THERE is a species of ivy in England—I do not know if it exists in this country—that grows over old stone walls and towers. It is treelike in character and size. Probably it was never planted deliberately against the masonry, but reached its habitat by one of those romances of nature’s accidents. Finding the support that its young life needed, it clung and mounted; gradually, however, gaining independent strength until in the maturity of its growth it has its own boughs, so hardy that a man may climb by them, and puts forth bunchy masses of leaves and berries that disguise the original support in a luxuriance of independent growth.

Such is often the story of an artist’s development, and is that of Wyant’s. In the small town of Defiance, in Ohio, where he lived, there was little to suggest to the boy what pictures meant, and yet he had the picture-making faculty in himself: the observant eye and desire to translate into line the forms of things. He drew incessantly: the forms of stones, of banks, and tree roots, their stems and branches, and made studies of the leaves, separately and minutely, as well as in masses. I like to think of him as a child lying full length before the kitchen fire with a bit of burnt wood taken from it, drawing on the floor; and fancy that in that soft, suggestive medium of charcoal, and on the rough surface of his improvised panel, he may have got his first dim consciousness of the meaning of synthesis in landscape; the securing of character and tone, and the fascination of working in masses rather than in outline.

When he was old enough to be set to a trade, he was apprenticed to a harness maker, working in his leisure hours at sign painting. But all roads lead to Rome, and a youth might derive much skill in form, as well as breadth of manner, in this humble department of the fine arts. Somewhere about the fifties he found himself in Cincinnati, even then an oasis in the desert of western indifference to, or ignorance of, art. It was here, in a private collection, that he first discovered what painted pictures were like, and, with a rare instinct for one so young, it was Inness’s work that captured his imagination. A youth, passionate and eager as Wyant was, must have his god or goddess; a being infinitely above him, yet, perhaps, of infinite condescension, who will listen to his devotion. Some of us may have offered our heart and future to ladies nearly old enough to be our mothers; Wyant’s divinity was of the other sex, an Apollo at whose oracle he would inquire. He found the means to come to New York and lay his sketches before the master, and never forgot the kindly criticism which bid him be of good courage and persevere.

He was now about twenty years old, and nearly ten more years were to elapse before his own independent growth was to establish itself. Meanwhile its direction had been assured by the influence of Inness; its manner of growth was to be partly affected by the Norwegian painter, Hans Gude, who had graduated from DÜsseldorf and was at this time working in Carlsruhe. He had been the pupil of Achenbach, who, as Muther says, had “taught him to approach the phenomena of nature boldly and realistically, and not to be afraid of a rich and soft scale of colour.” He had felt the influence, also, of Schirmer, whose fondness for the so-called Italian landscape had guided him to the “acquisition of a certain large harmony and sense for style in the structure of his pictures.” Such was Gude, to whom Wyant went for instruction. He spoke in after years of the kindness with which he had been received as almost one of the household by the painter and his good frau, and one may imagine that the student took much profit from the master’s emphasizing of form and construction, and also from the reposeful dignity, academic though it was, of his compositions. But when the older man passed from the teaching of principles to that of methods, and urged his pupil to imitate his particular manner of presenting the truths, Wyant’s independence rebelled. He had learned what could properly be taught, and recognizing that for the rest he must depend upon himself, returned to New York.

Face to face with the problem of making a living, and hoping to gain useful experience, he joined a government exploring expedition to the West. But the party suffered terrible hardships, to which Wyant’s physique succumbed. He was put upon the train to return East, and might have stopped at his mother’s home to be nursed and cared for. And much he needed tending, for he was helpless, stricken with paralysis; but the mind in his poor body was still active; he argued that to be taken off at a far western station was to become stranded, to lose all touch with the painter’s life, on which his determination was still fixed. So he let himself be carried past his home and reached New York. No words can add to the pathetic heroism of this decision. But in our admiration of the delicate poetry which belongs

to the work of Wyant that we know best, let us not lose sight of the force of will-power that was involved in the making of it. “Yes, he had been in hell!” exclaims Carlyle of Dante; and while suffering may not be the only road to highest effort, it is one of them, and the man who passes along it like a man, even if he cannot tread it, but must be carried, as in Wyant’s case, is very apt to produce something more than ordinarily appealing to the hearts of other men. While Wyant recovered the use of his body, though obliged ever after to paint with his left hand, he was never really free from some bodily discomfort; and I wonder whether this may not have had some influence upon his notable preference for depicting nature at the hush and restfulness of twilight. To one whose days were, more or less, days of weariness, constantly sensible of the afflictions of the body, with what a benediction the evening would come, full of spiritual refreshment! Out of the cool cisterns of the night his spirit would drink repose.

