American Masters of Painting: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American PaintersCaffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
General
American Masters of Painting: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters
Caffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
Painters -- United States
It is a remarkable feature of Fuller’s development that whereas in age
he belonged to the earlier generation of American painters, he should
have emerged from his fifteen years’ retreat and unaided communing with
himself more truly modern in feeling than the younger men who were then
returning from Paris. By very different ways he had reached an ideal not
dissimilar to Whistler’s; not, to be sure, expressed with the latter’s
inimitable, because so personal, _finesse_, but alike in its devotion to
the abstract and in realization of the correspondence between painting
and music, and not so unlike in its method of expression, so reticent
and mysterious. Fuller also anticipated the motives of the still younger
man, such as Le Sidaner and Duhem, to whom the inherent spirituality of
the landscape or figure is the absorbing search, which they seek to
embody in terms as intangible as possible. Wrapt from all contact with
the distractions of the art world, he had with the prescience of
sincerity put forth his hand toward the most interesting phase of the
latest movements. I mean the search for the significance of things, as
of higher and more abiding value than the things themselves.
Fuller’s life was a romance of more than usual human import,
characterized by a singular unity of purpose. He is not to be
considered, on the one hand as a man, and on the other as an artist,
with qualities, as is not unusual, respectively dissimilar and
conflicting. His art was of himself, truly an ingredient, nourished,
disciplined, chastened, always sweetly wholesome, modest and noble, like
his life. He lived the latter well, and in this high ideal of manhood
realized the ideal of his art.
VIII
HOMER D. MARTIN
Homer D. Martin has been called the first of American
impressionists--doubtless not with reference to his manner of painting,
but to the way in which he formulated his conception of the landscape.
He was not concerned so much with its obvious phenomena as with the
impression that it aroused in his own imagination.
The distinction is a very general one. Everywhere there are those to
whom the obvious appeals with undisturbed frankness; they have an
instinct for facts, and for confronting them singly and directly;
always, too, there are others to whom the facts are but a basis of
suggestion. A lamppost on the sidewalk implies another one beyond, still
others farther on, and on and on; and, by inference, the endless
footsteps in both directions, passing and repassing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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