Kenney Mencher: American Painters Late 19th to Early 20th C

Kindred Spirits: American Painters

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits,
Oil on canvas, 44 in. x 36 in. (111.8 cm x 91.4 cm).
Collection of the New York Public Library.
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. To the left is Thomas Cole, the founder of the
Hudson River School of painting.
On the right is William Cullen Bryant, a major
nature poet of the nineteenth century and editor
of Picturesque America, a set of books
showing the natural beauty of the United States.
"Painted a year after Thomas Cole's death, this view of Cole with his friend William Cullen Bryant is set on a rock ledge in his beloved Catskill Mountains. By the 1830s and '40s such Hudson Valley scenery was hardly wilderness; it was already opened by railroads and frequented by tourists. But Cole and his followers used it to evoke the "American sublime" and dispel, once and for all, the more primitive forest fears of Puritan days. " Robert Hughes

Albert Bierstadt,
Rocky Mountain Lander's Peak, 1863
approximately 4'x8"

Context: Robert Hughes in this next section describes how Americans viewed America and the resources America had to offer. For Americans, the landscape was and expression of the American Spirit and the painting and writing from this era are somewhat united in their rejpoicing point of view. Although, at some points, you will be able to see that Americans were also self critical.
Excerpted from,
The sacred mission.by Robert Hughes. Time, Spring97 Special Issue, Vol. 149 Issue 17, p10, 10p, 7c, 1bw
HTML Full Text

The first thing the colonists in the New World saw, the stuff they had to define themselves against, was nature. A sense of the wilderness, promising or oppressive, was one of the chief shared signs of American identity, and it became a prime subject of the country's art. "In the beginning," wrote John Locke in the 17th century, "all the world was America." It was not necessarily a reassuring thought, for America seemed very strange to its first European settlers, particularly the Puritans in New England. To them, its rocky coast and tangled woods were--in the expressive phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant landscape painting or religious art during the 17th or 18th century, by the mid-19th century, landscape was the national religious symbol. The artist who began this process was Thomas Cole (1801-48), a transplanted Englishman from the "dark Satanic mills" of the industrial Midlands. Cole's clients were mainly from the rich Federalist "aristocracy," whose members, offended by Jacksonian populism, wanted pastoral images of a pure American scene unsullied by the marks of getting and spending. Skeptical of progress, Cole painted the landscape as Arcadia, which served to spiritualize the past in a land without antique monuments. He loved the freshness of primal mountains and valleys--unpainted, unstereotyped, the traces of God's hand in forming the world. America's columns were trees, its forums were groves, and its invasive barbarian was the wrong sort of American, the developer, the Man with the Ax.
When Cole left on a trip to Italy, his friend William Cullen Bryant, nature poet and editor, urged him in a sonnet not to be seduced by the humanized, picturesque Europe--to "keep that earlier, wilder image bright." After Cole's early death, that image was to get wilder and brighter still in the work of his only pupil, Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900). Descended from six generations of Yankee ministers and merchants, patriotic and deeply religious, Church inherited Cole's belief in a style of landscape suffused with "a language strong, moral and imaginative." His paintings--mostly of the Hudson Valley and vistas of South American grandeur--were greeted as both religious icons and triumphs of observation, fusing piety and science in one matrix. Church hit a peculiarly American vein of feeling: Romanticism without its European component of alienation and dread, a view of the universe in which God was in heaven and all was basically right with the world.
But for all the grandeur of its pictorial rhetoric, Church's work didn't fully express the hot idea of westward expansion within North America--the belief in Manifest Destiny. To convey the image of the Western landscape as glorious and triumphal, the Cinerama devices first used by Church were taken up by other painters, notably Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and Thomas Moran (1837-1926).
The German-born Bierstadt made a hugely successful career on the insight that the landscapes beyond the Missouri made America unique among nations. His style was superdetailed, bombastic and almost obnoxiously grand, intended to knock your socks off with spectacle. In Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867, his most extravagant anthem to Manifest Destiny, the covered wagons roll forward into a sunset of such splendor that it's obvious God is beckoning them on, flooding their enterprise with metaphorical gold. Moran, the son of poor immigrant handweavers, was virtually self-trained as an artist but was a devotee of the great English landscapist J.M.W. Turner. He created the all-time Big American Painting, the climactic panorama of America's years of Western expansion, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1893-1901.

