Charles H. Caffin

IF we wished to introduce a foreigner to what is most distinctively American in our painting, we should show him, I think, the work of some of our marine and landscape painters. He would be least likely in these to detect the influence of Europe. The point of view he would recognize, no doubt, as the one common to all nature students since the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century; but in regard to the technique he could not attribute its character to the influence of this or the other master abroad, for our landscape painters, like most other true students of nature, have found, each for himself, their own necessary and inevitable language of expression. Necessary because it originated in their own peculiar need, and inevitable because it grew out of the particular character of the portion of nature that they studied. And in most cases it is some phase of the American landscape that has engaged the American painter, which accounts in no slight degree for the individuality of his work.

For do we pay enough heed to the essential differences that nature presents in different localities? At the moment I am not thinking of the variations in construction, forms, and configuration, as, for example, between the aspects of mountains and of simple pastoral regions, nor even of the separateness of impress set upon the landscape by man in the character of his buildings or of his farming occupations, but of that more subtle difference produced by varying kinds of atmosphere. The great landscape painters, we may have noticed, all belong to northern countries, who have lived, comparatively speaking, within the same degrees of latitude; and yet the landscapes of Holland, France, Scotland, England, Norway, and America can never be mistaken for one another. Apart from local conditions of man’s handiwork, each varies in the local quality of its atmosphere—its degree of clarity or humidity, of briskness or caressingness.

In a country vast as ours, there must needs be diversity in different parts, so there cannot be any one character of landscape distinctively American; but, in their faithful rendering of the local character, all may be distinguishable from those of other countries. And this expression on the countenance of nature is not unlike that on the face of a man or woman; the painter may suggest it perfunctorily, or he may render it with a completeness of sympathy and understanding, products of alert sensibility and interested acquaintanceship. It is the evidence of these qualities that gives enduring charm to Tryon’s landscapes.

No one who knows his work will need to be told that he is a New Englander. His landscapes show an intimacy of knowledge of that locality, and an affectionate sympathy with its particular phases of expression, that could only result from the painter having grown up in that part, the boy’s associations gradually maturing into the man’s convictions. His home was in Hartford, Conn., where he was born in 1849. He entered upon life as a stationer’s assistant, and pursued the occupation until he had accumulated sufficient means to visit Paris, all the while spending his leisure time in studying from nature and in discovering for himself how to represent his ideas in paint. There is evidence in this of sanity as well as earnestness, of a fine poise of character, qualities later to appear in his landscapes.

Above all, there is the perfectly natural process of a painter’s evolution; I mean, the antecedent love of nature, the clear apprehension of the kind of nature that he aimed to paint, the love of it and the knowledge preceding the final acquisition of technique; meanwhile, the gradual upbuilding of personal character by the discipline of postponing his ideals. So, when he reached Paris, it was not as a raw, enthusiastic student whose subsequent career spun suspended upon a mere cobweb of his fancy. He had married, and took his wife with him, establishing a little home and having clear plans in view, being, in fact, a man. He painted under Harpignies and Daubigny, an excellent combination of influences, mutually complementary: the one so sound and methodical, if a little prosaic; the other so captivating in the perennial boyishness of his mind, so lovable a student of the simple loveliness of rural scenes. What a happy antidote was Daubigny to the excessive earnestness of a typical New England character; how persuasively suggestive must his landscapes have been to one whose heart was implanted in the austerer charms of his New England home. The influence of his two masters served on the one hand to send the roots of his growth farther down and to stiffen the trunk, and on the other to encourage a more abundant leafage and the added fragrance of blossom. From both, also, he must have gained a store of technical principles; but of direct influence in his manner of painting there is no trace. His own special problem was one different from theirs, and he had to find his own way of solving it.

