, Mr. Wyant's aims are not at all frivolous. The impressions which he strives to record, and which he succeeds in recording, are worthy of him- self and of the spectator. His penetration into the heart and the mystery of Nature gets deeper as he grows older ; his insight and sympathy become more profound. We have not an American painter whose artistic purpose is less alloyed with conventionalism, with vulgarity, with opinionativeness, or with " clap-trap. 1 ' Following the even tenor of his way, he interprets the beauty of the unseen and the lasting ; and, if he is sometimes less perspicacious than he might be, the failing is one that leans to virtue's side. When Mr. Lowell, in behalf of himself and some brother poets, wrote of " the coming race, who haply shall not count it to our crime that we, who fain would sing, are here before our time," his words, doubtless, awoke a response in the heart of his friend Mr. William Page ; but an artist who has been as successful as Mr. Eastman Johnson is scarcely an object of poetic ON THE AUSABLE RIVER. From a Painting by Alexander //. Wyant. p. 100. EASTMAN JOHNSON. \<;- consolation. Almost from the start his pictures have been widely appreciated, and have brought him annually a handsome financial return. Many of them, perhaps the best of them, have the simple, tender characterization, the sweet, serene inspiration, that make Edouard Frere's genre works so pleasing; and almost all of them display a real original power that penetrates and discloses the newness and freshness of common scenes. Mr. Johnson's subjects are taken from American life — from the late war, as in his "Drummer-Boy," his " Convalescent Soldier," and his " Pension-Claim Agent ; " from Southern slavery, as in his " Old Kentucky Home," and " Washington's Kitchen at Mount Vernon ; " and from Northern homes and streets in country and city, as in his " Getting warm," a girl standing by a stove, " The Chimney-Swee|>." and " The Organ-Boy." His pictures are presentations of national types. " The absence of historical art in America," says Mr. O. B. Bunce, " is often noticed, and, no doubt, there exists good reason for it. But both our sculptors and painters have utterly ignored one character in our imaginative literature, that not only seems completely consonant with the spirit of our woods, but with the history of America. We refer to young Uncas of Coop- er's ' Mohicans.' This graceful and splendid savage is the type of the Ameri- can past. He personates the spirit of the woods. We think of him as an aboriginal Apollo, or as an epic hero of the forests. He possesses every attribute of the typical hero — youth, beauty, grace, and ' terrible daring.' He is conspicuously the subject for the sculptor, who would translate into stone the spirit of aboriginal life ; he is equally the theme for the painter, who would illustrate the link between Humanity and Nature — for what Undine in German is to the waters, Uncas is to the woods. And what Apol- lo and Adonis are to Greek art, Uncas should be to American inspiration. There is nothing like him, indeed, outside of Greek imagination ; and we may well wonder that he has never been accepted by art, either on account of his splendid personal qualities, or the typical character in which he may be viewed." The suggestion is a good one, and Mr. Eastman Johnson or Mr. Winslow Homer could finely carry it out in painting, while Mr. J. Q. A. Ward or Mr. William R. O'Donovan could do the same in sculpture. Mr. Johnson was born on the 29th of July, 1824, in Lovell, Maine. He exhibited in boyhood the usual symptoms, and made the usual crayon-draw- •11 168 AMERICAN PAINTERS. ino-s. Iu 1845 he painted portraits in Washington, District of Columbia, and the next year exercised himself over the faces and figures of some Harvard College professors and other literary celebrities in its neighborhood. In 1849 he went to Europe, and shared the studio of Emanuel Leutze, at Di'isseldorf. He studied art four years at the Hague, and then proceeded to Paris. On returning home, he renewed his portrait-painting in Washington. In the Paris Exhibition of 1878 he was represented by his "Corn-Husking," which received considerable attention from the foreign critics, one of whom, after remarking that " it was not to be expected that the United States, whose energies are absorbed in opening out its resources, and in the perhaps too feverish devel- opment of its trade, could compete Avith states, some of them having schools of painting the outcome of centuries of practice and traditions," took the opportunity of observing that " in Mr. Winslow Homer's work we come on American ground. ' Snapping the Whip ' is a very pleasant little picture : a string of urchins are joined hand-in-hand, while at the extreme end some have tumbled on the grass ; we seem to hear their shouts of laughter — they at least do not take their pleasure sadly. More sombre in tone and sentiment, but not ungenial, is his ' Visit from the Old Mistress,' a lady coming to see some negro women in their cabin ; the respectful, confiding air of the negresses and the kindly consideration of their old mistress, show great capacity for render- ing the more subtile emotions. ' Sunday Morning in Virginia ' is also a negro subject, four children learning their Bible lesson, and an old woman, with truly pathetic expression, quietly seated by them. These works are small in size, but painted with largeness of manner, low