Romantic painting in America

By James Thrall Soby and Dorothy C. Miller

Author
Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Date

1943

Publisher
The Museum of Modern Art

Exhibition URL
www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2903

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—

from our founding in 1929 to the present—is
available online. It includes exhibition catalogues,
primary documents, installation views, and an
index of participating artists.

MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art

 the museum
Of tvtODERM AHTj
Wace,

m| ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ MBB
V
—
Morris GRAVES:
Blind Bird. 1940. Gouache, 30V, * 27". Museum of Modern An, New York.
 Romantic
Painting
in
America

by James Thrall Soby and Dorothy C. Miller

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art

Stephen C. Clark, Chairman of the Board; Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 1st Vice-Chairman;
Sam A. Lewisohn, 2nd Vice-Chairman; John Hay Whitney, President*; Mrs. David M. Levy,
Treasurer; John E. Abbott, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, Mrs. W. Murray
Crane, Marshall Field, Philip L. Goodwin, A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim,
Henry R. Luce, Archibald MacLeish, David H. McAlpin*, William S. Paley, Mrs. John Parkin
son, Jr., Mrs. Charles S. Payson, Beardsley Ruml, James Thrall Soby, Edward M. M. Warburg.*

* On duty with the Armed Forces

Honorary Trustees
Frederic Clay Bartlett, Frank Crowninshield, Duncan Phillips, Paul J. Sachs, Mrs. John S.
Sheppard.

Copyright 1943, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York 19, N. Y.
 \ -J *—

o4 k

Contents

Blind Bird by Morris Graves 1 r

color frontispiece

Gas by Edward Hopper , , . . ori

*" color plate facing page 38

Foreword and Acknowledgment

4

Preface by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

5

Romantic Painting in America by James Thrall Soby

7

Plates
49

Biographies of the Artists edited by Dorothy C. Miller

129

Catalog of the Exhibition

129
Foreword and Acknowledgment Lenders to the Exhibition
The exhibition which accompanies this book presents Mr. and Mrs. Frederick B. Adams, Jr., New York;
the Romantic spirit in American painting as a persistent Matthew Barnes, San Francisco; Lt. and Mrs. Alastair
tendency beginning in the late 18th century and con Bradley -Martin, Glen Head, N. Y.; Stephen C. Clark,
tinuing with the youngest painters of today. While the New York; Mr. and Mrs. I. M. Cohen, New York; Mrs.
exhibition does not attempt a complete survey, it does Algernon Coolidge, Boston; Henry Wadsworth Long
explore a wide range of American Romantic art, some fellow Dana, Cambridge, Mass.; Mrs. Louise M. Dunn,
of it long neglected or viewed heretofore in another Cleveland; Philip L. Goodwin, New York; A. Conger
light, some too recent to be generally known. The Ro Goodyear, Old Westbury; Mr. and Mrs. Buell Hammett,
mantic tradition emerges as one of the strong and con Santa Barbara; Miss Anna Warren Ingersoll, Penllyn,
tinuous currents in American painting. Pa.; Mrs. Sheldon Keck, Brooklyn; Vance Kirkland,
Wartime restrictions and various other factors have Denver; Rico Lebrun, Westport, Conn.; The Lewisohn
made it impossible to borrow certain paintings of capital Collection, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal,
importance to an exhibition of American Romantic art. New York; Lt. Edward Millman, New York; Paul
Notable among these are Trumbull's Battle of Bunker s Mommer, New York; Mrs. Leighton K. Montgomery,
Hill, Allston's Moonlit Landscape, Morse's Allegorical Brooklyn; Frank C. Osborn, Manchester, Vt.; Harry
Landscape with NewYork University, several major works T. Peters, New York; Alton Pickens, New York;
by Thomas Cole including The Course of Empire series, Theodore C. Polos, San Francisco; David Porter,
Ryder's Jonah, The Flying Dutchman, Siegfried and The Washington; Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Reis, New York;
Race Track, Homer's Summer Night and 1 he Life Line. Ernest Rosenfeld, New York; Lt. and Mrs. Bruce Ryan,
In the contemporary field a number of painters whose New York; John L. Sexton, Wilmington; Nat Sharf-
work might have been appropriate to the exhibition man, Boston; George L. Shaskan, Poundridge, N. Y.;
could not be represented because of limitations of space. Mrs. Otto L. Spaeth, Dayton; Pfc. Boetius H. Sullivan,
Jr., Chicago; Mark Tobey, Seattle; Curt Valentin, New
York; Mrs. Payne Whitney, New York; Miss Denny
On behalf of the President and Trustees of the Museum
of Modern Art the director of the exhibition wishes to Winters, Los Angeles.
thank the collectors, institutions and dealers whose Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy,
generosity in lending has made the exhibition possible. Andover; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Public Library
In addition, grateful acknowledgment is made to the of the City of Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Cin
following for assistance in securing loans and for many cinnati Art Museum; New York State Historical Asso
valuable suggestions: C. G. Abbot; Jere Abbott; Mrs. ciation, Cooperstown; Detroit Institute of Arts; Wads
H. D. Allen; A. Everett Austin, Jr.; John I. H. Baur; worth Atheneum, Hartford; Honolulu Academy of Arts;
Donald J. Bear; Mrs. Florence Paull Berger; T. E. Newark Museum; Brooklyn Museum, New York;
Blackwell; Miss Louise H. Burchfield; Clyde H. Bur Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York
roughs; Charles D. Childs; W. G. Constable; Henry Public Library; Whitney Museum of American Art,
Wadsworth Longfellow Dana; Miss Louisa Dresser; New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northamp
Carleton V. Earle; G. H. Edgell; David E. Finley; Mrs. ton; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadel
Juliana Force; Joseph T. Fraser, Jr.; Blake-More God phia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Historic
win; Lloyd Goodrich; William A. Gosline, Jr.; J. D. Art, Princeton University; Rochester Memorial Art
Hatch, Jr.; Dalzell Hatfield; Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr.; Gallery; Washington University, St. Louis; Fine Arts
Arthur W. Heintzelman; Horace H. F. Jayne; Fiske Society, San Diego; Toledo Museum of Art; National
Kimball; Marchal E. Landgren; Clifford L. Lord; Rob Collection of Fine Arts, Washington; United States
ert G. Mclntyre; Henri Marceau; Frank Jewett Mather, National Museum, Washington; Phillips Memorial Gal
Jr.; Miss Agnes Mongan; Mrs. Gertrude H. Moore; Dr. lery, Washington; Worcester Art Museum.
Grace L. McCann Morley; Charles Nagel, Jr.; Harry A.C.A. Gallery; H. V. Allison & Co.; An American Place;
Shaw Newman; John O'Connor, Jr.; Duncan Phillips; Associa ted American Artists; Buchholz Ga llery ; Contem -
Reginald Poland; Paul North Rice; Daniel Catton Rich; porary Arts; Downtown Gallery; Durlacher Brothers;
E. P. Richardson; Mrs. Isabel S. Roberts; Paul J. Sachs; Kennedy & Co.; Kleemann Galleries; M. Knoedler &
Charles H. Sawyer; Edgar C. Schenck; Mrs. Alice M. Co.; Kraushaar Galleries; Julien Levy Gallery; Macbeth
Sharkey; Benjamin H. Stone; Frederick A. Sweet; Fran Gallery; Pierre Matisse Gallery; Midtown Galleries;
cis Henry Taylor; Ruel P. Tolman; W. R. Yalentiner; Milch Galleries; A. F. Mondschein; J. B. Neumann; The
Harry B. Wehle; Dr. Alexander Wetmore; Mrs. Harriet Old Print Shop; Passedoit Gallery; Perls Galleries;
Whedon; Miss Beatrice Winser; Miss Ella Winter. Of Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery; Victor D. Spark; Valentine
the Museum staff, Elise Van Hook and William S. Gallery; Robert C. Vose Galleries, Boston; Weyhe
Lieberman have contributed special research. Gallery. The galleries listed above are in New York unless
Dorothy C. Miller, Director of the Exhibition otherwise noted.