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits,
Oil on canvas, 44 in. x 36 in. (111.8 cm x 91.4 cm).
Collection of the New York Public Library.
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Form: This 1849 painting depicts William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole in Kaaterskill Clove. Iconography: . "Kindred Spirits," which is in the collection of the New York Public Library and depicts Cole and Bryant conversing on a rock outcropping in the Catskills with their names carved into one of the trees... Cole, Durand and Bryant, Ms. Foshay writes in her catalogue essay, "shared the belief that nature, particularly nature in the New World, resonated with overtones of meaning." "It was a sacred place, where true communion could bring not only joy in the beauty of the outdoors, but also enlightenment. With ink and with paint, these artists explored the tangible appearances of the natural world in search of its intangible truths. They communicated their perceptions in landscape paintings and nature poems that guided the direction of cultural ideas and aesthetic expression in nineteenth-century America," she continued...."These men," Foshay continued, "sought through their writing and painting to embellish and dignify the New World with a culture sown on native soil. The resource that they identified to inspire this native art was the American landscape - unique in its richness, variety and wildness. They emphasized scenery that minimized such intrusions of civilizations as railroads, buildings and farmlands. This land was God's creation, still fresh from his hand. It offered spiritual and moral possibilities, these men believed, for those trained to recognize them." Indeed, the purity of most Hudson River School paintings was bathed in the light of "Manifest Destiny," a concept that would actually evolve a bit later when a second generation of Hudson River School artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran would glorify the natural wonders of the American West while another, Frederic Church, Cole's sole pupil, would carry his explorations even further afield to Central and South America and to the Middle East...The importance of the Hudson River School paintings in helping to forge a national image can not be underestimated especially in the years before photography became popular. The artists would travel regularly to the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, the coast of Maine and Newport, R. I., and travel in those days was neither easy nor quick and their prolific production of paintings, sketches and engravings would provide many Americans with awe for their country's remarkable, bucolic landscapes..."Unlike his mentor and friend, Cole, Durand was attracted to the 'common details' of nature, spotted in situ. He sought to study them with a clear eye and reproduce them faithfully. He did not want to lose the keenness of his first impression….The simple design of these studies is also different from the complex compositions of Cole's allegorical landscapes. Durand uses nature in the form of a dead tree or a bunch of rocks to compose the picture. The artist sought to discover design in nature, rather than to rearrange the elements of nature to create a pleasing pictorial design….Wandering through the woods and selecting scenes as he found them was, for Durand, a spiritual journey. The works that he produced became acts of devotion….In Bryant's poems, Durand found confirmation of his belief that the particulars of nature were the embodiments of God's handiwork. To study these particulars carefully was a process of enlightenment; to recreate them in text and image was a religious endeavor. Durand produced several pictures based on themes from Bryant's verses, including Thanatopsis and Early Morning at Cold Spring, both painted in 1850."

Context:

"Asher Brown Durand was born in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey, the eighth of eleven children. His frail health exempted him from working on the family farm; instead, he helped his father, a watchmaker and silversmith. Following an apprenticeship to engraver Peter Maverick from 1812 to 1817, Durand entered into full partnership with Maverick and ran the New York branch of the Newark-based firm. The partnership dissolved in 1820 in a dispute concerning Durand's acceptance of John Trumbull's commission to engrave The Declaration of Independence, which Durand had apparently taken on without deferring to Maverick's position as senior partner. (Maverick, who interpreted the act as a violation of their partnership agreement, heatedly accused Durand of trying to sabotage his career.) The completion of the work in 1823 established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. An active member of the New York art community, Durand was instrumental in organizing the New-York Drawing Association in 1825 (later the National Academy of Design, which he served as president from 1845 to 1861) and the Sketch Club in 1829 (later the Century Association). During the late 1820s and early 1830s, when his interest gradually shifted from engraving to oil painting, he demonstrated a growing competence in portraiture and genre subjects. With the encouragement of his friend and patron Luman Reed, Durand ended his engraving career in 1835. "In 1837, a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake, in the Adirondacks, with his close friend Thomas Cole seems to have determined Durand's decision to concentrate on landscape painting. In 1840, with money advanced by Jonathan Sturges, Reed's son-in-law and business partner, Durand embarked on a two-year European Grand Tour, part of which was spent in the company of the artists John Casilear, John Kensett, and Thomas Rossiter. Durand's annual summer sketching trips in the Catskill, Adirondack, and White mountains yielded hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that he later incorporated into finished academy pieces. These are the embodiment of his Hudson River School style. With the death of Cole, in 1848, Durand was recognized as the leader of American landscape painting. He died on the family property in Maplewood, to which he had retired from active professional life in 1869."
(www.artchive.com)