For many years he made his summer home in the Adirondacks; then, fearing that he was getting too much into a groove in his way of seeing nature, he transferred his study to the Catskills. The move is characteristic of his alert sensitiveness to nature’s impressions. His temperament was like an Æolian harp, delicately attuned to nature’s breath, responsive to its faintest sigh; but he dreaded lest the melody might become too uniform, too much a merely passive expression. There was a similar mingling of purpose and of surrender in his relations with his fellows. To a few friends, among them always Inness, he gave a welcome, and no little of his time and means in constant acts of kindness to those who needed help; but from social or official functions he kept, as far as possible, clear. He had so much that in his heart he longed to do, had begun his life’s work comparatively so late, and knew the years left to do it in were few. It was only by unremitting application that he could realize his ideal.

This concentration of endeavour affected his ideal, limiting the range of moods of nature that he strove to represent. Such versatility as Inness’s and that painter’s alacrity of impression to constantly differing phases of nature were impossible to his temperament and circumstances. Drawn by both to isolate himself, he heard in the silence of his own heart the still small voice of nature, listened for it always, and strove to woo it. The echo of it is felt, I think, in all his landscapes. We may recall some of his large woodland pictures, in which sturdy trees are gripping the rocks with their roots. Strength and stability and the evidences of time confront us, just as they would in the forest itself; but like cathedral architecture when music is pulsing through it, they are for the moment secondary to the spiritual impression of the voice. Wyant heard it in the movement of the tree-tops, and in the stir of weeds and ferns that nestled in the hollows, and it whispered to him of peace, a quiescence that stirs the soul to gentle activity, gladsome by turns or subdued in the alternate sun and shadow, that inexhaustible mystery of nature’s peace that passeth man’s understanding. We have all felt it and know how far it is from our everyday lives, and we look to word-poets and to poet-painters to create an illusion of it. Surely no American painter has done this more irresistibly than Wyant. Nor is there wanting to the peace of his pictures at times a more solemn suggestion. While so many of his twilights breathe simply the ineffable loveliness of quiet, others are astir with persuasion to spiritual reflection, with the gentle admonition to sadness that itself is purifying, or with deeper, fuller suggestion of the infinite mystery of nature’s recurring sleep that swallows up the littleness of man in its immensity. I remember, too, a little picture of darkened earth and rather turbulent dark sky in which a large boulder alone glistens in the fading light—a rock of illumination and strength in the surrounding uncertainty of gathering night. Brimming over with the suggestion of an elevated melancholy sustained by faith, and painted with an extraordinary earnestness of simple and direct conviction, it seems like a symbol of Wyant’s own art life.

But almost everything that he painted is expressive of some phase, at least, of himself. His work is more than ordinarily personal; perhaps, for the reason already mentioned, that he so deliberately concentrated his motives. And the quality of his poetry was lyrical. I have seen it called idyllic, but that is to miss its higher and deeper qualities. The idyl, Tennyson notwithstanding, is too much identified with the little pastoral poem, that breathes the simple gladsomeness of the meadows; but a more serious strain is interwoven with the gentleness and lovableness of Wyant’s muse. He was passionately fond of music and, before his illness, could play the violin, not learnedly, but with true feeling. And the music of his painting is that of the violin; tenderly vibrating, searching home to one’s heart, by turns lightsome, melancholy, caressing, impetuous, but with a tenderness in all. He did not play on many colours, but reaches a subtlety of tone, often as bewildering as it is soothing. The bewilderment will be aroused as much by his shadowed foregrounds as

by the faintly luminous sky. They defy analysis and are triumphs of impressionism. Impressionism of the true kind, I mean, pregnant with suggestion and divested of aught that would clog its directness; exhibiting, not knowledge, but the fruit of knowledge, and especially its tact of omission. To the careless and commonplace eye his landscapes have “nothing to them”; approached with a little understanding they mean so much, and the measure of their meaning is the technical knowledge involved. If there were any doubt of this, it could be disposed of by an examination of his earlier work, in which he lets one into the secret of his love of form and construction. Admirably sure and full of character is the drawing of the ground and its features, bit by bit receiving its due share of individuality; so also with the trees and their anatomy of trunk and branches, and with the structure of the sky. Everything has been studied, so that later out of the abundance of his technical skill he could be significantly spontaneous. Yet increase of facility did not lessen the self-exacting conscientiousness of his work. Some of his most impressionistic pictures were the result of trying to reach a fuller exactness of expression; when, finding confusion growing, he would seize another canvas and return to the simplicity of his original thought and let it form itself. Few painters are better represented in their extant works. The fumbled canvas, or the one that, however sketchily, did not attain to his intention, never left the studio, and after his death, Mrs. Wyant, with a fine regard for his memory and with honour to herself, destroyed them. So the real Wyants—for I am told there are sham ones on the market—are invariably worthy.

So truly did he retain the spirit of the student that it was not until a little before his death that he allowed himself to feel that he had mastered the grammar of his technique. Then, with the consciousness of his end before him, he would exclaim, “Had I but five years more in which to paint, even one year, I think I could do the thing that I long to.” Brave, modest soul! What he might then have done we shall never know; but what he did do we know to be very good. For another nature poet of our race, of like simplicity and singleness of love for nature, of as choice and elevated a spirit, and as lyrical in expression, we must go back to Wordsworth, who also in his communings with nature found her message—