4
 Preface

Romantic Painting America is the fifthinof a series of books and accompanying exhibitions de
signed to present the movements, trends or divisions of modern art. The series began in 1936 with
Cubism and Abstract Art , followed by Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, which included a large
section devoted to related art of the previous five centuries. In 1938 paintings by modern "primi
tives" or self-taught artists of Europe, the United States and Canada were exhibited and pub-
fished under the title Masters of Popular Painting. In the spring of 1943 American Realists and
gic Realists brought together the pictures of some of the increasing number of living artists
who use a comparatively precise, "sharp focus" realism of technique whether their subject matter
s actual or imaginary. Their work was introduced by a "preface" of a dozen American paintings
chosen from the past one hundred years.
Romantic Painting in America, however, includes the past not as a preface but as an extended
"historical" retrospective. "Historical" is here placed in quotation marks because, for the Mu
seum, the history of art ends only with yesterday; the living art of the more remote past is second
m interest only to the art of the recent past which we call the present.
This is particularly true of the art of the United States, which, though it is our own, has been
less studied and less well understood than European art of the past three hundred years. Not only
Study and understanding are needed but also active discovery and revaluation-revaluation in
the atmosphere of the everchanging climate of contemporary art and critical opinion. With this
purpose in mind the Museum has held exhibitions or published books which involved our American
past far more than the program and name of the Museum of Modern Art imply. Among these
were Homer, Ryder, Eakins (1930); American Folk Art: the Art of the Common Man in America
1750-1900 (1932); Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870-1910 (1933); George Caleb Bingham,
the Missouri Artist (1935); Architecture of H . H.Richardson (1936); Photography: 1839-1937; Trois
siecl.es aux
d'art
Etats-Vnis (Paris, 1938); Indian Art of the United States (1941); and, already
mentioned, American Realists and Magic Realists (1943).
It is remarkable that Romantic Painting in America should be, so far as we can ascertain, the
first general survey of a tradition which now seems to have been at least as strong as the much
advertised Amencan love of fact and detailed local color. So vigorous and so manifold is the
Romantic current in American painting that one is easily reconciled to the absence of English,
German and French art which would have given international breadth to what the war and our
own enthusiasm have confined to national boundaries.
The history of Romanticism in American painting; our little known but important contribu
tions to the beginnings of the European Romantic revolt; what our painters in turn have borrowed
from Europe; and, above all, the development of our independent and often individual Romantic
art: these are the subjects presented on the following pages by James Thrall Sohy. Mr. Soby, the
Museum's recently appointed Assistant Director, is not primarily an historian of American art.
But he has for years past been a student of early 19th century Romanticism and, more than any
other American critic, has heralded the recent revival of Romanticism as distinguished from 20 th
century realism and abstract art. Dorothy C. Miller, the Museum's Associate Curator of Painting
and director of the present exhibition, has chosen the illustrations and edited the biographical
notes.
Both Mr. Soby and Miss Miller consider Romantic Painting in America something of a
pioneer venture, not so much in research, for which time was lacking, but in the general presenta
tion of the subject. They ask that their selections and classifications be considered tentative,
particularly insofar as these involve contemporary artists, most of whom are now for the first
time brought together in the name of Romanticism. They look forward to the questions and
debate which their work may stimulate; even more they hope that the public, both expert and
general, will share the excitement and enthusiasm which they and others of the Museum staff
have felt in preparing Romantic Painting in America.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
 Romantic Painting in America

