Part 6 (1/2)

Re's story is, it is no more so than that of many of his contemporaries Francis Alexander, for instance, born in Connecticut in 1800, a farm boy and afterwards a school teacher, never atte caught a pickerel, its beauty reminded him of a box of water-colors a boy had left him, and he attempted to paint the fish, with such success that he was filled with a the white-washed walls of a roos and chickens All the neighbors cah none of them cared to have his house similarly decorated; but finally one of theth portrait of a child

Other orders followed, and finally with sixty dollars in his pocket, he started for New York Soot so very passable portraits

So stories are told of the persistency hich he hunted for orders In 1842, Charles dickens visited America for the first tiht of land, the pilot clareat novelist for the privilege of painting his portrait dickens, amused at his enterprise, consented, and Alexander's studio, during the sittings, became the centre of literary Boston It is a curious commentary upon Alexander's development that, after a trip or two abroad, he professed to find the crudities of his native land unbearable, and spent his last years in Italy

A third self-le, whose portrait of Gilbert Stuart, which heads this chapter, is the best that exists Neagle was apprenticed, when a boy, to a coach-painter, and soon was spending his spare ti profession As soon as he was through his apprenticeshi+p he set up as a portrait painter, and travelled over theto fare as well as Harding had But he found the field already pre-empted by two other painters, one of whom, Matthew Jouett, was an artist of considerable skill

Neagle had a hard tiain, but he finally reached Philadelphia, and spent most of the reave hie of some instruction from Gilbert Stuart, but his work re's or Alexander's

Henry Inman had a more varied talent than any of these enre scenes and landscapes, and excelled in all of thee of fourteen, he had been apprenticed to a painter by the name of John Wesley Jarvis, a picturesque character, better remembered by his anecdotes than by his work; and when his apprenticeshi+p was over he began painting on his own account in New York and afterwards in Philadelphia For a tie; but reverses cae of forty-five

It is worth noting that, up to this time, practically no landscapes had been produced by American artists A few of them had tried their hands at landscape work, but soon abandoned it for the more profitable field of portraiture The first of the American school of landscapists may be fairly said to be Asher Brown Durand Durand was the eighth of eleven children, and his father, who e Mountain, in New Jersey, was renowned throughout the neighborhood for his enuity his son inherited, and his first artistic effort was an atte them on little plates which he had beaten out of copper cents This led to his being apprenticed to an engraver, and after his apprenticeshi+p was over, he devoted three years to engraving the plate of Tru of the Declaration of Independence” The as excellently done and established Durand's reputation

But he was not satisfied with engraving, and soon abandoned it for theHe tried his hand first at portraiture, in which he had considerable success; but he turned more and more to landscape work as the years went on He practiced it continuously until his eighty-third year Then he laid down his brush forever, saying, ”My hand will no longer doseven years of his life were passed peacefully on the farhout by sincerity and skill, if not by genius His portraits were in a style especially his own, thorough in workly painted His landscapes, too, are his own, clearly and definitely finished, and with a bewitching silvery gray tone, which could have co direct from his subject in the open air, a practice exceptional at the time His pictures are not ”compositions,” in the artistic sense of the term--that is, he did not combine detail into a balanced whole; they are rather studies or sketches from nature, with a central point of interest But the work is done so truly and with such patience and enthusiasm that it deserves the sincerest admiration

Joined with Durand as the earliest of the landscapists is Tholand and did not come to America until he had reached his nineteenth year, but he afterwards becaive his left hand to have been identified with America by birth instead of adoption He found eraver Then, after so materials, and started to tramp about the country as a portraitist He found the woods full of them, and co; but, deter to be an artist at any cost, he returned to Philadelphia and passed a fearful winter there, living on bread and water, half frozen by the cold, with only a cloth table-cover for overcoat and bed, and suffering tortures fro winter followed, but in the spring of 1825 he removed to New York, and his privations were at an end

For in those years of suffering he had developed a delicate art as a landscapist, and he found a ready sale for his pictures, at first at low prices, it is true; but his fao abroad and spend three years in Italy and England He lived only to the age of forty-seven, his last years being passed principally in his studio in the Catskills, where some of his most famous pictures were painted

Cole idely known for many years for the various series ofPerhaps theinfancy, youth,down the stream of time The taste of the period approved them, and they were especially popular for schoolrooms, lecture-halls and other places where youth would have a chance to gaze upon and gather edification fronized that the proper way to tell a story is by words and not by pictures, and ”The Voyage of Life,” and ”Course of Empire,” and ”The Cross and the World” have, for the ated to the attic

