Charles H. Caffin
American Masters of Painting
Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664632869
Table of Contents
I
GEORGE INNESS
IN the record of American art three names stand out distinctly as those of innovators: Whistler, La Farge, and George Inness. While Whistler’s influence has been felt throughout the whole art world, and La Farge (to quote from the Report of the International Jury of the Exhibition of 1889) “has created in all its details an art unknown before,” Inness was a pathfinder, only within the domain of American art, and was led by instinct into ways already trodden by the great men of other countries. But this does not make him less an innovator. Nor does the fact that he was certainly influenced by “the men of 1830,” when he came to know their works. The point is that throughout his life his evolution was from within.
His father, a retired New York grocer, would have had him enter business, and even opened a small store for him in Newark, N.J., whither the family had moved from Newburg. But the son’s mind was set on art. Like Durand, Kensett, and Casilear, he was apprenticed for a short time to an engraver, and subsequently studied painting for a little while with Regis Gignoux, a pupil of Delaroche. For the rest he was self-taught. His contemporary, Frederick E. Church, younger than himself by a year, was seeking instruction from Thomas Cole, the founder of the “Hudson River School,” whose grand topographical landscapes the pupil was to follow in his studies of the Andes, of Niagara, and of other impressive regions. The young Inness, meanwhile, was independently studying the individual forms of nature. That he should be insensible to the influence of Cole was out of the question, and so late as 1865, when he was forty years old, and had returned from his first visit to Europe deeply impressed with the work of the Barbizon painters, we can detect in at least two pictures, “Delaware Valley” and the large “Peace and Plenty” of the Metropolitan Museum, that fondness for grandeur of distance and extent so characteristic of Cole. But we can also detect the expression of a fuller intimacy with the scene than Cole could give. Inness’s own penetrating study of natural phenomena, indorsed for himself, no doubt, by the corresponding aim of the Barbizon painters to reach the inwardness of the landscape, had enabled him more thoroughly to comprehend the vastness; to collate
From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq.
THE BERKSHIRE HILLS.
By George Inness.
From the collection of William T. Evans, Esq.
SUNSHINE AND CLOUDS.
By George Inness.
the details and render them subordinate to a single powerful impression. The conception and progress of each of those pictures is from the general to the particular, and not contrariwise, as in the topographical landscape; and this contrary has impressed upon them a distinct personal feeling; the realization in each case of a mood of nature, powerfully felt.
But in alluding to the topographical character of Cole’s landscapes, I am very far from wishing to belittle the essential greatness of that painter. While his means of expression were comparatively inadequate, while he may even have mistaken the true province of landscape painting, his conception of nature was unquestionably an exalted one, and likely to be acceptable to a spirit so eagerly aspiring as Inness’s. Moreover—and this is often overlooked—it was the natural result of the time and environment. To a young people, with its growing consciousness of free and independent nationality, surrounded by the vastness of nature as yet scarcely altered by man, what could have been more attractive than this sense of nature’s grandeur? In their attitude toward the nature around them they may have been nearer to the truth than we give them credit for. We must not forget that our estimate of the functions of landscape painting comes to us from Holland, a country of limited horizons, through France, whose soil is highly cultivated and studded with the charming intimacy of rural life. Finding this paysage intime true to nature and intrinsically lovely, while the so-called classic landscape was grandiloquently superficial, we have assumed that the former is the true and only satisfactory representative of pictorial landscape. Perhaps too rashly; for even as painting has been able to compass the solemnities of religion, so a painter may arise who will join to technical ability sufficient force of mind to compass the solemnities of nature. Meanwhile, we should at least remember that Cole drew his inspiration from American scenery, which the modern painter is studying through spectacles borrowed from France and Holland.
Where Inness showed himself superior to the American painters of his early life was in the comprehensive control which he exercised over his view of nature; a control assisted by his close study of nature’s forms, and of their relative significances. He was, in fact, the father of the naturalistic movement in American landscape; for it seems clear that he fully realized the trend of his studies before he had found them indorsed by the Barbizon painters. And this separate and independent offshoot of the naturalistic movement, appearing almost simultaneously in the New World, is a very curious and interesting problem. In the case of the Barbizon painters the logic of the movement can be readily traced: in the general dissatisfaction with classicism; in the immediate influence of Constable and the tradition of the Dutch; and, finally, in a sort of compromise between the realism of Courbet and the poetic rage of the Romanticists. But that, unprompted by outside suggestion, a yearning for