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream 1899
Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (American Realist)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

JMW Turner The Slave Ship 1840 35"x48"

GERICAULT,Theodore 1791-1824
Raft of the Medusa 1819
Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism

Winslow Homer, The Life Line 1884
Oil on canvas 29 x 45 in Philadelphia Museum of Art

Form: Oil painting, using the theme of a 'storm tossed boat.'Iconography: Many artists use themes such as "storm tossed boat" or in the case of the trancendentalists, towering vistas that are meant to represent God, in nature. The theme of the boat in a stormy sea is meant to convey the futility of human struggle against the awesome forces of nature.,

"A stay in England from 1881 to 1882, during which Homer lived in a fishing village, led to a permanent change in his subject matter. Thereafter he concentrated on large-scale scenes of nature, particularly scenes of the sea, of its fishermen, and of their families. Taking up solitary residence on the Maine coast at Prout's Neck, he produced such masterpieces of realism as Eight Bells (1886, Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts); in it the drama of the sea scene is imbued with an epic, heroic quality that symbolizes the dominant theme of his maturity: human struggle with the forces of nature. In his Gulf Stream (1899; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), the black sailor lying on the deck of a small, dismasted boat is dramatically highlighted at the center of a ring of predatory sharks. "
http://www.island-of-freedom.com/

Context: (Originally published in the Tennessee Tribune 3/9/00 )
"I have liked Winslow Homer's painting, The Gulf Stream, for many years, but I would never have understood what makes it so beautiful, nor that it can teach men and women about our own lives, had it not been for my study of Aesthetic Realism. Eli Siegel, who founded the education of Aesthetic Realism, defined what beauty is and pointed to its importance for every person's life in this principle: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."
People have been pained at not being able to make sense of their desire for energetic activity on one hand, and for rest or repose on the other. Aesthetic Realism teaches that we can learn from art how to put these opposites together in our lives. Homer’s painting — in its composition and technique shows that we can feel truly reposeful and energetic at once. It has in it a man on a boat whose mast has been broken and swept away by a hurricane, adrift in the restless sea, and surrounded by sharks. I once thought it justified my feeling that the world was cruel and battered one about. I learned this was not what this painting is about, or why I liked it. Homer's The Gulf Stream met my deepest hope — to like the world honestly — because it puts opposites together in a way that shows the world makes sense.
At any age people can want to get away from things, and older people tend to go more and more for rest. At 88, I am grateful to continue to learn about this drive in myself and humanity in classes and public seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation in New York City. In "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" Eli Siegel asks about Repose and Energy: Is there in painting an effect which arises from the being together of repose and energy in the artist's mind? — can both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail and composition? — and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?
The tumultuous sea and whitecaps, the sharks, broken boat and waterspout in the distance on the right — all have motion and turbulence. Yet the man seems strangely at ease as he rests on his elbow, looking out. Homer’s composition shows that both man and world are a relation of "repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir." Before I met Aesthetic Realism I shuttled between feverish, exhausting activity in work or sports, to getting home, pulling down the blinds and going to sleep. I felt these different directions in myself had to fight. It was my good fortune that in 1947 I began to study it. In the thousands of Aesthetic Realism Lessons which Eli Siegel gave to people, he saw each person with the deep comprehension humanity hopes for, because he saw every person as an aesthetic situation of opposites.
When I told Mr. Siegel in a lesson, of a frightening dream about being on a train, on a stretcher, he explained: You want to be on the move, but while being on the move you're afraid that something in you wants to be very quiet and take it easy. While you're on the train something in you would like to take it easy and be in the hospital. The opposites which were fighting in me, are made beautifully one in The Gulf Stream. There is the activity of the waves, the waterspout, the sharks, as the boat is tossed about, while the schooner in the distance on the left is moving calmly. There is motion in the waves as they roll and peak, but there is ease at the same time because of the definiteness of the shapes and the rhythm of the curves. I believe that is why watching the ocean makes for composure in people. As the man reclines on the boat he is not taking it easy, as I once did, to get away from the world — his mind is alert as he looks out steadily for help. I understood more why this painting moved me, when I read this sentence by Mr. Siegel: "If we look at a desperate and controlled sea painting of Winslow Homer, we can see passion and control given to black muscles." Aesthetic Realism understands anger, which I was so pained about and unable to control. In a lesson Mr. Siegel said: While you jump from being sweet to angry you'll be tired. You want to like people and also hate them, and you go from hot to cold.
While you play around with this you're going to be tired. This fight in me and so many men is resolved in The Gulf Stream. Look at the relation between the open mouth of the shark with its teeth and the dark opening of the boat’s hold from which sweet sugar cane extends. The cane represents a world giving the man sustenance. The fierce and the sweet do not jump from one to the other, as they once did in me. I learned my anger came from wanting to feel that people were against me; that I was in a hostile world I should be separate from. As Homer separates things, he also joins them and shows they are not against each other. The curve of the back of the boat is like the curve of the shark’s tail fin and body on the right, and the curves of waves and sharks are alike. Homer has bathed the man and boat in light and they seem to be safely nestled in a trough of waves. Does this say the world can be comforting? I believe Homer's work shows his hope to make sense of wanting to see the world as an enemy and as a friend — the fight Eli Siegel so kindly explained in me. Aesthetic Realism taught me that repose and energy do not have to fight, and saved me from a life of anger and loneliness. This is a hopeful and beautiful painting because it composes repose and energy, the fierce and sweet, in such a way that shows the world makes sense. We can all learn from it."