in tone, and rich in color. Another characteristic American scene is Mr. Johnson's 'Corn-Husking,' which, however, is little more than a sketch, but full of capital suggestions of color and effect. The figures are arranged in two lines, with baskets before them, all busily engaged in husking the Indian-corn ; the straw makes a golden car- pet, on which they are relieved ; among the incidents is one of the girl who finds a red ear of corn, whereby her lover may claim a kiss ; in the back- ground is (he farm ; tables are being spread, poultry forage in the straw — altogether a more cheery scene could not be imagined." Mr. Johnson's perception of character is quick and accurate ; he does his own thinking; lie prefers truth to melodramatic effect, but seldom puts in z z a o 2 >• < o z D m w H Z < o s 1) WYA TT EA TON. ] ( ;rs no AMERICAN PAINTERS. the efforts of the old masters in the National Gallery seemed dark and discol- ored. He drank full draughts from that Pierian spring. The works of Mr. Whistler also, especially their decorative qualities, attracted him strongly, and the courtesies accorded him by that artist were very helpful and opportune. The renewed sight of the old masters in the Louvre awakened his profound admiration. In pursuance of his original intention, he entered the atelier of Gerome (in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts), a room about fifty feet square opening from an anteroom used for the hanging of hats and overcoats and for the study of the antique. Gerome went there twice a week during the season, and staid an hour at each visit, criticising the performances of about sixty pupils. When the composition was a large one, too large to be brought con- veniently to the atelier, he went to the student's own studio, and examined it there, charging, of course, nothing for his services in either place. Mr. Eaton began to draw from life, and, at the end of six months, to paint. During the winter he became acquainted for the first time with the works of Corot, Millet, Diaz, Rousseau, and Dupre — and was allured to Barbizon, a village on the outskirts of the forest of Fontainebleau, because Millet lived there. Half of his time for the next four years was spent in and near Millet's house. Ge- rome he respected as a great teacher of technique ; Millet he reverenced as a great master of art. Before going into the country, Mr. Eaton had begun a picture — a group of two peasant-women and a child — which he finished in Paris the next win- ter. In Barbizon he was attracted more by the cultivated fields than by the forest ; and it was not until a few days previous to the end of his first summer there that he mustered courage to call upon Millet, who received him with peculiar warmth. " I found as much to admire in the man," says Mr. Eaton, " as I had found in his works. His studio was unlike any other I ever saw, except John La Farge's ; there had been less attempt to make a studio ; his pictures in it were all turned to the wall, except the one that stood on the easel ; he would not be diverted by them. The few that were visible were panels of the earliest Flemish school, and several casts of the Egyptian antique and the Renaissance. The room was almost like the interior of a barn ; a yard separated the building from the artist's house. Millet was then for the lir-t time at his ease financially, though In; was not yet able to live in advance WYA TT EA TON. 171 of his work — up to the hour of his death, in 1875, he was living on money advanced to him on the pictures he was painting, and most of these wen- orders received several years previous when his prices were comparatively small. His deportment was quiet, even, and unaffected, and, except when he was brought out by a question concerning something that especially interested him, or was annoyed by the presence of an antagonistic idea, he talked very little. His aim was art ; the peasants that he happened to see in ear]y life were the subjects of his pictures, but he would have been equally at home with any other subjects. He sought for expression rather in attitudes than in faces — the largeness of his art so led him." In those summer evenings at Barbizon Mr. Eaton was a frequent and wel- come visitor at the artist's house, one of the artist's sons being his friend. The party played dominoes, and occasionally discussed, in direct and simple fashion, the province and the trophies of pictorial art. Almost every meeting with Millet is marked with a white mark in his pupil's memory. The winters in Paris brought him again under the instruction of Gerome. In 1874 he painted his "Reverie'' — a woman leaning against the mantel, her face in full light and reflected in the mirror — and exhibited it in the Salon that year. " After that I did all sorts of things, made studies of landscapes, designs for pictures, spending a great deal of time in doing nothing — begin- ning, throwing aside, experimenting in general." In the spring of 1875 he began to make studies for his " Harvesters at Rest," which we have engraved, and in the spring of the next j'ear painted the picture. The growth of this work was in this wise : First, the artist made a preliminary sketch just as he was leaving Paris for his summer stay in Barbi- zon. The subject he had had in mind for several years, and had intended to express it in a scene in the interior of a house into which a laborer, after his day's toil, was entering, while his