Durand and Cole were the founders of the famous Hudson River, or White Mountain school, which looo Its loried in the views of the Hudson, especially as seen from the Catskills, and journeyed into the wilds of the Rockies and the Yellowstone in search of sublime subjects--too sublime to be transferred to canvas They loved nature--loved to copy her minutely and literally, loved to live in her hills and woods Some of them came afterwards to see that, after all, this was not art, or only one of her lower forreat result, a picture must express an idea

Cole had a pupil and disciple, who did some admirable work, in Frederick Edwin Church Church was born in 1826, and lived with Cole in his house in the Catskills until the latter's death He then established himself in New York, and proceeded to visit the four corners of the earth in search for grandiose scenes For he reatness of a landscape lay in its subject rather than in its execution; so he painted views of the Andes, and Niagara, and Cotopaxi, and Chi in rainbows and sunsets and ood measure These pictures elcomed with the wildest enthusiasm--just as Clarke Mills's statue of General Jackson had been, fifteen years before Strange to say, they were not absurd, as that aure is, but were really fine exa

Two men attempted to duplicate Church's success, but with very indifferent result They were Albert Bierstadt and Thoht the Rocky Mountains for his subjects; the latter, the Yosemite and the Yellowstone; but neither of the to canvaspresentions

Durand also had a disciple, more famous than Cole's, in Frederick Kensett, the best known of the so-called Hudson River school He was a close follower of Durand in believing that nature should be literally rendered, but hein his studio fros and sketches, instead of in the open air direct fro all shadows a transparent brown, and of hts where he thought they ought to be instead of where they actually should have been He surpassed Durand, however, in his range of subject, for all hours and seasons had their charm for hiht of a summer day

On this foundation a loftier structure was soon built and the builders were George Inness, Alexander Wyant and Ho been born in 1825, and was contemporary with some of the most arbitrary and hide-bound of the nature copyists

But he felt the weakness of the method and himself attained a much fuller and completer art He seems to have dabbled with paint and brushes fro, for the most part, fro a chance to see the original when a friend offered to send him to Europe He passed fifteenperiod of assimilation followed, in which he developed a theory of art and struggled to transfer it to canvas It was a sound and true theory, and is worth setting down here for its own sake ”The purpose of the painter,” Inness held, ”is to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene had made upon him A work of art does not appeal to the intellect or to the moral sense Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an ele emotion, if the work has unity, as every such work should have, and the true beauty of the work consists in the beauty of the sentireatness consists in the quality and force of this e and developing to fit this theory He steadily gained , of true harin other minds the impression which the scene made upon hi from the little Ohio tohere he was born to see hiave Wyant's boyhood had been the A, a little practice, and then setting up as a painter In 1873 he joined an expedition to Arizona and New Mexico The hardshi+ps which he endured resulted in a stroke of paralysis and he was never again able to use his right hand With an inspiring patience, he set to work to learn to use his left hand, and grew to be ht

But even at his best, Wyant's appeal is more limited than Inness's He learned to paint a typical picture, a gli country seen between the trunks of tall and slender birches or maples, and was content to paint variations of it over and over That he sometimes did it superbly cannot be denied, and he possessed a certain delicate refinement, an ability to throw upon his pictures the silvery shi+mmer of summer sunshi+ne, in which no other American artist has ever surpassed hi roup is Homer D Martin Born in Albany in 1838, he turned naturally to painting and began to produce pictures after only teeks'

instruction At first, he was a disciple of Kensett, with brown shadows and artificial high-lights, but study of nature soon cured these rew steadily in skill and power, until he succeeded in i sentiment, which is the keynote of his work His coast vieith their swirl and al achieves us fairly to our own ti, for the period just preceding and following the Civil War was marked by no new impulse in American art and by no hich demands attention But in the early seventies, there were a nu at home or in Europe who have since won a wide reputation for inspiring achieve these is Elihu Vedder, born in New York City in 1836, and following, in his manhood, the manifest bent of his childish years He went to Paris before he was of age, and from there to Ro years were spent in America, and finally, in 1866, he settled in Rome and has since made it his home He represents a revival of the classical quality of Raphael or Michael Angelo, though he belongs to no school, and his work has froinality He has held to the old simplicity, which nition came to him in 1884, when he published his illustrations to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam--the most sympathetic and beautiful pictorial coiven any book of poetry Since then he has executed h the mastery in this branch of the art is held by another

That other is John LaFarge, adreatest mural painter the world has seen in recent years His life was a fortunate one His father, an officer of the French marine, careat plantation in Louisiana, frorew up in an artistic atht to draw When, after some study of law, he visited Paris, his father advised him to take up the study of art as an accomplishment, and he entered one of the studios,adh his family connections, to the inner artistic circles of the capital For some years he studied art, not to become a painter, but because he wished to understand and appreciate great work, and at the end of that time, he returned to New York and entered a lawyer's office