Art

IN the history of every young American painter of to-day there seems to occur an interesting moment when, having got something of the required skill of his profession while retaining his individuality, he reaches out for some new power, and quietly puts all his originality into the hands of some admired French or German or Belgian painter, to be held in trust for an indeterminate period. It seemed at one time that Mr. Appleton Brown had taken this course. A pupil of Lambinet, and possessed of considerable native force, he made a visit to Paris and came back a confirmed admirer of Corôt, to that extent that his own formerly free and vivacious interpretations of nature threatened to disappear under a new and cloudier manner. This, however, has now yielded to the old influence of American climate and scenery reëxerted, and Mr. Brown has recently shown a collection of his landscapes which have all the independent charm of his earlier work, with an added strength and subtilty well worth the temporary uncertainty through which he has passed. A large view on the Merrimac deserved much praise for the delicious, humid distance of the wide river-space which it opened out; and here, too, was afforded a glimpse of reedy marginal growth with the sunlight falling softly on it, quite characteristic of Mr. Brown. The degree in which green came forward in the subjectmatter of some of the other paintings was noticeable, as showing that the artist has learned to make entertaining as well as delicately artistic pictures on a basis of decided monotony. One vista of a quiet, white road curling away into a dense confusion of light green trees, with a suggestive light-hued umbrella at the distant turn, struck us as a special triumph in this kind. We confess, nevertheless, to a preference for Mr. Brown’s autumnal studies. He seizes the poetic season when it is most poetic, when approaching November chills the tree-boughs and a few bright leaves linger in the woods like birds of passage; and under these conditions the edge of a grove, — a single white birch standing out among the dark stems and vagarious branches of oaks, with a pausing gleam of ditch-water, — furnishes him the elements of an idyllic production. Study of the human figure is an auxiliary which this painter can hardly afford permanently to forego, notwithstanding the delightfulness of his endowments and achievements at present ; but he has already reached a point where it can be affirmed of him that he is, on the whole, one of the richest in sentiment of our younger landscape painters. His technical measures all indicate French influence, and he comes within the list of those who, headed by William Hunt, are a little too apt to take the recording of impressions for the final aim of the artist. But it must be said, in justice, that he has a more constructive mind than these, a poetic capacity for giving unity and depth where others of his school give merely agile observation; and this in addition to a graceful dexterity with the brush, at times passing into singular though unboastful breadth of touch.

— There has lately been exhibited in Boston a picture of Mr. La Farge’s which is well worth a visit, or, more truly, several visits. It has just come from New York, where it was shown at the annual exhibition of the Academy, and was the cause of more or less discussion and of the utterance of diverse opinions. It is a large landscape, representing a view from the hills near Newport at the spot called Paradise, back of the second beach, looking down to the ocean at the south. The place itself will be familiar only to those rare pedestrians who, not contented with enjoying scenery from the seat of a barouche, have strolled at will among the lovely meadows, where in the most primeval solitude it is possible to get far - reaching views of the sea, or to find fascinating little nooks among hills and valleys whose very existence is hardly known to the ordinary summer visitor. One great charm of Newport scenery is its modesty: it has no massive cliffs that extort wonder and admiration, its hills are all hardly more than gentle undulations; it has no rich abundance of trees growing to the water’s edge, there is nothing but the stretch of yellow meadow grass rolling gently to the water, with here and there a softly rising hill. It is like a grand landscape in miniature.

This picture gives with wonderful fidelity the quiet and softness of the place under the light of a Newport afternoon, so different from the sometimes glaringly noticeable scenery of more famous spots. There are parts of the Hudson River, for instance, that seem designed to justify the paintings on drop-curtains, or, if this sounds harsh, they lack the coy, half-hidden reserve which the damp air of Newport lends to remote objects. Those who have traveled have seen fit to compare this Rhode Island shore with what is to be seen in Greece, and photographs simply confirm their statements. This quality is clear in this picture, which has the gentleness, the repose, the completeness, which the lover of nature finds in a few places which are not necessarily the most obviously picturesque. It is not lugging the highest of the Himalayas into a picture which gives it surely the greatest sublimity; and there is here no straining for effect by display of contrasts, by accumulation of points that cannot fail to catch the eye, but rather the willful rejection of such devices, and a sincere rendering of nature by an artist who has this rare claim to greatness, that he enforces upon us that impression of loveliness in what he has painted, which, when presented us by poet or painter, seems like the easiest simplicity, so high is the art. The evasive, modest beauty of Newport demands of the artist who undertakes to put it on canvas just that sympathy with things delicate and subtle which is shown so often by Mr. La Farge in his paintings. But by subtlety in the present case is meant his power to give what escapes a hasty glance, and rewards only more attentive study. This study, too, it may be said, is not intellectual or literary pondering, which in its time has inspired pictures, but rather that more or less fruitful sensitiveness to emotional impression which some feel in listening to music or in gazing at a sunset. No affectation can acquire this art, which has nothing to do with handiwork, but with the soul with which the painter sets about his work ; for after all, the artist shows at the best what is in himself. Mr. La Farge has found here a subject admirably suited for his skill in interpreting gentle, unobtrusive things, and he has performed what he had to do with wonderful success.