wife, with a child in her arms, was waiting to welcome him. During the harvest of the previous season, however, a scene in a wheat-field had induced him to carry out the idea in the open air instead of within-doors. On arriving at Barbizon, he began to make studies in color and drawings for the picture — in rye-fields, so it happened, whose appear- ance is not dissimilar to that of wheat-fields — all the studies and drawings being in hand simultaneously, some of them being very slight and meagre ; 42 172 AMERICAN PAINTERS. others, like the study of the distant village, elaborate. The picture was a composition throughout, and, while no part of it was a literal transcript, every part was founded upon a separate study from Nature. The peasant's foot, as seen in the painting, was the result of very careful preparation, Mr. Eaton having examined many of the best Tuodels in Paris, after trying unsuc- cessfully among the peasantry of Barbizon. When he had become discour- aged he mentioned the fact to a friend, who at once pulled off his boot and asked, "How'll mine do ?" The friend's foot was just the model he had been wishing for : it met his idea with respect to pedal character, and it also ena- bled him to get the desired movement. He made a thorough study of it, and used it in the picture. Of the peasants in Barbizon he made a great variety of studies, and, when the weather began to be cold, returned to Paris, with his abundant materials, and occupied himself with the composition and drawing until February, when he proceeded to paint, having already devoted the best part of nine months to preliminary and preparatory work. In five weeks more it was finished — finished, at last, on the very day appointed for receiving contri- butions to the Salon, where both Americans and Europeans greeted it warmly. Mr. Eaton did not take the scene as a whole directly from Nature, as he might have done, because the harvest-season was so short, and the aspect of the fields changed greatly every few hours. Having resolved to paint his landscape from studies, he determined to paint his figures also from studies, for the sake of a more nearly perfect unity and harmony. Mr. Eaton's laborious, pro- longed, and intelligent preparation for this picture of the " Harvesters at Rest" is exceedingly interesting, exemplary, and suggestive. To the New York Academy Exhibition of 1875 Mr. Eaton sent his "Reve- rie," the hanging committee refusing one of his landscapes with figures, which two years afterward was accepted by another hanging committee in the same place. He returned to Canada in the summer of 1876, after an absence in Europe of four years, and painted portraits in Montreal. While on a visit to New York City in January, 1877, he was offered the position of instructor in drawing in the schools of the Cooper Institute, an offer which he gladly accepted because it enabled him to widen the range of his opportunities for study, and to in- crease the sympathy of his environment. Early in 1878 he made a portrait- drawing of the late Mr. William Cullen Bryant, who gave him eight or nine W YATT EA TON. 173 sittings. The work was an order from /Scribner's Magazine, was engraved for that periodical by the artist Cole, and is said to have been pronounced by the most intimate friends of the poet the best portrait of him ever produced. His latest pictures are portrait-drawings of Longfellow, Emerson, and Whittier, made at their homes in Cambridge, Concord, and Danvers, Massachusetts. His portrait-drawing of Abraham Lincoln, from a photograph, was also published in Scribner's. " In Mr. Bryant's portrait," says Mr. Eaton, " I aimed to give prominence to the principal fact of his character, to reproduce that which was most really Bryant, to portray the real form of his head, and the life that issued from his eyes. Everything was kept subordinate to the sense of that life ; every detail of the hair and the flesh was generalized ; hardly a wrinkle in the face was preserved — only enough to convey the impression of age. The effort was, along with the generalization, carefully to set forth the individuality of the man. I find myself more in sympathy with sculptors than with paint- ers. Imitative painting I have no fancy for : and the painting of stuffs, bric-a- brac, and so forth, would be a burden. I like, most of all, bare Nature, the human form, landscapes, and effects of light and atmosphere. Art should take real Nature, and carry it out with simplicity and directness in the perfection of type, giving it meanwhile all the qualities of grace and decorative effect." Mr. Eaton was the principal founder and one of the first four members of the American Art Association, which afterward became the Society of Ameri- can Artists, and concerning which this place is perhaps as convenient as any other for saying a word. The occasion of the new organization was a certain act of the National Academy of Design. That institution, in view of what to it seemed to have been a partiality on the part of the hanging committee of 1877 for a few of our younger painters who had been or were studying in Eu- rope, passed a law to the effect that thereafter in every annual exhibition eight feet of line should be reserved for the works of each Academician — eight feet at least, and as many more as a hanging committee should see fit to allow. The law, indeed, was very wisely repealed soon afterward, but its animus could not be forgotten by those to