Art in America: A Critical and Historial SketchBenjamin, S. G. W. (Samuel Greene Wheeler)
History
Art in America: A Critical and Historial Sketch
Benjamin, S. G. W. (Samuel Greene Wheeler)
Art, American
Less subjective and morbid, but moved by a similar feeling for the
suggestions of nature, A. H. Wyant displays a sympathy with scenery and
a masterful skill in reaching subtle effects which place him among the
first landscape-painters of the age. In the suggestive rendering of
space and color, of the manifold phases of a bit of waste land, or
mountain glen, or sedgy brook-side, simple enough at first sight, but
full of an infinitude of unobtrusive beauty, he works with the magic of
a high-priest of nature; his style is broad in effect, without being
slovenly and careless, and gives a multitude of details while really
dealing chiefly with one central and prevailing idea. Mr. Wyant's work
occasionally shows traces of foreign influences; but he is an artist of
too much original power to be under any necessity to stunt himself by
the imitation of the style of any other artist, however great.
Homer Martin is another painter who views nature for the sentiment it
suggests, while he is impressed chiefly by color and light; for form he
seems to have less feeling. But he is a lyrist with the brush, and his
sympathy with certain aspects of nature is akin to idolatry. With a few
intense and telling strokes, he brings before us the splendors of sunset
or the quietude of twilight, the gray vapors of morning creeping over
dank woodlands or the sublime pathos of lonely sands, haunted by wild
fowl and beaten by the hollow seas. But we have no painter whose art is
so unequal: in all his works there is absolute freedom, freshness, and
originality; his scheme of color is altogether his own, full of
luminousness and purity; but he is weak in technique, and thus he
alternately startles us by the brilliance, beauty, and suggestiveness of
one painting, and the palpable failure to reach the desired end in
another. However, this very irregularity in achievement shows that he is
subject to inspirations, and thus partakes of the character of genius,
which, if it were of a higher order, would be more often successful in
its attempts.
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