Winslow Homer,1836-1910 Snap the Whip, 1872
Oil on canvas, 22 x 36" (55.88 x 91.44 cm.)

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson 1893
Oil on canvas 49 x 35 1/2 in. Hampton University Museum, Virginia

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Walt Whitman. 1887

Whitman 1881 Photo by Bartlett F. Kenny, Boston.

Form: Oil paint on canvas, portraiture.Walt Whitman by Thomas Eakins
The friendship between Eakins and Whitman began in 1887. They had met in Whitman's Mickle Street residence in Camden. A few weeks later, Eakins went to Camden without warning to paint the portrait, a spontaneous act that Whitman much admired (Homer 210). "Much of Whitman's admiration for Eakins centered on the portrait" (Homer 213). In the portrait, Whitman was represented exactly how he was. By 1888, Whitman showed his age. And Whitman appreciated Eakins' portrait because it showed his age, too. There is nothing picturesque about Whitman in the portrait -- he simply looks like an old man (my index page shows the similarities between a photo and Eakins' painting). In admiration of Eakins, Whitman said, "'I never knew of but one artist, and that's Tom Eakins,' he said another time, 'who could resist the temptation to see what they ought to be rather than what is'" (Goodrich 123). It was Eakins' realism that Whitman admired so much -- a realism extending even to the portrait of the aging poet. Whitman contrasted Eakins' portrait to Herbert Gilchrist's, "which is parlor Whitman" (Goodrich 123). Whitman, focused on the realistic aspect of human beings, told Horace Traubel not to glamorize Walt's last days.
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/archive1/classroom/student_projects/brian/eakins.html