whom it was odious. To them it was the incarnation of the spirit of persecution. The reign of justice, they thought, was over. The Academy intended to take care of itself, letting outsiders eat of the crumbs that fell from the Academicians' table. The pride of the out- 174 AMERICAN PAINTERS. siders was touched. Their strength they knew, because the public had ad- mired their pictures, and the press had praised them. " Why not have a show of our own \ " they asked. Four of them, Mr. Wyatt Eaton, Mr. Walter Shir- law, Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens, and Mrs. Helena De Kay Gilder, met in Mrs. Gilder's studio in Fifteenth Street, New York City, on the 1st of June, 1877. and organized the American Art Association. In conjunction with the Ameri- can artists in Paris, they appointed a committee of judges in that city, who should accept or reject every painting or piece of sculpture there offered to the exhibition in this city. Their object was, least of all, to ingraft foreign art upon American art. They adopted the following resolutions : " Resolved, That an Association be formed by those present, with the object of advanc- ing the interests of art in America, the same to be entitled ' The American Art Associa- tion.' '• Resolved, That the Association hold animal and special exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, and other works of art, and that the first exhibition be held in the city of New York during the coming winter." Mr. Olin S. Warner, Mr. R. Swain Gifford, Mr. Frederick Dielman, Mr. Albert P. Ryder, Mr. Louis C. Tiffany, Mr. Francis Lathrop, Mr. Homer Mar- tin, Mr. John La Farge, Mr. Thomas Moran, Mr. J. Alden Weir, Mr. W. H. Low, Mr. William Sartain, Mr. Samuel Colman, Mr. George Inness, Mr. A. H. Wyaut, and a few others, were elected members, a principal bond of union being the reverence felt for the earlier Italian masters and the early Spanish, Flemish, and Dutch painters. " We are all of us," said one of them, " real admirers of the old masters ; while the typical National Academician admires Lambinet, Bouguereau, Cabanel, Delaroche, Meyer von Bremen, and such men as Guido Reui and Murillo." Their first exhibition began on the 4th of March, 1878, and was a surprise and a success. Mr. A. D. Shatttick was born in Francestown, New Hampshire, on the 9th of March, 1832. He painted the usual number of portraits, and entered the school of the National Academy in New York City. His principal works are landscapes with sheep and cattle, and sea-coast and lake scenes. They are s <0 < w ci ir; h ^ U) 5. ■S^ W I h "is >■ $ JOHN F. WEIR. 175 realistic in treatment, nice in feeling, placid in spirit, and excellent in the pre- vailing impression made by their rich verdure of foregrounds and cool stretches of meadow. Mr. Shattuck has painted sheep with unusual success, and, un- like Verboeckhoven, without loss of truth and simplicity. Mr. John F. Weir, a son of Professor Robert W. Weir, is at the head of the Yale School of Fine Arts. His best-known paintings are " Casting the Shaft," " Lago Maggiore," " The Confessional," " The Column of St. Mark, Venice," and " The Culprit Fay." He wrote an official critical report on the pictures in the Centennial Exhibition, and contributed to the Princeton Re- view for May, 1878, a paper entitled " American Art, its Progress and Pros- pects," from which the following extract is taken : " We have seen Americans settling abroad as artists, not for purposes of study, but that they may bask in what they are pleased to term ' a congenial art-atmosphere.' . . . The very choice of subjects engaging the attention of many of these artists grows out of a sort of epicurean dilettanteism. And how should it be otherwise — for are they not removed out of the flow of vital conditions in which they were born and reared ? Art does not consist of merely picturescpie conceptions of costume ; of painted contadinas decked in spangles and ribbons ; nor is its truest function the merely intellectual, carefully wrought-out stories of times out of mind, full of interesting archaeological research, but no longer accepted with the faith and conviction that are essential to art. A panathenaic proces- sion had once a meaning for the Athenians, kindling a glow on their cheeks and sending the life-blood bounding through their veins on those serene morn- ings in Greece ; but we can only understand this through our intellectual sym- pathies coldly awakened. It has no intensity of meaning for us, no real hold on the heart, no faith, no hope, no promise. Our lines of art cannot enwreath these glad forms with that tenderness and pathos which doubtless caused the Greek artist's hand to tremble with suppressed delight as he chiseled them in marble. We look in upon all this ' askance and strangely,' not really under- standing it, but pretending to a sympathy we do not, cannot feel. " And the same may be said of our modern mediaevalists. We cannot revive that peculiar religious fervor which found natural and spontaneous 176 AMERICAN PAINTERS. expression in the ecclesiastical art and symbolism of the middle ages. If we affect this, it becomes mere sentimentality — an intellectual sentimentality it may be, but none the less removed from true sentiment, however curious and learned. In art it will not do to let the intellect work without the heart. The feelings, the impulses, the passions, these are at the root of all true art, as they are the