What is Romantic painting? And what in particular is American Romantic painting? A vast inter-
national documentation deals with the first question. The second has evoked faint reply, though
the Romantic literature of such men as James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe has been
exhaustively studied here and abroad. To begin then with the first question, Romantic painting
represents the temporary triumph of Imagination over Reason in the war between the two which
had been openly declared in the 17th century. In historical terms, it commenced to evolve as a
formal movement around 1725, reached a climax in the first half of the 19th century and thereafter
survived, as it had existed centuries before, as a state of individual mind rather than as a cohesive
tendency in art.
The themes of Romantic art were high in emotional content, passionately expounded and
regulated only by Instinct— the infallible litmus paper of the Romantics. These themes required
to an exceptional degree an intimate communion between artist and audience. And one of the
many paradoxes of Romanticism is that its artists, though considering themselves geniuses far
removed from the public, should have abetted this communion. They chose subjects which fall
into three rough classifications: those to which their audience was emotionally preconditioned,
such as scenes from widely read literature; subjects of common firsthand experience— moral
causes, dramatic current events, fear, loneliness and pain; and subjects of common nostalgic
appeal the distant in time or place, solitude, sublimity, fantasy. The public to which they
appealed was diminished by the very force of their expression, but such as it was, it understood
their language.

American Romantic art adopted some of the themes of European Romanticism and much of
its spirit. Indeed our Romantic painting came into being in London with Benjamin West, as part
of the European movement. It was brought to this country in the early 19th century. The transi-
tion was dramatically signalized in 1818 by Washington Allston's decision to return to America to
live permanently, after a brilliant career in London. Soon after his arrival Aliston wrote: "Another

7
1 thought recurs, that I had returned to a mighty empire." The statement is significant, for Ameri
can Romantic painting was at first to feed upon the special grandeur of the American continent,
the scale and sweep of its scenery, history and legend. Our 18th century art had been chiefly con
fined to portraiture and had therefore not developed the intricate Romantic vocabulary of Euro
pean painting. Consequently our early landscapists took their basic inspiration, direct and raw,
from the rich wilderness of nature, first in the East and later in the West. Our figure painters took
theirs from the giants of myth and fact and from the lesser heroes of daily life in an untamed
country. The native Romantic artist of 1820-50 was less the confessor of egocentric emotion than
the celebrant of a national landscape and mythology. Though spiritually akin to his European
counterpart, he was on the whole far less introspective.
During the 1840s and 1850s a number of American painters went abroad to study at Diissel-
dorf, but these were usually realists with only occasional leanings toward Romanticism. Our
Romantics went to Paris or London or Rome, and once again the European and American move
ments drew close together in technique and approach and even in an intense privacy of vision, as
with Ryder. But there were important artists who stayed at home and developed a more purely
local tradition. Throughout the latter half of the century American Romanticism developed in two
divergent but occasionally overlapping directions, native and international. The dual tendency
continues to this day. The Francophilia of William Morris Hunt is echoed in the work of many
modern American artists; the Romantic regionalism of the Hudson River school has been revived
lately in Missouri and Kansas. But that is the end and not the beginning of this brief study. The
beginning is with West, Copley and Trumbull.

American Romantic Art Abroad:

West, Copley and Trumbull —Pro to-Romantics in Figure Painting
In the anti -Rococo reaction which swept over European painting during the latter part of the 18th
century, culminating finally in the high Romantic movement, the part played by American artists
is gradually coming to be defined. It was an impressive part, and perhaps it could have been played
only by men from the New World such as West, Copley and Trumbull. When these painters went
to London to live and work, they became identified with the English tradition to such a degree
that the more chauvinistic of their countrymen have not yet forgiven them. But they brought to
European art certain inextinguishable qualities of mind, formed in their own country and more or
less peculiar to it. Among these qualities was a toughness of thought which cherished hard fact
2 both for its own sake and as a starting point in idealization. It is surely no accident that Copley's

1 Jared B. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, New York, 1892, p. 140.
2 Late in the 19th century William Morris Hunt exclaimed: " 'Sentiment' if you like! But do embroider it upon a
possibility!" (W. M. Hunt's Talks on Art, First Series, Boston, 1875, p. 4.)