As a painter, Thomas Eakins had a relationship with Walt Whitman unlike any other. Born in Philadelphia in 1844, Eakins did not meet Whitman until the latter half of the 1880's, but "the two men had a deep respect for each other" (Goodrich 122). In his old age, Whitman had relocated to Camden, New Jersey, right across the Delaware and very close to Philadelphia. Eakins "went into the wilds of New Jersey where he found. . . Walt Whitman, in a self-chosen exile of his own. Expelled from the bourgeois world, or so the legend ran, Whitman and Eakins together built the metaphysics for a distinctly American realism -- the poet's ecstatic and high-hearted, the painter's murky and inward-turning" (Gopkin 78). The two men shared not only a friendship and mutual respect, but an artistic vision of American democracy grounded in realism. Philadelphia-Camden Friendship: Celebrating America
Whitman and Eakins were friends in more than just the sense of acquaintance; in fact, Eakins was one of 32 people invited to a dinner party for Whitman's 72nd birthday (Goodrich 124). They were so close that the day after Whitman died, Eakins went to Camden with some of his students and made a death mask and hand cast of Whitman (entitled Death Mask of Walt Whitman, 1892, in Houghton Library of Harvard University. Unfortunately, no images were available). When Eakins heard of Whitman's death, he immediately contacted Horace Traubel to make the mask of his friend, a man he admired very much. This illustrates that the relationship transcended a mere respect between two artists.
The two artists had similar ideas of America and art. "Whitman disliked European manners and conventions, and he was passionately devoted to America and to a celebration of the democratic ideal. . . The chief similarity between Eakins and Whitman was their self-sufficient confidence, which allowed them to disregard the conventions of their time. Eakins, like Whitman, insisted on making art in a way that seemed most appropriate and truthful, without giving in to popular or critical opinion" (Homer 217). They were individualists who did not waver in the face of criticism. Both men were artistically rejected in their lives -- though as Whitman aged he gained more popularity. Eakins was scrutinized by the bourgeois Philadelphia society. He paid a high price for his fascination with the nude body. Whitman also had a fascination with the body, but because of the nature of poetry -- words -- was less explicit than Eakins, who painted the body. "Both were democrats, despising forms and conventions which hid the essential human being" (Goodrich 122). The tendency to celebrate the human body was prevalent in both Whitman and Eakins' work. A major difference must be brought to light, though: "Eakins concentrated on the individual; Whitman, on humanity and the cosmos" (Homer 219).
In spite of this idea, Eakins was still profoundly indebted to the poet. When Weda Cook (who wrote music to O Captain, My Captain!) was posing for Eakins, "the artist talked much to her about Whitman and would sometimes quote his verses" (Goodrich 122). Not only was Eakins fond of Whitman's poems, but "it was the concrete, realistic side of the poet, his observation, and his feeling for the body, that appealed most to the painter, who used to say: 'Whitman never makes a mistake'" (Goodrich 122). It is this admiration that Eakins can be classified as a Whitmanian painter.

The Swimming Hole and "Song of Myself"

The Swimming Hole, now widely known as The Swimmers, is exemplary of Eakins' work because it shows his infatuation with the nude body. Eakins once said that "a naked woman 'is the most beautiful thing there is -- except a naked man'" (Matthiessen 604). He actually lost his teaching job at the Pennsylvania Academy because of his fondness for the nude figure (reminiscent of Whitman being fired for writing an inappropriate book). The Swimming Holealso shows that Eakins is a Whitmanian painter because "Walt's work, in turn, approaches the powerful construction of Eakins in his sketch" (Matthiessen 610). Eakins' scene directly echoes Whitman's "Song of Myself," particularly the scene with the 28 bathers. "Moreover, a number of art historians and literary critics have concluded that Swimming is a response to Whitman's 'Song of Myself'" (Folsom and Price, eds. Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive). The section that Eakins is depicting is the following:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray (Whitman 197-198).
Whitman's words are clearly echoed in the canvas; but so is Whitman's presence. "The example of Walt Whitman, who celebrated the joys of nudity in the open air, may well have influenced Eakins, and Whitman, in turn, would certainly have enjoyed this scene glorifying male companionship" (Homer 116). The sexuality of the painting is strikingly reminiscent of Whitman as well: "There is content in this painting that, in Whitmanesque fashion, is unabashedly sexual" (Foster 29). Themes of fraternity and sexuality permeate Walt Whitman's poems, and Eakins used these in The Swimming Hole. Knowing of the respect and admiration that Eakins had for Whitman it is no wonder he plays a role in Eakins' painting. It is important that it occurs in The Swimming Hole -- Eakins, who like Whitman was somewhat ostracized because of his love for being naked and undisguised, looks to Whitman to convey ideas of 'manly love' or sexuality. In Swimming: Thomas Eakins, the Twenty-ninth Bather, Elizabeth Johns suggests that the above poem is applicable to the lives of the two men. "Here, Whitman as the woman who is both poet and character in the poem brings the young men into full sexual experience, but, in the self-centeredness of immaturity, they do not recognize her agency" (Johns 77). The poem again acts as an influence on Eakins: "In Whitman's poem are the two worlds in Eakins' picture: one inhabited by high-spirited young men -- the subjects of Swimming -- the other by an observing presence that rejoices in their beauty and loves them with a tenderness and passion of which they are oblivious" (Johns 77-8).
Thomas Eakins is a Whitmanian painter; he was inspired and influenced by the the great poet Walt Whitman. Eakins had the unique opportunity to befriend the poet -- he therefore is influenced by Whitman as a poet and as a person. Their friendly personal relationship is evidence of this, as is The Swimming Hole. As realists, Eakins and Whitman again are similar -- both want to depict the actuality of America.
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/archive1/classroom/student_projects/brian/eakins.html

I Sit and Look Out
Walt Whitman
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.