moving, underlying energies of life itself. We cannot doubt that human life has everywhere, now as in times past — in America as in Greece, as in Italy, as in France — all the requisites for great art. If the art- instinct be properly directed — not to seeking in Nature for that which corre- sponds to our preconceived notions of what makes a picture, but rather with the conviction that what interests us in Nature will surely interest us in the picture, and make the picture, in spite of all that may be said about masters, and schools, and discipline, and method, and vehicle, and what not, which have their place but not the preeminence. While the earnestness and study that are directed to technical acquirements are sure to perfect these means and render them attractive, yet, for the real advancement of American art, we must look to those who, while they value the means of pictorial art, direct their principal earnestness and study to seeking those higher values in char- acter and beauty which have far greater significance for those who constitute the great body of lovers of art, and who form the true audience of the artist ; otherwise, we must take the ground that poetry is not for the people, but for the grammarian, who can dissect the verse and designate its quantities. Art is not alone for artists, but for man ; and it is needless to add that man, in the most intelligent sense, knows where to place the preeminence. Let the artis- tic insight search deeply into Nature and human action, and it will find pict- ures in stones — certainly in that toil and labor which consecrate and render even religious, as well as beautiful, such simple subjects as engaged the art of Jean Francois Millet, who, while he took Nature for his model, did not mis- take his model — if he ever employed one — for Nature. Our own life is equally teeming with similar subjects, perhaps less happily clothed with quaintness, but far more worthy of engaging the thought of the painter than that 'picturesque material' which is often so cleverly and gracefully disposed in the pictures and workshops of inferior artists. The aesthetic should doubt- less have its place, but the deeper impulses should likewise manifest them- < I m w X h z h in < S 43 WILL J J .1/ /'.I QE. 177 selves iu art, if it is to have any permanent hold on the affections or on the mind. Our older artists have not all lost sight of this, and in the work of some few of the younger men there is evidence of its hearty recognition." The honored name of William Page may fitly end the series of American painters whose works are illustrated in this volume. For some months Mr. Page has been an invalid at his home on Staten Island ; and the brush which so often has charmed us from our wearied selves, and been a torch to enkindle our nobler sentiments, is laid aside. Mi'. Page was born in Albany, New York, on the 23d of January, 1811, and, when eight years old, he came to New York City. After studying law and theology in succession, he entered the studio of the late Professor S. F. B. Morse, and in early manhood went to Italy. In Venice, in 1853, he became a disciple of Titian, and ever since that time has studied, expounded, and reverenced that master. " He has the same traits as Titian," says one critic. " The laws which Titian discovered have been unheeded for centuries," says another, " and might have remained so had not the mind of William Page felt the necessity of their revival and use." His copy of Titian's " Portrait of Himself" is one of his most representative works. Mr. Page is preeminently a portrait-painter, and to 8cribner''s Magazine for September, 1875, he contributed an article on "The Study of Shakespeare's Portraits," iu which he laid down, as follows, some principles of portrait-paint- ing : "If I am accused," he said, " of too microscopic regard of this face " (the Kesselstadt mask of Shakespeare), " I must reply, ' Nature is not less in leasts ; and the portrait-painter knows that many littles make a mickle.' Even up toward the highest art Nature submits to rule and compass. Geometry is a never-failing guide and friend, which Phidias and Titian never forsook as long as it was able to lead them. Leonardo's excellent color and chiaw-oscuro are somewhat fettered by his immense scientific knowledge, and, beside Titian's, suggest to a sensitive eye the gradations of stairs rather than the infinite and immeasurable more and less of the light from a lens, with the pulsating undu- lations which Nature shows, and which come and go — a mere suspect of which must be set down in imitative art, and not a permanent fixture. Titian's 178 AMERICAN PAIXTERS. geometry is as faithful and true as Leonardo's, but less obtrusive and more honest, and well to be trusted in the dark. The art of hiding art here cul- minates, or, as I should say, the art of hiding science. But, if in a portrait or other work of art geometry and all science are confounded, and art itself, which we will now call imitation of Nature, shows feeble vitality, the result is pitiful indeed. I would always urge the observance of the eleventh command- ment, even in art : to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness; so, if the artist fail in all his higher aims, he may finally turn to the friendly homes of geometry, and at last be received into its houses. Between science and art there is the relation of cook and roaster. The trade of the first can be learned, that of the other