8
 single Romantic work, Watson and the Shark (ill. p. 49), was inspired by an account of Watson's
boyhood rescue from a shark in Havana harbor, a story supposedly heard firsthand by the
painter on Copley's first voyage to England in 1774.®However Raphaelesque the figure of Watson
in Copley's composition, however formalized the crew, the picture carries a new realistic intensity
of a kind particular to Romanticism. For the Romantics cherished reality most when its emotional
impact was strongest; and grisly, macabre and sensational subjects were so revered that Baude
laire was one day to refer to Romanticism's leading figure in art, Eugene Delacroix, as a "lake of
In emotional pitch and journalistic appeal, Watson and the Shark foretells by forty -four
years the epoch-making Raft of the Medusa by the French Romantic, Gericault, and leads to
Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (ill. p. 79), painted more than a hundred years later.
An equivalent factual emphasis is to be found in Benjamin West's famous Death of General
Wolfe (c. 1771) in which, as is well known, West strove for authenticity of detail in the soldiers'
uniforms, to the horror of his British contemporaries. Consider that at this same date Jacques
Louis David was painting Combat de Minerve contre Mars Secouru par Venus, supplying Minerva
with an upholstered shield and borrowing the figure of Venus from one of Fragonard's pillow
fights—consider this, and the revolutionary measure of West's respect for reality may be had.
West's precedent was followed by his pupil, John Trumbull, whose Battle of Bunker's Hill (1786)
was painted from personal experience and whose Sortie from Gibraltar (ill. p. 51) is more believable
than most battle scenes of the period. Nor was the lesson of West's canvas wasted on David and
those of his successors who became the French Romantics. Factual research and direct reportage,
especially when related to dramatic subjects heavily involving the emotions, became an important
factor in the anti-Rococo approach. In 1793 David was bending over the bloody tub of Marat,
sketchbook in hand. Soon after this date Antoine Gros was with Napoleon's armies in Italy as an
artist-correspondent. In 1818 Gericault was consulting the survivors of the shipwrecked "Medusa"
and building a model of their raft.
Though such dramatic realism lies nearer the main artery of 19th century Romanticism than
generally supposed, the pulse of the movement was free imagination, and here again West appears
as a precursor. The Romantics laid much stress on choice of subject as a stimulus to flights of the
imagination, and in terms of later Romantic development West's iconography is precocious,
though less so than that of Fuseli. The Romantics' predilection for the Middle Ages and for the
works of Shakespeare is prefigured in his canvases of fifty years before —"as early as 1778 [he was
choosing subjects] from early Saxon history; as early as 1789, from Shakespeare . . .""His Saul and
the Witch of Endor (ill. p. 50) typifies that Romanticism of the supernatural and the wild which,

.
ere 3 3>k. 48 no evidence that Watson traveled from America to England in this year. (Cf. Margaret Jefferv, "A
amting of Copley's English Period," Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. I, no. 4, December
1942.)
4 Fiske Kimball, "Benjamin West in His Historical Significance," Catalog of the Exhibition of Benjamin West,
1 ennsylvania Museum of Art, 1938, p. 11.

9
 springing from the landscapes of Salvator Rosa and his 17th century Italian and Netherlandish
contemporaries, was to receive new impetus from the "Gothick" tales of English and German
novelists in the late 18th century and was finally to become a recurrent preoccupation among 19th
century Romantic artists, particularly but belatedly in France. Saul and the Witch of Endor makes
an exciting foil to West's previous Death of General Wolfe. Between them they illustrate the dual
nature of Romanticism's dramatic vocabulary. On the one hand the Romantics often chose sub
jects of fairly direct emotional force—scenes of death, suffering and injustice. On the other hand
they chose subjects which touched man's psychoses —fear of the unknown, the untamed, the
darkly metaphysical. At times they struck at the heart of their audience; at others, they probed
for its nerves.
Shortly after West's arrival in England he had begun a series of paintings on subjects from
heroic antiquity —Pylades and Orestes, Regulus Returning to Carthage (which made his fame in
England), The Oath of the Young Hannibal, Hector Taking Leave of Andromache, Erasistratus
Discovering the Love of Antiochus and Stratonice. Such subjects had of course been routine assign
ments in the European academies since the days of Poussin in Rome; it was the contemporary
vitality which West brought to them that constituted his originality. Painted between 1766 and
1774, West's pictures antedate those works of David on equivalent themes which encouraged
Frenchmen of the Revolution in their self-identification with the ancient Romans, but it should
be kept in mind that David was ten years younger than West. Perhaps it will someday be held that
the antiquarianism of West and David formed merely the opening tableau in the Romantic cha
rade —a matter of costume and stage properties rather than an inherently classical manifestation.
Whether it is so recognized or not, West has a more direct claim to place as a proto-Romantic in
figure painting. His second sketch for Death on the Pale Horse (ill. p. 50), completed in 1802 and
shown in Paris that year, revives Rubens' Baroque fury of movement, fiery color and turbulent
conception, and this at a time when David was still arranging his figures and furniture in an archi
5 tectonic counterpoint of static and inflexible calm. The sketch for Death on the Pale Horse leads
directly to the high Romanticism of Delacroix, who looked upon Rubens as the greatest of all
6 artists.