Even in one of his earliest landscapes painted about 1881, after his return from Paris, from studies made abroad, there is a decisively individual note. It is a scene of ploughing, owned by Mr. Montross—a stretch of dark rich soil, with man and horses pushing the furrow toward a clear, cool horizon. There is a larger feeling than Daubigny would have portrayed; a sterner one, if you will, certainly one more bracing in its suggestion of vigorous earth and breezy sky, and more distinctly inspired than Harpignies could have made it, with the sentiment of the soil and sky in their relation to the life of man. Still, the motive of the picture is so far a borrowed one that, although it has the feeling of a New England scene, it has not its local characteristics of atmosphere or of soil colour, lacking the more sensitive quality of the one, and the tenderer hues of the other. While, then, this picture is without the subtle qualities that mark the later ones, it has a clear, strong note of vigorous earnestness, strongly felt and strongly realized. Indeed, it seems entirely characteristic of the strength of purpose and sturdy qualities which are the foundation of Tryon’s equipment, both as a man and a painter. He seems to have grown up with the smell of the soil in his nostrils as Millet did, though without the latter’s saddened associations; to have been nourished with the brisk New England air, and to have gathered muscle over its ploughed and grassy uplands. The keen stimulus of nature went through and through him early and has stayed with him, so that his art partakes of its strength. In his pictures, one finds, I think, a stronger foundation than only that of good drawing and construction; an earnest, wholesome delight in the strength of nature as being something in which he himself shares; which, indeed, has so grown into his mind and life that its expression in his work is but a matter of course. It is a part of his most serious convictions, so that his rendering of it is convincing.

Put into words, the distinction may seem a little fine drawn; but I feel sure that our experience of pictures gives it substance. How often, for example, in the work of the French classicists we may see illustrations of human vigour, on which good drawing and construction have been expended, and yet their suggestion of vigour is only an affectation; a quality aimed at by the painter, but not vitalized by strong, earnest convictions of his own. What a protestation of strength there is in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes, and how little real convincingness! And, coming to the landscapes of our own time, it would be easy to quote examples of strong drawing and construction from which,

From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq.

SPRING BLOSSOMS.

By Dwight W. Tryon.

however, the spirit of strength is lacking. They are the work of men who mean strongly, but are not themselves strong men. So surely does personal character, or lack of it, show in a painter’s work, not the mere robustiousness of personal force, but the settled, earnest, habitual convictions that are the elements of character. And quite as evident to our experience in pictures is the distinction between the real and the false in refinement. Mere subtlety of brush work, while it may create for a while an illusion of refinement, will not satisfy us in the long run.

Many of Tryon’s landscapes reach a pitch of delicate suggestion in the rendering of soft air, caressing atmosphere, and shrouded light that is unsurpassed by any painter in this country; for the impression is much deeper than that of an entrancing skill in the management of the pigments. The spirit of the landscape stole into his heart when a boy, and has abided with him in his manhood; he is so much a child of New England, sweetened by its tenderer influences as well as nurtured on its hardihood, that, sharing its strength and refinement, he gives expression to himself when he reproduces these qualities in his pictures. Hence, in both directions, their complete convincingness. A fact, too, which helps to justify this appreciation is that his pictures show an interest in so many moods of the landscape, and the degree of force or of subtlety with which he renders each is regulated by the demand of the occasion. You cannot divide the past twenty years of his productiveness into special periods of style; any attempt to do so will bring you up against the insurmountable objection of finding that two canvases of very different feeling and manner of painting are dated the same year. Development, necessarily, there has been in style; increased acquisition of facility and the power to render more penetratingly the mood of nature he is studying. But evolution of motive you will scarcely find. That from the first has been realistic; in the sense that the landscape, as it appears to him to be, affords primarily sufficient incentive to his study.

In the presence of nature he makes studies, intent for the time being solely on recording what he sees; later, in his New York studio, the poetic suggestion of these studies will come to him, and he composes a picture. But the process is from realism to poetry, and not contrariwise, as one suspects to be the case in the poetical landscapes of some painters. Tryon’s way is not unlike a man’s regard for a good mother. In the days of his habitual intercourse with her, it is her dignity and sweetness that grow into his life, the changes of expression in her face and voice that win upon his devotion, her beautiful reasonableness that is accepted as quite a natural thing. It is only when the son’s life is drawn apart from the habit of her presence that the sentiment of a mother’s love is realized. So Tryon’s withdrawals to city life allow the poetry of nature to steal in upon his imagination; when he resumes his face-to-face communing with it, the life habit of absorbed regard comes back to him. The result of this is that the sentiment of his pictures grows out of the actual, and represents the soul of a fact. One finds one’s self admiring the extraordinary truth of the visual impression, and then often surprised that material so homely should yield such abundance of poetic suggestion; forgetting, for the moment, that poetry is not an element of nature, but a quality of the painter’s mind, representing the degree of sincerity and elevation of purpose with which he has approached his subject. Tryon’s poetry comes of the associations garnered through a life of affectionate intimacy with the country of his birth. It is as true and spontaneous as filial love.