must be born into. " Art begins where geometry ends. . . . Portraiture is the cable that holds the argosies of all the arts fast to the land of fact. Look into the eyes of Shakespeare in his portraits ; look into his heart in the sonnets ; feel the rhythm of his head ; see his thought and life in his plays — and the pious im- agination feels little lack of his real presence. . . . The best bee builds her cell by the rule of her instinctive law, and it is more perfect than we busy- bodies could devise. . . . The order of Nature is fixed in portraits as in plan- ets ; while the friar friends of science worked the rack, the planets moved on, abashed neither by old doubters nor new observers. Truth is light as day ; it is we who are blind, whom Mother Nature waits for to come to maturity, to see us enjoy the pleasure of seeing what the Creator made to please himself. . . . Art is not the pastime of great men. . . A true likeness shows one in- side out ; the leopard does not change the spot of the heart. Its color is set on the palette, and is the least refrangible one in our spectrum. The soul is photographed on the face. If one has the gift to develop it by the processes of imitative art, the world is so much the richer for the result. The great por- traits of Raphael and Titian are soul tale-bearers no less than the terza rima of Dante or the ' Sonnets ' of Shakespeare. . . . The life and works of Dante tally with his face. In the face of Cromwell the great frontal base of his brain, as left in his mask, and the power of his lower jaw, are the upper and nether millstones of his history. A true portrait is that incorrigible page of history which neither justice nor mercy invalidates. It is the dead-level of man amid fluctuating fashion and fickle opinion. God made man in his own FARRAGUT IN THE SHROUDS OF THE HARTFORD. From a Painting by William Page. p. 1T8. WILL/AM PA OE. 179 human image. So the soul creates its outer shell in likeness to itself. If the man is hid in his stature, it is the duty of the artist to pick him out." A few years ago Balzac exclaimed that he was ashamed of French painters because their ignorance of the science of colors had caused their pictures to fade. " Mon portrait par Boulanger," he wrote, " est devenu la croute la plus hideuse qu'il soit possible de voir ; les couleurs etaient ou mauvaises ou mal combinees, et c'est tout noir, c'est affreux ! Nous n'avons plus des peintres." A portrait by one of the Scottish painters is said recently to have been taken from its position in the London National Gallery, transferred to a storeroom and hung upside-down in order to let the eyes in it run back to their normal place. They had melted and were flowing. It is a well-known fact that the greens in some of Ruysdael's and Hobbema's landscapes have changed into black, giving to these works their so-called " melancholy sentiment." Some of Mr. Page's pictures, too, have lost color, or begun to peel, the reason being that he has been fond of making all sorts of experiments in the mixing of pigments. The City Hall, in New York, contains Page's portrait of Governor Marcy, and the Boston Athenaeutn one of his " Holy Families." In the New York Historical Society's rooms hangs his " Ruth and Naomi." The late Mr. Evert A. Duyckinck owned one of his sweet pictures of children. His own portrait of himself is one of his most artistic and thorough performances, and so is his portrait of Shakespeare, from the Kesselstadt mask, and his portrait of Wash- ington from the Houdon cast. His " Farragut in the Shrouds of the Hart- ford " deserves a place in the national Capitol. His " Head of Christ," which presents the features of a Galilean Jew, and was intended so to do, is in the gallery of Mr. Theodore Tilton. He has painted hundreds of portraits of men and women in public and private life. For some years he was the Presi- dent of the National Academy of Design. Mr. William R. O'Donovan, the sculptor, an intimate personal friend of Mr. Page, says, in a letter to the writer : " You wish me to give you some recollections of Page, but, looking back over the years in which it has been my good fortune to know him well, it seems hard to say anything that will convey even an approximate idea of the most individualized person with whom I ever came in contact. Few, I think, have known him well, or been 180 AMERICAN PAINTERS. able to form a just conception of his character, for the reason that he is ex- tremely sensitive to the influences of what may be called individual magne- tism. Even those who have seen much of him for many years have, owing to a lack of adaptability on either side, been shut out from the knowledge of some of the most essential phases of his character, and led to form opinions entirely erroneous. A man, all whose energies have for a long lifetime been devoted to pursuits with which people at large have little knowledge or sym- pathy, is apt to shut himself up within himself to such an extent as to render it almost impossible to express, to others than those who have the capability of losing themselves for the time being, any really vital part of himself. That continuous contact with the world, through which one may keep upon its plane and express one's self to it, is a thing to which Page has been, within my knowledge of him, greatly averse — possibly unduly so. He has not been in the habit of going much outside the rather limited circle of his intimate artist-friends ; not because of any lack of social qualities or wide sympathies, but because his devotion to his own studies is the strongest part of his nature. To those with whom he is in sympathy no one can be more communica- tive or interesting, but upon many persons even of intelligence and education his conversation would have little effect, for the reason that it is the outcome of a nature essentially spiritual, and lacking in that sensuous quality through which the widest and most effective medium of communication is furnished. The lack of this quality will, too, I think, explain why a painter of so emi- nent abilities, as almost all artists will concede to Page, has gained so little popular appreciation, and why many of his works have provoked so bitter controversy. For persons without any great spiritual apprehension his pict- ures have little meaning, although his 'Head of Christ' and his 'Venus' may be cited as examples to the contrary. They are certainly sensuous — that is, they have the quality of sensuousuess which is arrived at through the intellect rather than through the feelings, and which verges so nearly on sensuality as to be extremely offensive to certain organizations. But, after this repulsion has spent itself, the works attract even more strongly than at first they re- pelled. How much an artist should subject himself to the influences of the great current of every-day affairs is certainly a question of very grave im- portance ; for while, on the one hand, these influences must have a leveling WILLIAM PAGE. 181 effect, on the other they have certain healthy corrective properties that, if judi- ciously used, cannot fail to be of great benefit to the artistic temperament, which tends too often to isolation. The artist should certainly keep a means of passage from the real to the ideal, from the objective to the subjective, so that his work may have strong hold upon the people of his own time, and offer to them a revelation of those remoter qualities of Nature which it is his special province to see and to express; but the temptation is always greater to render Nature as it appears to the uninspired and untrained eye of the average man, than to seek for the expression of cpialities which give to his work a permanent value. Certainly it cannot be said of Page that he has in any sense sacrificed truth, as he saw it, for the sake of popularity, and of that material success which follows always in its wake. Where he has erred, it has been in the opposite direction. For example, he has always held that flesh can be rendered truthfully onby in a much lower key of color than is used by most artists ; and, in adhering to his convictions in this respect, has sacrificed much more than most men would care to have done. Pictures painted in so low a key, when hung upon the walls of our badly-lighted houses, can scarcely be seen ; but he has always held that they should not be falsely painted be- cause houses are badly lighted. Again, his famous portrait of Mrs. Crawford, the wife of the sculptor, painted in Rome some twenty years or more ago, was subjected to much criticism by the artists there, because, as they said, the paintings of the old masters had been in a higher key, which had lowered with age. The venerable sculptor Gibson, however, being appealed to in the matter, gave it as his opinion that it was well to have a picture right once. I certainly cannot but agree with Page that, if it is necessary to paint falsely with the expectation that time will right the matter, painting is a useless and trifling art, which ought at once to be abandoned. Many painters, I know, hold that Page's manner of painting is entirely too methodical ; but to me it seems perfectly logical, and in no way calculated to cramp or smother the use of all the creative faculties, but, on the contrary, to facilitate their use. His canvas is always prepared in a middle tint, between light and dark, the picture being drawn in and modeled in black-and-white, and the flesh grad- ually worked up into color that seems very red and raw, until toned by a glaze of yellow. His method, which I am incapable of giving with any 44 |v' AMERICAN PAINTERS. amount of fullness, is what he holds io have been the method of Titian, and the only method capable of the highest results in pictorial art. However this may be, his painting of flesh seems to me, with my limited knowledge of color, to be the most adequate solution of the painter's most difficult problem that Las been attained by any modern artist with whose works I am familiar. The o-reat principle of reserve in art upon which Page always strenuously in- sists is certainly a just one, and it applies with equal force in all the arts. It is a principle that he, more than any other of our artists, has understood and ex- emplified. Through his early comprehension of it he avoided many attractive art-heresies that so vitiate the taste as to make it impossible to feel the ele- vating, reposeful influences of the higher art exemplified in the Elgin marbles, the painting of Titian, the music of Beethoven, and the poetry of Shakespeare. All these efforts of genius are, in Page's estimation, on the same plane, and are the very highest expressions of art. He has little sympathy with that period of Greek sculpture which produced such works as the ' Fighting Gladi- ator,' or with such poetry as Byron wrote. Every one who knows him at all knows his admiration for Shakespeare ; but