WHEN Fortune is apportioning qualities to the artistic temperament, she does not always include character. I mean that unflinching rectitude of purpose which at once answers “Adsum!” to the call of duty, and is not of the kind that says, “‘I go, sir,’ and went not.” Sacrifice to the call of art is by comparison a slenderer quality. It is not so difficult to suffer for the sake of an ideal, especially when a man is young, or even when he is old, if he keeps his heart young within him, a faculty which is often rather an incident of the artistic temperament than a matter of personal effort. But sacrifice to the call of duty, a duty outside of the art ideals, represents a much higher quality, demanding the exercise of personal force and the maintenance of a quite unusual endurance; the quality, in fact, which one sums up as character.

This is one clew to the reading of George Fuller’s life as an artist; that, at the call of what seemed to him to be his duty, he gave up the single-aimed pursuit of the treasure where his heart lay; disregarded, as the world would say, the chances of a lifetime for the dull monotony of a life of arduous routine, and yet, despite the sacrifice, more probably because of it, found his ideal after all. But there is another clew. Fuller’s ideal and his craving after artistic expression were bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, an integral, inseparable part of himself. They did not need stimulating any more than a healthy appetite, were so normally a part of him as to preserve their natural functions under any circumstances of life. This is not the way in which artistic proclivities always reveal themselves. In some cases the art instinct is not dissimilar to a taste in waistcoats; double-breasted to-day, to-morrow, single; sprigged, plain, coloured, sober, to meet the occasions of the moment; put off as easily as put on; a habit rather than an instinct. This is the trivial, masquerading side of art, so detestable in a solid world of facts; a conscienceless sniffing of the air for change of fashion, that reminds one of the jackdaw with a few peacock feathers in his tail, strutting around and trying to deceive us into recognizing his superiority to fowls of ordinary degree. I doubt if the true artist ever humbled himself to proclaim his worth, and nothing more proclaims his worth than his beautiful humility. It was so, I am sure we may believe, in Fuller’s case. He was not even conscious of his power in the way that smaller men of less character are: only conscious of something that he longed to do and would do in time, if life were spared, notwithstanding the claims upon his attention of other and more mundane matters. The beauty of such a process of evolution is all from within: natural, like the bursting of the honeysuckle into fragrance and blossom over waste, dry places; not to be judged by what it might have been in other soil and climate, but fulfilling its special function of beauty through the inherent mystery of its own independent force.

The product of good New England stock, George Fuller was born at Deerfield, Mass., in 1822, his father being a farmer and his mother the daughter of a lawyer. At thirteen years he was taken to Boston and put first into a grocery and later into a shoe store, but only for a short time, soon returning to the home farm and resuming his studies at the country school. Already he had displayed a taste and aptitude for drawing. When fifteen, he joined an expedition to Illinois that was engaged in making surveys for the first railway in the state, and then again, after two years, returned to school at Deerfield. It soon became evident that the youth had more leanings toward art than business, and he was allowed to accompany his half-brother Augustus, a deaf mute who painted miniatures, in a ramble through the smaller towns of New York State, executing portraits at fifteen dollars apiece. How much of simple romance there was in these beginnings: the early influence of the hill life, for Deerfield is a village among the hills; the wider freedom on the western prairies; and the roaming from place to place with paint box and wallet, light of heart and heel! All these influences tended toward independence, self-reliance, and wholesomeness of mind, to the natural and firm upbuilding of the individuality in himself, before he came in contact with influences directly artistic. He was fortunate, also, in his early friendship with artists of so fine a quality of mind and beautiful personal character as the sculptors Henry Kirke Brown and Thomas Ball. The former, eight years his senior, invited him to his studio in Albany, where he studied drawing for nine months, until Brown and his wife went to Europe. Then he spent the winters of 1842 and 1843 in Boston, returning to Deerfield each summer. In the latter year, having been elected a member of the Boston Artists’ Association, he wrote to Brown, who was then in Rome, “I have concluded to see nature for myself, through the eye of no one else, and put my trust in God, awaiting the result.” It is just such simple-souled, reliant men who can possess their souls with patience and reach their end by waiting.

In these early days at Boston, during part of which he shared a studio with Thomas Ball, he was painting portraits; but in 1846, the year after his mother’s death, he sold his first imaginative picture, “A Nun at Confession,” to a patron in Pittsfield, Mass., for six dollars! In the following year he moved to New York at the solicitation of his friend Brown, who had returned home, eager to devote the experience he had gained abroad to the representation of American subjects in America. During the ten years which followed of study and work in New York, varied with visits to Philadelphia and the South, it is not difficult to trace the effect of Brown’s influence upon his earnest friend. One result of it was to prepare the latter for his own visit to Europe; to open his understanding beforehand to the wonders that he was to see, and at the same time to habituate him to an attitude of study, which would enable him to receive the technical lessons of the various schools and their stimulus to the imagination without being lost in the wealth of impressions or unduly influenced by any one of them. The opportunity to visit Europe came in 1859, when, at an interval of only a few months, both his elder brother and father died, so that the duty of caring for the farm and for those left dependent upon it fell to him. But before settling down he made a tour of five months, visiting London,—where he met Rossetti and Holman Hunt,—Paris, and the chief cities of Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Holland; making sketches in the galleries, and finding especial delight in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Correggio, and Murillo, apparently with a particular admiration for the colourists.

