The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1884Various
History
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1884
Various
Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
Such works are not struck out in a heat, but grow and develop like human
lives, and it will not surprise many to know that most of them were
labored on for years. With Fuller, a picture was never completed. His
idea was constantly in advance of his work, and persisted in new
suggestions, so that the Winifred Dysart was two years in the painting,
the Arethusa five, and The Gatherer of Simples and the Witch, after an
even longer course of labor, were held by him at his death as not yet
satisfactory. The figures in the two works last mentioned have suffered
almost no change since first put upon the canvas, but they have from
time to time appeared in at least a dozen different landscapes, and
would doubtless have been placed in as many more before he had satisfied
his fastidious and exacting taste.
The artist found as much difficulty in naming his pictures when they
were done as he did in painting them. It is a prevalent, but quite
erroneous, impression that his habit was to select a subject from some
literary work, and then attempt to paint it in the light of the author's
ideas. His practice exactly reversed this method: he painted his picture
first, and then tried to evolve or find a name that would fit it. The
name Winifred Dysart, which is without literary origin or meaning, and
yet in some strange way seems the only proper title for the work to
which it is attached, came out of the artist's own mind. His Priscilla
was started as an Elsie Venner, but he found it impossible to work upon
the lines another had laid down without too much cramping his own fancy;
when half done he thought of calling it Lady Wentworth, and at last gave
it its present name by chance of having taken up The Blithedale Romance,
and noting with pleased surprise how closely Hawthorne's account of his
heroine fitted his own creation. The Nydia was started with the idea of
presenting the helplessness of blindness, with a hint of the exaltation
of the other senses that is consequent upon the loss of sight, and
showed at first merely a girl groping along a wall in search of a door;
and the Arethusa was the outgrowth of a general inspiration caused by a
reading of Spenser's Faerie Queen, and did not receive its present very
appropriate name until its exhibition made some designation necessary.
I have devoted this study on of Mr. Fuller to his quality as an artist
rather than to his character as a man, but shall have written in vain if
some hint has not been given of the loveliness of his disposition, the
modesty of his spirit, the chaste force of his mind. A man inevitably
paints as he himself is, and shows his nature in his works: Fuller's
pictures are founded upon purity of thought, and painted with dignity
and single-heartedness, and the grace of his life dwells in them.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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