only those who have heard him read the works of the great master in his studio know how close and sympa- thetic a student he has been. His reading is perfectly easy and simple, with- out the least strain after dramatic effect, but it opens up to the hearer an infin- ity of new meanings, of remoter and subtiler beauties, which come to him as a revelation, and make him feel that he has gone beyond the outward expression into the very soul of the poet. I have seen Page going about his work in studio-dress, repeating, half unconsciously, one of Shakespeare's sonnets, or Keats's ' Ode on a Grecian Urn,' with such force and vividness as made me believe for the moment that it was au unconscious expression of himself. This, indeed, is the secret of his admirable reading — for reading in the com- mon sense it is not at all : he is simply using another's words to express what he himself feels. It was his own deficiency in language, as he has told me, that gave him an early and abiding love of poetry. Since words come to him with an effort, he uses them discriminatingly, and to express exactly the thing he has in mind. I doubt if Lowell could read his own poetry with half the effec- tiveness that Page renders it; and I doubt also if he has nearly so high an appreciation of it. Certainly no poet ever had a better friend than Lowell WILLI A .!/ PA (IE. [g3 has in Page. The painter has brought many people to see the great beauty of this poet's verse, and I myself am under obligations to him for having opened to me this great mine of poetic wealth. " With the single exception of George Inness, I know of no man in whom the religious sentiment is so strong as in Page, or who has so vivid and logical an apprehension of spiritual things. His religion has not been a garment worn loosely, but a companion that has gone hand-in-hand with his art, the one helping the other. It has been, too, the informing principle of his every- day life. So essentially is it the moving principle of his nature that it has taken on no formal method of expression. He recognizes the great axiom that all visible results must have an adequate cause, and never reasons, as do our modern scientists, who proceed without regard to it, and consequently run into all manner of vagaries. The last time I talked with him — he was then in ill health — he lamented his inability at times to grasp the remoter spiritual truths, the apprehension of which had been to him always the highest source of pleasure and the greatest incentive to action. I think he scarcely ever took into account, when he set about doing a thing, any of the merely worldly mo- tives which weigh so much with most men, or had another thought than to do what was before him to be done with all his might, and with the best faculties he could bring to bear upon it. With him it has not been art for art's sake, but art for truth's sake — truth in its noblest sense, the divine principle. No one knows better than he how any trifling with art, only making it subserve base purposes, will bring the fearful penalties of a seared conscience and debauched imagination — a price too high to be paid for anything, even for the whole world. If occasionally he has made failures, these have been the results simply of a never-ceasing search for light, and a contimious struggle for higher attainments. Any violation of Nature for what is called ' artistic effect,' anything with the slightest tincture of trickery, is to him rank sacrilege. Fidelity to Nature is, in his view, the one essential principle which should never be forsaken ; not Nature upon the merely physical plane, but Nature as it is to those who see, in all its outward palpable forms, merely the physical manifestation of the informing principle. His advice to pupils would be : 'Be faithful to Nature ; do what you see in a spirit of self-abnegation and with a reverential hand. After a while it wall be given you to see, beyond these 184 AMERICAN PAINTERS. ever-changing outer forms, new beauties and the infinite variety of higher truth.' " The future of art in this country is just now a subject not unpleasant to contemplate. Our leading young artists have received a liberal education in the best academies in the world ; our own art-schools are multiplying their num- ber and resources, many of them under the direction of these well-equipped pupils ; lay appreciation and love of art are visibly increasing ; and at least some earnest men and women are hopefully waiting for a new revelation of the beautiful in Nature. Self-conceit, and the indolence proceeding therefrom, are smaller than formerly. Americans are coming to talk less of American art, of Munich art, of French art, or of Greek art, and to think more of art itself — not art made tongue-tied by authority, nor art that imitates Nature, but art that, using the principles on which Nature works, produces creations of its own ; while criticism itself, properly and wholesomely intolerant of imperfec- tion, is nevertheless becoming, in its aims, more constructive and less destruc- tive, standing with the artist where he stands, and recognizing his purposes as well as his processes and results. The outlook is to some extent really promising ; and, if the love of Nature, the desire for knowledge, and the manly persistence in toil, which characterize the most cultured of our painters, shall continue, the leaven will be enough to permeate a large lump. THE END. s B D 000 381 653 5 %mmmm