His technical skill has secured the respect and admiration of his fellow-painters. They assign him that final title of approval, “a painter’s painter;” meaning that only those who know by practical experience the difficulties and trials of technique can properly appreciate his ability and resourcefulness, and certainly not implying, as is sometimes the case when this expression is used, that the admirable qualities in the picture are primarily and solely technical ones.

Attempting in non-painter language to summarize the spirit of his method, one may, perhaps, reduce it to the equivalent elements in his own character—poise and sympathetic penetration. The balanced effect of his landscapes is very notable: a harmony of colour in which there is no jar, a similar equipoise in the details introduced, a delicate adjustment of strength and tenderness and of sentiment to facts; an ensemble of uninterrupted unity. In the matter of sympathetic penetration—a rather clumsy expression for which I can find no happy alternative—his method is even more remarkable. I allude to the affectionate studiousness with which he analyzes the significant constituents of the landscape, and to the degree in which his eye penetrates the secret of the envelope of atmosphere, of that particular quality of atmosphere characteristic of New England.

I would cite the “Early Spring, New England,” not as an example of one of his most beautiful landscapes, but as a triumph of technical resource, to which was awarded the gold medal in 1898 at the Carnegie exhibition in Pittsburg. The foreground is a pasture with a brook winding through it, and several leafless trees which spread their delicate network of branches against a clear, open sky that reddens slightly near the horizon. Beyond is cultivated land, partly covered with the brilliant green of young vegetation, and partly red, upturned soil, with a team ploughing. Farther back are gently rising hills.

The front of the picture is painted with remarkably delicate detail, and in the distant parts there is a similar suggestion conveyed of the worthiness of the scene to be minutely studied. There is not a square inch in the composition that is without individual interest, and yet this elaborate mosaic unifies into a single impression of spaciousness; for the relative significance of each plane in the picture has been so shrewdly realized. The eye is invited to travel back to the remotest part of the ground and up into the expanse of sky. This is the primary invitation of the picture as would be that of the actual scene; and then follows, if you have eyes for it, the beckoning in this and that direction to the separate interest of the various parts. This accurate rendering of the effect of intervening atmosphere upon the receding forms and colours brings the atmosphere itself into the picture; a softly stealing animation, not yet nimble, but gently quickening into life. It is, indeed, a picture of quite extraordinary subtlety; and so much the more a triumph of accomplishment because it is a very large one, and the mere problem of filling such an extent of canvas with the evidences of minute observation, so that it should still hold well together, was a most formidable one. There was no possibility of evasion or of falling back upon convenient generalizations: the problem, once grasped, had to be solved to its ultimate conclusion.

Yet the very magnitude of canvas and of problem impairs somewhat the intimacy of feeling in the picture, and for all its abounding skill we shall not reckon it among Tryon’s choicest work. In that he gives us, when he wills, the sense of spaciousness within a much smaller frame, and, compassing it around so discreetly, makes its subtle appeal by so much the more insinuating. These comparatively smaller pictures are too numerous and different in character to allow of detailed allusion, yet one may single out a few such gems as “The Rising Moon” and “Sunrise,” owned by Mr. Charles L. Freer; “After Showers—June,” owned by Colonel Frank J. Hecker; “The Meadow—Evening,” owned by Mr. A. T. Sanders; “Springtime,” owned by Mr. George

A. Hearn; and a “Winter Evening” and “Early Spring,” the property of Mr. N. E. Montross.

These are masterpieces,—and the list is incomplete,—pictures that you may study from the strictest standpoint of technical excellence, and that exert an influence upon the imagination which one may believe will be felt by those who come after us as fully as by ourselves.

In considering American landscapes, there is more than a little tendency to dwell upon the names of the painters who are dead, regardless of the fact that the traditions which they established are being maintained. Among those who are maintaining them, Tryon is conspicuous, and in a way that is, perhaps, more distinctive than theirs. He represents much more closely the kind of contribution that the American temperament may be expected to make to the progress of painting. For unless painting can continue to reflect the evolution of human progress, it is, after all, only a “dead language.” But it is landscapes such as Tryon’s that prove its vitality. They represent the combination of qualities that differentiate American civilization in its worthiest form from that of other countries and of past times. They combine a largeness of outlook with alert sensibility to impressions; being, at once, big in character and minutely subtle.