6 West's picture of 1802 does not, however, quite deserve the solitary, advanced status which has sometimes been
claimed for it. In 1801 Antoine Gros had completed the sketch for the Battle of Nazareth (Nantes Museum). It is
a painting no less indicative of the new Romantic-Baroque spirit than Death on the Pale Horse, and probably
contributed far more to the cult for Rubens among French Romantics than did West's picture. It is true that
West had made a preliminary sketch for his painting before 1796, but this sketch is not comparable to the one
under discussion.
6 Delacroix himself never spoke of Rubens in more enthusiastic terms than did West's pupil, John Trumbull,
throughout his visit to France and Germany in 1786. After seeing a famous private collection which included
works by Raphael, Titian, Correggio and the Caracci in addition to Rubens, Trumbull wrote: "for color,
composition and expression, nothing can excel a Rubens." (Autobiography , Reminiscences and Letters of John
Trumbull from 1756 to 1841 , New York, 1841, p. 113.)

10
 The Migration of Romanticism to America:
Washington Allston and Samuel F. B. Morse

West's sketch for Death on the Pale Horse is also linked to the work of his pupil, Washington
Allston, who was to become the first true, though not consistent, Romantic in American painting.
Soon after Allston s arrival in London in 1801, he wrote home: "It is impossible to conceive any-
thing more terrible than Death on the white horse, and I am certain no painter has exceeded Mr.
7 West in the fury, horror, and despair which he has represented in the surrounding figures . . ." In
the same letter Allston refers to West as the greatest of contemporary artists in London, but this
tribute was probably largely inspired by West's extraordinary personal kindness toward younger
painters who enrolled in his studio. Certainly Allston's work showed only sporadic signs of his
master's influence and was more directly affected by the paintings of West's English contempo
raries. Yet it was fitting that he should have begun his career in West's studio. It had been West's
function to launch American art on an international scale. It was to be Allston's to guide native
painting to maturity of scope and vision, to broaden the narrow colonial tradition which had
limited most of our 18th century artists to portraiture. In so doing he carried over American
Romantic painting from one century into the next, from England and the school of Benjamin West
to this country and an indigenous art.
Since Allston was born and educated in the 18th century, his career forever reflected that
century's ambiguous character as an Age of Reason and as an age of "Gothick" anti-reason. But
he lived until 1843 and became a spearhead of 19th century American Romantic painting in
both figure and landscape. He had sat with Coleridge as an equal in the Cafe Greco in Rome and
he came home to be a prophet to his countrymen, pointing the way to the Romantic naturalism
of the Hudson River school and to the figure painting of the later Romantics. As a key figure in
American esthetic development he can scarcely be overestimated.
During his childhood in Waccamaw, South Carolina, Allston absorbed in isolation the melan
choly Gothick Romanticism which was sweeping over Europe as a formal movement and as a
widespread state of mind. He was to express this Romanticism in certain paintings throughout
his career, in The Deluge (ill. p. 53) and in the Rise of a Thunderstorm at Sea (1804), in Elijah Fed
by the Ravens (1817-18) and in Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand (1830-31), inspired by Mrs.
8 Radchffe's The Italian. As a young boy in Carolina he loved the "wild and marvelous." He adds:
"I delighted in being terrified by the tales of witches and hags, which the negroes used to tell
9 me . . ." In the Charleston Library he admired engravings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery,
particularly Fuseli's ghost scene from Hamlet. At Harvard as an undergraduate he made drawings