An infinite pathos, we may feel, gathers over this visit, affording, as it did, a view of the Promised Land to a pilgrim whose steps were so peremptorily recalled to the hard routine of the far-off hill farm; a first meeting with the lady of his imagination in her full glory at the moment when he found himself compelled to forego entire allegiance; a brief vision of the ideal before setting his hand to the prosaic reality of life. Yet, perhaps, to feel this is to misread the nobility of Fuller’s character. To him, we may believe, there was a fuller, more rounded comprehension of beauty in life, manifested simply in the living of it well with hands and back and brain as well as with the subtler forces of the imagination; that in this big organic beauty, the beauty of art might be a fly wheel, but still

was only a part of the beautiful whole. So what seems to us such a tremendous sacrifice, to him may have been assuaged by the satisfaction of having the method in which his life should be lived so clearly set before him; and in this reading of his mind one pays, perhaps, the most honourable tribute to his character.

For fifteen years no picture by him was seen at the exhibitions, and only a few intimate friends knew that he still painted in the intervals of farm labour; at first in one of the rooms of his home, and later in an old carriage house, converted into a studio. His subjects were elaborations of the sketches made in Europe, small landscapes, and portraits of his children, relatives, and friends; often never finished, sometimes destroyed because they did not reach what he desired. Meanwhile his work on the farm was successful; many improvements were carried out, and tobacco culture was introduced with good results, until the fall of prices in 1875. This forced him into bankruptcy and restored him to art. During the ensuing winter he finished twelve canvases, which were exhibited at Boston, meeting with hearty praise and a ready sale. In 1878 appeared at the exhibition of the National Academy “By the Wayside” and “The Turkey Pasture in Kentucky,” followed in succeeding years by “The Romany Girl,” “And She was a Witch,” “The Quadroon,” and “Winifred Dysart.” Being elected a member of the Society of American Artists, he sent to its exhibitions “Evening—Lorette, Canada,” “Priscilla Fauntleroy,” and “Nydia.” Among his other works, exclusive of numerous portraits, especially of ladies and children, were “Psyche,” “The Bird Catcher,” “Girl and Calf,” “Fedalma,” and “Arethusa,” the last named being his single example of the nude. But this rich aftermath of creative work was all too short, lasting only eight years, for George Fuller died after a brief illness in March, 1884. He was buried at Deerfield, and a few weeks later a memorial exhibition was held in Boston comprising 175 paintings: an almost complete rÉsumÉ of what existed of his art work, produced through forty years. Two years later the house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published a sumptuous memorial volume, containing appreciations by W. D. Howells, Frank D. Millet, Thomas Ball, W. J. Stillman, and J. J. Enneking; a sonnet by Whittier, and engravings by Closson, Kruell, and Cole.

It is useless to speculate upon what might have been if Fuller’s productivity had not been interrupted by those fifteen years upon the farm; but when he emerged from them it was with a style of painting very different from his early one. That had been hard in outline, minute and careful in finish; now it was immersed in atmosphere, tenderly elusive, quietly luminous, a revery of colour, reticently harmonious. It was no longer the work of an observation intent upon the outer world, but the outpouring of his innermost spirit, mellowed, chastened, become contemplative by time. One may believe that the outer world had become more and more identified with the necessities of his life, from which he sought a refuge within himself in his own dreams of spiritual beauty. For the names of his pictures count as little as the subjects. In all his best, notably in the “Winifred Dysart,” “Nydia,” “The Quadroon,” and in “The Romany Girl,” especially that example of the latter owned by J. J. Enneking, he is not concerned with portraying the individual but a type, and in giving to it especially a significance of spirit, investing it in each case with phases of what he had learned to realize as the spiritual quality of rarest, subtlest beauty. How could the essential fragrance and indefinable loveliness of maiden innocence as it appealed to the matured sympathies of his advanced years be expressed otherwise than he had felt it,—veiled in the romance of shadowed light, a thing too rarely delicate for sharp, decisive handling? And yet beneath this tender suggestiveness of method, what strong brush work is discernible! Not clever, truly, or facile and masterful; rather plodding, ay, tentative, as of compressed emotion striving patiently for expression. One has seen a dreamy, tender treatment of the female form, which had no such staunch underlying structure to support it, work which attracts by what we hastily style subtlety, and later find to be but an exquisite veneer to an unstable conception; the artistic affectation of men whose coarseness of character belies the exquisiteness, and, as one studies their pictures longer, leaves us unconvinced of their sincerity. But in the purity of Fuller’s conceptions the man himself and his deliberate, habitual conviction are embodied.

It is a remarkable feature of Fuller’s development that whereas in age he belonged to the earlier generation of American painters, he should have emerged from his fifteen years’ retreat and unaided communing with himself more truly modern in feeling than the younger men who were then returning from Paris. By very different ways he had reached an ideal not dissimilar to Whistler’s; not, to be sure, expressed with the latter’s inimitable, because so personal, finesse, but alike in its devotion to the abstract and in realization of the correspondence between painting and music, and not so unlike in its method of expression, so reticent and mysterious. Fuller also anticipated the motives of the still younger man, such as Le Sidaner and Duhem, to whom the inherent spirituality of the landscape or figure is the absorbing search, which they seek to embody in terms as intangible as possible. Wrapt from all contact with the distractions of the art world, he had with the prescience of sincerity put forth his hand toward the most interesting phase of the latest movements. I mean the search for the significance of things, as of higher and more abiding value than the things themselves.

Fuller’s life was a romance of more than usual human import, characterized by a singular unity of purpose. He is not to be considered, on the one hand as a man, and on the other as an artist, with qualities, as is not unusual, respectively dissimilar and conflicting. His art was of himself, truly an ingredient, nourished, disciplined, chastened, always sweetly wholesome, modest and noble, like his life. He lived the latter well, and in this high ideal of manhood realized the ideal of his art.