DOI issue:
No. 178 (December, 1911)
DOI article:White, Isreal L.: Childe Hassam-A puritan
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.43448#0385
INTERNATIONAL
• STUDIO
VOL. XLV. No. 178 Copyright, 1911, by John Lane Company DECEMBER, 1911
HILDE HASSAM—A PURITAN
BY ISRAEL L. WHITE
The safeguard of every democracy
is its traditions; yet it often suffers
from this very source, for traditions are found
which have no basis in fact and pervert the expec-
tations of the people. There is a traditional an-
tipathy, for instance, to the spirit of Puritanism
which persists among a large class of artists and
art-loving people who sincerely believe that our
Puritan forebears, living their severe and almost
ascetic lives, thwarted every possibility of Amer-
ica’s ever becoming esthetic. Only recently Mr.
Thomas Nelson Page has perpetuated this false
tradition by reiterating the common opinion
“that the spirit of our people is essentially non-
artistic,” and his voice is but one in a multitude.
The mere statement of such an antipathy should
discredit it, but if this is not enough there is surely
sufficient evidence to convict the instigator of
such a tradition of mendacity.
While it is true that the Puritan, engaged in a
bitter religious and political conflict, repressed,
for conscience sake, his enjoyment of esthetic
pleasures, it is equally true that the greatest art
this country has produced has come, either direct-
ly or indirectly, from New England. The artists
whose names took highest rank in their respective
periods came from New England stock or re-
flected the Puritan spirit. The relation of our
earliest portrait painters to this place and ancestry
is duplicated in the first school of American land-
scape painting. Whistler was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, while of modern painters E. C.
Tarbell, J. Alden Weir and others, including
Childe Hassam, belong in the same category.
Repression in this particular, as in the develop-
ment of plant life, seems to result in a fine, final
fruitage.
It should never be forgotten that the Puritan
was an arch aristocrat by birth and democratic
by conviction only. He sprang from the North
European races, which were both esthetic and
highly intellectual—two characteristics that go
hand in hand—and he was, indeed, an aristocrat
of the intellect, producing the single superb liter-
ary flowering this country has witnessed. His
passion was for truth and, if it carried him too far
into a transcendental desire to know the Unknow-
able, the ambition to sift things to their dregs
and lay foundations upon the bed rock was a
guarantee that whatever art he produced would be
substantial enough to meet the tests of time.
For, in art, as elsewhere, nothing lives unless it has
a foundation of truth. In fact, the true artists of
the world are, as Mrs. Browning said:
The only truth-tellers left to God,
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun—skirts, through conventional grey glooms,
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on the charnel wall
To find man’s venerable stature out,
Erect, sublime—the measure of a man.
Within a very definite limit, Spain and Holland
produced painters—Velasquez, Hals and Rem-
brandt—who took the truthful “measure of a
man,” painting the human face and figure as well,
perhaps, as it will ever be painted. That was their
great achievement and contribution to the art of
the world which is made up of the confluent
esthetic currents of races and centuries.
But the illusion of reality, except within this
limited sphere of portraiture, was not accomplished
then; it was not even undertaken. Constable and
the great French landscapists sought to produce
this illusion in certain hours and lights, yet even
they left unentered fields for the truth-telling
American to occupy. For, if I have analyzed the
situation correctly, the great achievement of the
modern painters is the painting of sunlight, moon-
light, and the many reflected lights that give to
the world its fullness of color. This seems to me
xxix
• STUDIO
VOL. XLV. No. 178 Copyright, 1911, by John Lane Company DECEMBER, 1911
HILDE HASSAM—A PURITAN
BY ISRAEL L. WHITE
The safeguard of every democracy
is its traditions; yet it often suffers
from this very source, for traditions are found
which have no basis in fact and pervert the expec-
tations of the people. There is a traditional an-
tipathy, for instance, to the spirit of Puritanism
which persists among a large class of artists and
art-loving people who sincerely believe that our
Puritan forebears, living their severe and almost
ascetic lives, thwarted every possibility of Amer-
ica’s ever becoming esthetic. Only recently Mr.
Thomas Nelson Page has perpetuated this false
tradition by reiterating the common opinion
“that the spirit of our people is essentially non-
artistic,” and his voice is but one in a multitude.
The mere statement of such an antipathy should
discredit it, but if this is not enough there is surely
sufficient evidence to convict the instigator of
such a tradition of mendacity.
While it is true that the Puritan, engaged in a
bitter religious and political conflict, repressed,
for conscience sake, his enjoyment of esthetic
pleasures, it is equally true that the greatest art
this country has produced has come, either direct-
ly or indirectly, from New England. The artists
whose names took highest rank in their respective
periods came from New England stock or re-
flected the Puritan spirit. The relation of our
earliest portrait painters to this place and ancestry
is duplicated in the first school of American land-
scape painting. Whistler was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, while of modern painters E. C.
Tarbell, J. Alden Weir and others, including
Childe Hassam, belong in the same category.
Repression in this particular, as in the develop-
ment of plant life, seems to result in a fine, final
fruitage.
It should never be forgotten that the Puritan
was an arch aristocrat by birth and democratic
by conviction only. He sprang from the North
European races, which were both esthetic and
highly intellectual—two characteristics that go
hand in hand—and he was, indeed, an aristocrat
of the intellect, producing the single superb liter-
ary flowering this country has witnessed. His
passion was for truth and, if it carried him too far
into a transcendental desire to know the Unknow-
able, the ambition to sift things to their dregs
and lay foundations upon the bed rock was a
guarantee that whatever art he produced would be
substantial enough to meet the tests of time.
For, in art, as elsewhere, nothing lives unless it has
a foundation of truth. In fact, the true artists of
the world are, as Mrs. Browning said:
The only truth-tellers left to God,
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun—skirts, through conventional grey glooms,
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on the charnel wall
To find man’s venerable stature out,
Erect, sublime—the measure of a man.
Within a very definite limit, Spain and Holland
produced painters—Velasquez, Hals and Rem-
brandt—who took the truthful “measure of a
man,” painting the human face and figure as well,
perhaps, as it will ever be painted. That was their
great achievement and contribution to the art of
the world which is made up of the confluent
esthetic currents of races and centuries.
But the illusion of reality, except within this
limited sphere of portraiture, was not accomplished
then; it was not even undertaken. Constable and
the great French landscapists sought to produce
this illusion in certain hours and lights, yet even
they left unentered fields for the truth-telling
American to occupy. For, if I have analyzed the
situation correctly, the great achievement of the
modern painters is the painting of sunlight, moon-
light, and the many reflected lights that give to
the world its fullness of color. This seems to me
xxix