International studio (17.1902)

American Studio Talk

teristic of the nation that must be reckoned with,
and on the other, if you view it reasonably, it is
perfectly natural and laudable. A people full of
life is naturally and properly alive to the actualities
of its existence. Why should it take interest in the
diluted myths of three thousand years ago; in the
allegories and legends of a bygone era, or in
pompous inanities that tickled the jaded appetites
of a century ago, when faith and hope were almost
dead? The particular period of the past with
which it has closest affinity is the Dutch revival of
the sixteenth century, and then, in art as in life, it
• was with the contemporary facts of its own exist-
ence that it was interested. So why not now in
the case of the American people ? It is a question
that has often been asked and is gradually being
hearkened to, for unquestionably among the
younger painters of the figure, even outside of
portraiture, there is a growing tendency towards
realism, and, as a corollary, towards a true painter-
like motive in the representation of the real.
Amongst the older painters likewise there are a
few who have proved themselves artists of nature,
but they will be found in most cases to have
studied their art independently of the European
teachers.

But it is in the domain of landscape that the
great developments of the new movement are
apparent; the result in every case of loyalty to
nature. For though while buried in the country
one may muse over the inadequacy of painting to
express the beauty of nature, one knows very
well that when back again in the city one will
readily admit the fascination of the painted land-
scape ; that it has the power to insinuate even
where it cannot directly represent the fluency of
nature’s effects, recreating them by illusion and
infusing into the simulacrum a suggestion of the
spiritual and emotional elevation with which the
real affects us; and not with the abstract sublimity
or tenderness of the classical landscape, moving as
the latter may be, but with the poignancy of sensa-
tion that real nature prompts. One detects this in
the self-expression and direct nature study of the
Barbizon painters, but not in the work of those
who have deduced from their pictures a formula
of painting and are barrenly striving to reproduce
it. To recover the sensation one must revert to
the works of Cazin, a new offshoot of the Barbizon
pictures, or to those of Monet, Pissarro, and others
of their ilk, who very directly separated themselves
from the men of 1830. And, according as a new

and personal expression enters into their motive,
so do American landscape painters stand forward
among their contemporaries as vitally somewhat.

That so many are thus distinguished is at present
the highest feature of native art. Their school has
been nature, and their studio for the most part
planted in their own country. Living apart with
nature, or returning year by year to the same spot
of their choice, they know intimately and love
their subject, and the intimacy of knowledge and
affection is reflected in their work. Some there
are who trot over the globe to discover a pictur-
esqueness which they confess themselves unable
to find at home. One suspects the deficiency is in
themselves and believes that one detects in their work
a corresponding lack of intimacy and convincing-
ness. For, after all, the quality of picturesqueness
is not so much absolute as relative, existing less in
the object than in the artist’s manner of regarding
it; and the so-called poetry of nature is but a
reflex of our own temperament. I have seen
tourists to whom the Alps made no appeal; only
they deplored the roughness of the road and the
distance to be traversed before they could again
overcharge their stomachs. Contrariwise for the
true artist there are “sermons in stones and good
in everything,” and what he knows best and is
most affectionately interwoven with his life is
likely to result in an expression most worth
heeding.

Nor does such realism as we are discussing
prevent an artist from straying into the field of
imagination and from representing life in allegorical
guise. Only we ask of him that his allegory shall
be based upon the life of to-day, upon the passions
and aspiration that stir himself and us. What we
have no patience with is the so-called classical
allegory watered down through a thousand flimsy
minds, till it is nothing but vapidity, or to such
foolishness as that statue of Washington in front
of the Capitol which would represent him as a
Roman by baring his body and laying a sheet over
his legs. Life is real, and if art is to be of any
vital consequence it must lay hold of the realities
of life.

Such is the trite conclusion derived from a sum-
mer’s communing with nature ; a conclusion, how-
ever, that for all its triteness we need once in a
while to dig out of the heap of sentimental affecta-
tion with which art is apt to be overpowered.

Charles H. Caffin.
xcvii .