7 Flagg, op. cit.., p. 44.

8 M. F. Sweetser, Allston, Boston, 1879, p. 12.
9 Ibid., p. 12.

11

V
 of scenes from The Mysteries of Udolpho and Schiller's The Robbers; he portrayed a maniac in the
act of crushing a dove, and developed the talent for telling ghost stories upon which Washington
Irving was later to compliment him. In 1801 when he arrived in England, he was a full-blown
Romantic of the 18th century roman noir school. "Up to this time," he wrote, "my favorite sub
jects, with an occasional comic intermission, were banditti. I well remember one of these, where I
thought I had happily succeeded in cutting a throat! ... I did not get rid of this banditti mania
10 until I had been over a year in England."
He did not in fact ever rid himself of this kind of Romantic inspiration, as Spalatro 's Vision
of the Bloody Hand , painted late in life, testifies. But soon after his arrival in London he was caught
up in the strong currents of Grand Style tradition which flowed from Italy, and presently he was
torn between the fantasist, Fuseli, whom he had admired since youth, and the classicist, Flaxman,
whose Illustrations he later advised a younger artist to copy every day. He admired equally such
Grand Style advocates as Sir Joshua Reynolds and such devotees of exotic invention as John
Martin, whose Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1812) became one of his favorite pictures.
The climax to his indecision was reached —inconclusively —in 1804, when he traveled through
Paris to spend about four years in Italy, chiefly in Rome. There he looked at the Michelangelo
frescoes with no less awe and fervor than the young Gericault was later to experience, but these
works did not inspire him to a Romantic figure style of his own as they did Gericault. Instead
Allston turned to the 16th century Venetians. He had seen their works in Napoleon's great exhi
bition in the Louvre (1804) and had written concerning them a letter which may explain why he
often abandoned his Romantic approach for a more abstract Mannerism of style. "I . . . think I
understand why so many great colorists, especially Tintoret and Paul Veronese, gave so little heed
to the ostensible stories of their compositions. In some of them . . . there is not the slightest clue
given by which the spectator can guess at the subject. They addressed themselves, not to the
senses merely . . . but rather through them to that region (if I may so speak) of the imagination
which is supposed to be under the exclusive dominion of music . . ."" Thereupon Allston proceeded
to earn himself the dubious title "The American Titian," renouncing for long intervals the
"Gothick" inspiration so ideally suited to his temperament.
If as a result of this renunciation Allston's Romantic pictures are few in number, they are
nonetheless of capital beauty and importance. Most of them are landscapes, and it is in this direc
tion that his main significance appears to lie both for his immediate successors in Romanticism
and for posterity. Many of his figure pieces are empty pastiches after 16th century Italian Manner
ism or after the Mannerism so variously revived by his English predecessors, Reynolds, Fuseli,
Blake, Romney and Lawrence. But his Deluge and Elijah Fed by the Ravens rank high in terms of
historical perspective and for their qualities as painting. His Rise of a Thunderstorm at Sea is often
appraised as the work which inaugurated the American Romantic landscape school. To it should
10Ibid., p. 29. 11Ibid., pp. 37-38.
 be added one of his idyllic landscapes such as the Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase (1805)
(ill. p. 52) or the Italian Landscape (1827) which revived the tradition of elegiac pastorals several
years before Corot's first efforts in this direction. These pictures and the magnificent Moonlit
Landscape (c. 1827) (ill. p. 52) reveal the reverse side of Allston's Romantic naturalism —a vision
of calm loveliness as opposed to the rugged torment of his roman noir settings. The open, abstract
patterns of cloud and sky in the Moonlit Landscape foretell Ryder's handling of similar passages
with startling exactitude. The idyllic spirit of its composition was adopted by a number of later
landscapists, among them Inness and Wyant.
To Allston's house in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, came a long procession of the cele
brated men of his period, and his limited production as a painter during the last twenty -five years
of his life was ascribed by Dunlap to his love of conversation. The charge was indignantly denied
by Allston, and there is in fact a more plausible reason why his output slackened. The reason lies
in his huge unfinished composition, BelshazzaF s Feast , the story of which is a far greater Romantic
fantasy, in the contemporary, Surrealist sense of the term, than anything Allston ever painted or
said. The picture, measuring roughly 12 by 16 feet, was nearly completed when Allston left London
in 1818. When he died a great part of the composition had been painted out, so that for twenty-
11 five years he had more or less steadily worked backwards to the raw canvas. There are a number
of conflicting theories as to why this should have happened: it was said that Gilbert Stuart per
suaded him to change the perspective, resulting in "more than twenty thousand chalk-lines in
;
13 circles and arcs, to bring the amended figures into correct drawing" that financial worries spoiled
his ability to concentrate; that John Martin's picture on the same subject, shown in London in
1821, dulled his own ambition. The true explanation probably springs from inner rather than
external circumstance, for Allston's interminable references to the picture in letters of the period
make clear that he had developed a thoroughly paranoiac attitude toward it. He defended it bitterly
against real and imagined abuse, he guarded it so zealously that on one occasion he demanded that
workmen going to his studio should enter with their backs to it. He felt that he could not die before
he finished it, and when he did die, leaving a half-wrecked canvas, his close friend, R. H. Dana,
Jr., wrote thankfully in his diary: "He had escaped that terrible vision—the nightmare, the incu
14 bus, the tormentor of his life—his unfinished picture."
The story of BelshazzaF s Feast is Balzac's Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu come to life and no incon
siderable part of Romantic history. Fortunately Allston as a person accounted for more positive
contributions, and among these is his share in forming the career of his devoted pupil, Samuel

12 The fact is the more surprising in that Allston ordinarily worked with a quick, instinctive ease. His Elijah Fed
by the Ravens was finished in three weeks, and he once wrote a young artist: "Do not be anxious, but put faith
cers. in your fin When I paint, I often do not look at my palette; I take off my colors by a secret sympathy be
tween my hand and the pigments." (Sweetser, op. cit., p. 141.)
13 Ibid., p. 121.
14 Flagg, op. cit., p. 333.

13
 F. B. Morse. Though Morse went to London, exhibited in the Royal Academy and received the
usual encouragement from West, he worshipped Allston and in 1813 wrote home: "You must
recollect, when you tell friends that I am studying in England, that I am a pupil of Mr. Allston,
15 and not Mr. West."
Since Morse became primarily a portrait painter between the time of his return from Europe
in 1815 and his absorption in telegraphy, Romanticism's influence on his work is minor and spo
radic. Yet in 1828 he responded to the appeal of the Greek War of Independence, an obsessive
theme for Delacroix and endless lesser Romantics and the equivalent of the recent Spanish Civil
War in our own century as a moral cause. In that year Morse painted The Greek Boy (cat.no. 151),
its subject a youthful survivor of the Massacre of Chios who had been ransomed from the Turks
by a group of Americans and sent to this country for adoption. The boy, Christos Evangelides,
arrived in New York in 1828 and was a great attraction in literary and artistic circles. Morse
painted his portrait in full Oriental costume, with Greek and Turk warriors struggling in the back
ground, and William Cullen Bryant composed a poem, The Greek Boy, in his honor. Portrait and
poem are part of the ample body of evidence to prove that one of Romanticism's deepest nostal
gias was directed toward antiquity, even toward its modern vestiges. In 1832 Delacroix, after
traveling all the way to Morocco in search of contemporary exoticism, was elated to discover that
the Moroccans reminded him of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Toward the end of the century
16 John La Farge reacted similarly to the Samoans he saw in the South Seas.
Morse's Chapel of the Virgin at Subiaco (1830) (ill. p. 56), is closely related in conception to
the Italian landscapes of such German Romantics as Franz Catel, Carl Gustav Carus and Philipp
Fohr. But Morse reserved his longest flight of imagination for a native subject —New York Uni
versity at Washington Square. His Allegorical Landscape Showing New York University is an
astonishing transmutation of fact to fancy, a vision of lakeside landscape and imaginative archi
tecture which must have confounded both students and faculty of the University. It would be
interesting to know whether the picture influenced Cole's landscapes with architecture, such as
The Departure and The Return (1837) and The Architect's Dream (1840). In any case Morse might,
have himself developed into a painter of considerable Romantic interest had he not devoted him
self to the invention and perfecting of the telegraph. The invention was to be anti-Romantic for
American artists later than Morse. Half a century afterwards, in explaining why he was going to
the South Seas, John La Farge wrote: "We wished to go very far. Japan is too near. There is
17 always|the telegraph. The Pacific gives you at least two months free from news."

