International studio (15.1901/1902(1902))

American Studio Talk

The picture exhibition at

THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPO-
SITION, CONCLUDED. BY
CHARLES H. CAFEIN.

In the previous notices allusion was made to
some of the landscapes, but I have reserved a de-
tailed consideration of the mass of them until this
last paper.

Now, it is much easier to enjoy landscapes than
to write about them interestingly for readers who
may not have seen the pictures. The subjects are in
a way so similar, ringing perpetual changes on sky,
water, trees, and ground; lacking that immediate
distinction that belongs to portraits and figure
pictures. Yet, essentially, they may easily be more
original, more distinctive and full of character than
the latter. For landscape is without doubt the
freshest kind of art to-day ; the one in which the
modern painter has something new and special to
say and contrives most satisfactorily to express him-
self. He gets his impressions at first sight, and,
with the least possible obsession of merely studio
traditions, discovers for himself an individual form
of expression. He need never be at a loss for a
subject, nor has any excuse for treating it in hack-
neyed fashion. So, while the portrait or figure
painter is more inevitably apt to be reminiscent of
his student traditions and under the influence of
methods and even of feelings that are current in
Europe, the landscape painter’s evolution is from
within and he responds more readily to the influ-
ences of his own environment. His work has,
therefore, a peculiar interest to one who is interested
in the development of American painting and in
the immediate relation of art to human experience.

In the brief period of twenty-five years which
this exhibition covers, there are already several
artists numbered with the majority. Of these
George Inness, Homer Martin, and Alexander H.
Wyant had attained to a maturity of their power.
'There are, at least, two others, Bliss Baker and
Edward Martin Taber, whose possibility of further
development must ever remain a matter of conjec-
ture. But their promise was of so signal a kind that,
if death had not overtaken them when still very
young, it is almost certain that their names would
have been reckoned in time among the most dis-
tinguished. And for reasons, so fin- as they had yet
declared themselves, entirely different. The forest
scene by Bliss Baker, Solitude, is represented with
a quite extraordinary knowledge of forms and
patient skill in delineating them, while Taber’s Ml.

Mansfield in Winter is essentially a product of the
artist’s temperament, a mood of feeling.

Surely these are the two opposite poles from
which a student of landscape may set out to inter-
pret nature, and between them are a constant flow
and reflow of influence, drawing him in one case
towards great freedom of expression, in the other
to more exact knowledge of the phenomena which
excite his emotions. Baker’s observation was so
acute, that, although each stone almost has been
minutely studied, the relation of the part to the
whole has not escaped him, and the picture has
more than a little synthesis, though it is rather a
natural than a pictorial one. But consider the store
of observation and manual dexterity that are
shown, — qualities that remind us in their complete-
ness of some of the earlier work of George Inness
and Alexander Wyant,— and you will feel it to be a
certainty that, as his mind matured and his sense of
power was realized, he would have grown to a larger
simplicity, and the more pregnant suggestiveness of
the impressionistic point of view. Taber, on the
other hand, had little discipline, but worked with
that intensity which the brave mind exhibits under
the shadow of impending death. Only the upper
air could help him for a little while to keep his hold
on life, and with what a sense of its purity, stimula-
tion, and companionship he paints the mountain.
I have seen this picture several times and always
with renewed refreshment, and with a realization
of its pathetic significance. Very few painters have
been able to compass the magnitude of feeling that
prevails in mountain scenery. Segantini did by
making his home permanently in an upper valley
of the Italian Alps, and so did 'Taber during a brief
acquaintance with the mountain through the intensity
with which he hung upon its companionship and
support.

This intensity indeed is the measure of his suc-
cess and is a quality that does not always accom-
pany the temperamental way of approaching nature.
More than a few of the landscapes in this exhibition
betray their authors’ reliance upon temperament
rather than upon a knowledge of form and without
that intensity of purpose which might condone such
sparingness of study. The agreeableness of tone
is but a thin disguise to the unsubstantial character
of the scene, which, not being based upon nature’s
structure, misses the real poetry of nature, and
reaches a mild sentimentality instead of sentiment.
Even so stalwart a student of form as Henry W.
Ranger or one so analytical as Bruce Crane seems
to me at times to let go the hold on facts. Fortu-

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