International studio (35.1908)

The Scrip

believer in the power of his instrument to evoke for
others the visions seen by his inward as well as by
his outward eye, the “old man grey” behind the
thistle in his path. And in this instance he has also
been respectful of his material—this is obvious in
spite of the tricks his pigment has played him. His
canvas is untortured, his glazes were drawn lightly
across it with a delicate and fastidious touch, his
color has altered; but, at least, one can see that there
has been no dull solid application of the paint nor
any coarse and unconsidered attack.
Washington Allston died in 1843, at the age of
sixty-four. George Fuller was born in 1822, so
that for a score of years the two worked under
similar conditions. Allston, however, jjaid only a
divided allegiance to romance. With the excep-
tion of perhaps half a dozen little canvases of the
quality of the Spanish Girl, his works belonged in
the category of those which deliver a message un-
suited to the medium. Like those of West, they
were incontestably “literary” in the worst sense
that has been given to the word and interesting only
as a phase of our American art that rolled with
heavy wheels in the first years of the Nineteenth
Century, as cumbersome as the prairie wagons of
the Western settlers.
With Fuller, on the contrary, the romantic spirit
was all in all. It is that upon which his art rested.
In order to find adequate expression for it he per-
suaded his materials to do for him the most ex-
traordinary feats. His Nydia at the Metropolitan
Museum would have been almost an ordinary per-
formance had he not forced an expressive texture
by the use of his brush handle. We have only to
imagine this tall, large woman with the innocent
profile, gathering her draperies about her, as she
would seem painted with such a surface as that
frequently used by Copley, obtained by the smooth
and heavy laying on of pigment, to realize what
Fuller was striving for when he broke up the sur-
face of his picture by those violent digs and swirls
in the paint, obviously made by the handle of his
brush. It did for him in a different way and to a
lesser degree what the breaking up of tones by the
juxtaposition of colors did for the pictures of the
Impressionists—it produced a vibration and a
sense of atmosphere.
He needed just this effect to unite his really sub-
stantial and firmly modeled figure, the strong, round
arms and neck and the ample frame, with the
shadowy background through which significant
shapes are seen to waver indeterminate. He might
have used more admirable means, a blander and
more learned method, to obtain the same effect,

but the point is that he recognized the effect needed
to express his personal view of the world. A sharp
and fixed definition of forms would have lost for
him the veil that nature herself casts over her facts
and that seems to the dreamer as important a fact
as any it conceals. Mr. Isham refers to his earliest
work as careful and prosaic and not greatly differ-
ing from the average work of the time. It was
after he gave up trying to sell his work and while
he was trying to wrest a living for his family from
his Deerfield farm that he painted such pictures as
She Was a Witch, now in the Metropolitan, the
Turkey Pasture, the Winifred Dysart or the Nydia.
In the last we see at its best the painter’s realization
of color. It is not that of the so-called great
colorists. It is almost the negation of color in
some of his pictures, the impression of blue or red
being given by the closeness of the harmony making
any suggestion of a positive hue seem of accentuated
importance. In the Nydia, however, the color,
swimming, as it does, in a mist of light, is one of the
chief elements of the picture’s beauty. On the
thin draperies and blond flesh rests a tea-rose flush
so delicate and sensitive in its subtle variations as
to seem to flicker and deepen and fade like the
color of a flower, in truth, a flower stirred by a
light wind, paling and glowing as it passes into and
out from light. It is repeated in the faint mists of
the landscape with less positiveness and finally is
lost in the more shadowy depths. Its presence
gives to the picture much of its emotional quality.
Together with the blue of the atmosphere it renders
the character.of the conception. The idyllic sweet-
ness of the color fits the childlike features, the half-
frightened inquiry of the gaze, and the mystery sug-
gested is made to seem the delicious mystery known
to youth, an emotion without real horror because
without real knowledge.
The same sweetness and tenderness without a
touch of insipidity, but less helped by the color, is
in the beautiful little Hannah, now on exhibition in
the Metropolitan Museum, loaned by Mr. Frank
H. Lovell. A child is standing in a meadow. She
wears a dull red apron and the landscape is of a
blond, almost tawny, tone. In the foreground are
vague indications of long grasses, tangled and
drooping. The face is of the demure New England
type with the intimate mystic beauty belonging to a
reticent and vision-seeing race. The forms are
very simple and free from obtrusive detail and the
execution is more fluent than in the Nydia. But
the romantic feeling is not less strong, the sense of
the unseen not less surely rendered. That the
method should be in all instances a somewhat

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