16Sweetser, op. cit., p. 64.

16 In describing the Samoans, La Farge wrote that they had startled him "with a great wonder that no one had
told me of a rustic Greece still alive somewhere, and still to be looked at." (John La Farge, Reminiscences of the
South Seas, New York, 1912, p. 86.)
17J. Walker McSpadden, Famous Painters of America, New York, 1907, p. 220.

14
 The Triumph of Nature:
The Hudson River School and The Glorification of The West

For many European Romantics of the early 19th century America was a rugged Arcadia to the
West for Shelley afire with justice no less than for Coleridge conjuring up an escapist image of
life on the Susquehanna. American Romantics of the period shared this conception of their coun
try, and their works became to a large extent an art of moral sentiments and landscape. As such it
developed certain close affinities to Romantic painting in England and, above all, in Germany.
It stood in opposition to French Romantic art, in which figure painting remained so supreme that
Delacroix spoke with contempt of landscape painters, while Baudelaire declared that landscape
appealed to lazy, sluggish and unimaginative artists. The Americans were capable of replying in
kind. When Thomas Cole visited the exhibition of contemporary French art in the Louvre in
1831, he wrote: "Although I had been informed that the present French artists were low in merit,
I did not expect to find them, with little exception, so totally devoid of it. I was disgusted in the
beginning with their subjects. Battle, murder and death, Yenuses and Psyches, the bloody and the
18 voluptuous, are the things in which they seem to delight . . ," Later on, in writing to the art
historian, Dunlap, Cole passionately defended landscape painting, asserting that it was more diffi
19 cult than historical and superior in everything save passion.
For the generation of painters which afterwards came to be known as the Hudson River,
Catskills or White Mountains school, not only was landscape a greater form of art than figure
painting but American landscape was more inspiring than European. Behind this judgment was
the authority of Jean Jacques Rousseau's philosophy of primitivism, reexpressed by Cole and
William Cullen Bryant, the two leading American prophets of nature Romanticism. "All nature
here is new to art," Cole wrote, "No Tivolis, Ternis, Mont Blancs, Plinlimmons, hackneyed and
2° worn by the daily pencils of hundreds; but primeval forests, virgin lakes and waterfalls . . ."
And Bryant, delivering his famous funeral oration for Cole, said: "I well remember ... the delight
which was expressed at the opportunity of contemplating pictures which carried the eye over
scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our country, over our aerial mountaintops with their mighty
growth of forest never touched by the axe, along the banks of streams never deformed by culture,
21 and into the depth of skies bright with the hues of our own climate . ." The two men and their
whole philosophy of Romanticism are summarized in Asher Durand's portrait, Kindred Spirits
(ill. p. 57).

18Louis L. Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life , and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A., New York, 1853
pp. 125-26.
19 Ibid., pp. 171-72.
20 Ibid., p. 202.
21 Ibid., pp. 58-59.

15
 It is generally believed that Cole's earliest landscapes were preceded a few years by those of
Thomas Doughty. But except in rare cases such as In Nature's Wonderland (cat. no. 79) with its
elaborately curvilinear composition, Doughty's art was a simple, straightforward transcription of
nature as it appeared to a man of limited imagination and skillful hands. Cole, on the contrary,
brought to landscape decided imaginative power, evident not only in the landscapes themselves
but in the architectural fantasies with which he often filled them. He also brought to his art a
passionate moral force which made him the acknowledged leader and prophet of nature Romanti
cism in this country. In contrast to the French landscapists, whose veneration for nature was
rooted in a peasant humility, to the Englishman, William Blake, who declared that "Nature is the
devil," Cole made his art a sermon on the godlike relation of nature to man, as many of the German
Romantics had done. He did so with a vigor of conception which transcends the sentimental piety
of his period and sometimes comes through with clarity and force, as in The Expulsion from Eden
(ill. p. 54). 22He prayed before he painted, and often his sermons required prolonged attendance
by his audience, as in his four epic series, The Departure and The Return, Before and After, The
Course of Empire and the Voyage of Life.
Cole was born in England and lived there until he was nineteen. Returning for a visit in 1829,
he found his own works superior to those of the contemporary English, though he admired Turner,
Wilson and Calcott. Ten years later he traveled on the Continent and praised the paintings of
Titian, Correggio, Claude, Poussin and (prophecy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) painters
earlier than Raphael. He declared that Italy was a paradise for painters, but added character
istically: "I have found, though, no natural scenery yet which has affected me so powerfully as
that which I have seen in the wilderness places of America: and although there are a peculiar
23 softness and beauty in Italian skies, ours are far more gorgeous."
Despite this patriotic statement, Cole's art was based upon the 17th century European tradi
tion to a degree from which no love of New World scenery could completely free him. As opposed
to Asher B. Durand and other contemporaries who often narrowed their view of nature to a de
tailed close-up, Cole was a painter of vistas, modeling his compositions on Claude. "I am not a
mere leaf-painter," he protested. "I have higher conceptions than a mere combination of inani
24 mate, uninformed nature." Nevertheless, it is the detail in Cole's works which is often so spe
cifically American in its unchecked tangle of trees, rocks and underbrush, though to examine it is
to go directly counter to Cole's own wish. He declared that detail should not attract the eye, and

