International studio (17.1902)

American Studio Talk

MIDSUMMER MUSING.

Amid the rural simplicity and quiet in-
fluence of a Nova Scotian village I have
been re-reading Muther’s “ History of
Modern Painting ” ; particularly his opening book,
“The Legacy of the'Eighteenth Century.” You
know the work and how admirably just it is ; large
and sane in outlook ; founded upon a true appreci-
ation of the technical distinction of painting, as a
separate and individually complete expression of
art, and yet illuminated with a genial philosophy
that views it in relation to the other arts and sees
m all an efflorescence of the conditions and aspira-
tions peculiar to each age of civilization.

I have been reading with one eye on the com-
mencement of the nineteenth century in Europe
and with the other upon the state and promise of
painting in America to-day; helped in each case
by the long perspective through which one sees the
matter. For the distance of time in the former
case scarcely leads to a greater contrast than the
distance of conditions which separates this little
nook of nature from the artistic conventionalities of
what we take satisfaction in regarding as our ad-
vanced civilization.

Here on the shore of the Annapolis Basin, itself
an opening out of the Bay of Fundy, one is brought
so intimately face to face with the facts of nature
and with the wholesome, natural lives of the coun-
tryside that by a reaction, quite reasonable and
for the time being at any rate entirely enjoyable,
art seems a factor in life of little value by compar-
ison. Food enough for one’s imagination and for
one’s sense of beauty is afforded by the countless
manifestations of nature : the ordered restlessness
of the water, rising and falling twenty-six feet at
each tide ; the ample bosom of the hills, with dark
forests atop and smoothly sunny foot-hills, divided
into farms and dotted with homesteads ; reaches of
sky that now is an expanse of soft gray-blue, now
buoyant with flocking clouds, or again stooping to
caress the earth and water with drifting mist; per-
petual flux of elemental movement and play of light.
The shadows chase the sunlight across the moun-
tains ; the waters of the Basin, stirred by many
currents and responsive to the slightest breath of
wind, will lie for a while like a sheet of onyx,
streaked, polished, and luminous, an hour later
frolicking in the joyous contention of breeze and
tide, or whipped by the south wind into a tumble
of animation that sets one’s blood astir. Or, as
twilight gathers into night, and the saffron fades to
primrose in the sky, and the rosy mountains cool to

violet and become steeped in dewy indigo, the
water is a sheet of subtle splendor; tinged with
wine in parts, opalescent in others with the hues of
mother-of-pearl, deepening into the iris of a dove’s
throat or drowsing in a welter of grays. Against
the subdued majesty of such a field of color the
fishing schooners, passing up or down with the tide,
assume a stateliness; their sails, as they hang sus-
pended in the scarcely stirring air, shining like pale
silver, while the hulls brood upon the luminous
surface of the water in tones of ebony. Last night
the tide did not serve a homing vessel, and she
passed in through the narrow passage of the Basin,
towed by her eight dories, that were strung out
ahead of her in a long procession. The quick ruck
of the oars sounded sharply over the water, mingled
with the voices of the rowers as they sang or hailed
the women-folk upon the shores and their comrades
who were setting nets, their tiny boats rocking like
toys upon the fishing-grounds. Here was a little
touch of romanticism, as freshly spontaneous as the
prevailing naturalism. But was it a subject that
painting could comprehend? How should pigment
express the deep, bell-like voices of the rowers, or
the sparkling tinkle of laughter and welcome, com-
bining as in a fugue? For that matter, it is power-
less to express the whisper of the tide, the pungent
purity of the odor of spruce, or the interminable
movement in the sky and on hills and water.

Yes, it is an entirely natural and for the time
being a healthy conviction that art is futile in the
presence of nature ! It is an invigorating reaction,
like the grape-diet at Interlaken or the baths at
Aix upon a digestion overwrought by the products
of the culinary art; a salutary purging of the es-
thetic organism that establishes once more its
regular and balanced action.

I yield to no one in my love of the naturalistic
in painting, of that realism which represents nature
through the medium of the individual painter’s tem-
perament. Yet, confronted with such a superabun-
dance of natural beauty, and, which is more to the
point, presented with so much leisure to study and
enjoy it, one finds one’s self realizing how easy it is
to justify the classical conception of the painted
landscape ; such as Claude’s or Turner’s or Wil-
son’s. Each with very marked capacity of observa-
tion selected from nature phases of her beauty not
for translation but for paraphase, as contributory
to his imagination rather than to his vision, but
equally impressing upon his independent creation
the subtle essence of his own temperament. Filled,
for example, with the benediction of a sunset, he

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