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
Some of his pictures, in which we shall find these qualities
conspicuous, are “Normandy Church” and “Normandy Farm,” painted during
the years that he lived at Villerville and Honfleur, “The Sun
Worshippers,” “Autumn on the Susquehanna,” “Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario,”
and “Headwaters of the Hudson.” Individual preferences count for very
little; but I cannot resist the pleasure of recording a particular
fondness for the “Normandy Church” and “Sand Dunes.” In the former it
will be remembered how the roof and tower of the church, embrowned with
centuries softened by moss and lichen, stand like an embodiment of
stability against the quiet movement of fleecy clouds that cross the
blue sky, like a token of faith and protection to the little cottage on
the left. It is an idyl of the permanence of hope and consolation in a
simple faith. Then what a full-lunged inspiration of rest and vastness
does one draw from the “Sand Dunes”! It is not the vastness of distance,
for the evening sky is wrapping with greenish gray the sand hillocks,
which are separated from us only by a belt of warm green-brown grass
and a strip of golden-brown scrub. But it is the character of the scene
that is vast in suggestion. We do not feel the sky to be a quilt of
softness, but an abyss of tenderness, assuaging the desolation of the
spot,--a desolation that has the feeling of primeval loneliness.
For, at the risk of repetition, I would dwell once more upon the
elemental quality that characterizes all the best work of Homer Martin.
Not only is his theme elevated and serious, clothed moreover in
pictorial language of corresponding significance, but it shuns the
trivial and transitory and attaches itself to what is basic in nature’s
beauty and perennially true. In his masterpieces there is the evidence
of a great mind, for the time being unreservedly consecrated to great
ends, and expressing itself in an imagery of grandeur and enduring
suggestiveness. To recognize these qualities is to rank him highest of
all the poet-painters of American landscape.
IX
GEORGE DE FOREST BRUSH
To many a young student, regretfully turning his back on the few bright
years of study in Paris, has come the question, “What must I do to be
saved?” Hoping all things, believing all things of his single
determination to succeed, he feels within him a capacity; but how shall
he apply it? I fancy there are two classes of such aspirants: those who
look around them for suggestion, and those who look within. Among the
latter seems to have belonged George de Forest Brush.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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