22This painting seems to abound in the currently fashionable "double images" —forms which suggest other forms
of a different identity. There is some evidence that their presence may have been deliberate. "Treading the
mosses of the forest," Cole wrote, "my attention has often been attracted by the appearance of action and
expression of surrounding objects, especially of trees. I have been led to reflect upon the fine effects they pro
duce, and to look into the causes. They spring from some resemblance to the human form." (Noble, op. cit.,
p. 65.)
23 Ibid., p. 142.
24 Ibid., p. 263.

16
 to make sure that it did not do so, he painted his skies first on the canvas, keying them up to such
a point that they tended to silhouette the foreground. Perhaps to Cole's example may be partially
ascribed the emphasis on backlighting so common in 19th century American painting. His predi
lection for objects "seen between the spectator and the sun"" was inherited by numerous native
painters of later generations.
Cole died in 1848, revered by American artists and writers, a national figure through the fame
of his Voyage of Life series. Toward the end of his life he lamented that he had not lived in a time
and place where a more cultivated taste prevailed, believing that had he done so he would have
conceived more sublime works. He does not appear to have doubted his ability to execute them,
though his technical limitations were serious and have accounted for his eclipse. After Cole the
Romantic tradition moved more or less steadily away from philosophy toward esthetics, from
ideology toward craftsmanship. The progress is marked in midcourse by the landscapes of Kensett
and Whittredge, so superior in painterly quality to Cole's works, and reaches its climax in the
"art for art's sake" doctrine adopted by Hunt, La Farge and Whistler.
A significant factor in this development is the fact that a number of Cole's successors studied
or made a profession of engraving, a trade which focused attention on technical problems and
reduced conception to an imitative role. Chief among these men was Cole's contemporary, Asher
Brown Durand, whose first landscape, according to his son's biography, was exhibited in the
National Academy of Design in 1828. From 1832 on, Durand painted landscapes consistently,
alternating them with genre and historical compositions (he abandoned the last-named category
in the late 1830s). Around 1834 Durand wrote Cole: "I am still willing to confess myself a tres
passer on your ground, though, I trust, not a poacher; landscape still occupies my attention.""
The quotation serves to confirm Cole's position as leader of the landscape school, yet Durand was
justified in saymg that he was not a poacher. His fundamental approach to landscape was radically
different from Cole's, as different as Courbet's from that of Corot. Durand's long career as an
engraver taught him a respect for the very detail which Cole had held in careful check, and in
his work the influence of the 17th century, formalist landscape tradition is less often felt. Indeed,
in the winter of 1840-41 he wrote Cole a far from enthusiastic letter giving his reactions to the
landscapes of Claude. By contrast with Cole's epic attitude toward nature, Durand regarded
landscape as a series of conjoined but separable still lifes, and late in life he advised a younger
artist: "You will be most successful in the more simple and solid materials, such as rocks and tree-
trunks, and, after these, earth-banks and the coarser kinds of grass . .
Whereas Cole lived in intimate communion with nature and retired to his studio to compose
its elements from sketches, Durand resided in New York City for fifty -one years of his life and

25 Ibid., p. 262.
26John Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand, New York, 1894, p. 140.
27 Ibid., p. 215.

17
 m ade excursions to the country to paint directly from nature. As a result Durand tended to bring
nature Romanticism down to earth, to reduce its ideological content from the sermon to the anec
dote, its pictorial form from the vista to the section. His favorite poets were Goldsmith and Thom
son (Cole's were Dante, Milton and Wordsworth), and there is in most of his work a simple,
pastoral realism which relates him to Doughty rather than to Cole. Yet he was not entirely im
mune to the more intellectual Romantic forces of his period, as may be seen in Kindred Spirits
(1849) (ill. p. 57), Thanatopsis (1850) and Primeval Forest (c. 1869-70).
As a youth John F. Kensett, whom James Jackson Jarves was to call "the Bryant of our
23 painters,— a little sad and monotonous, but sweet, artistic, and unaffected," applied to Durand
to be taken as an apprentice in engraving. He was refused, since Durand, twenty-two years
Kensett's senior, was by then ready to abandon engraving. The young artist thereupon studied
the process with his own uncle, and the evidence of this training is often visible in his work, rein
forced by his schooling in Dusseldorf. A number of his paintings are in the Durand tradition of
minute exactitude in rendering close-ups of nature, though they are usually more polished in
technique. But Kensett was born with a sensitivity to mood and hour which his hearty predecessor
lacked, and much of his art is a direct negation of Durand's premise that nature is the ultimate
truth, a premise expressed by Durand in a statement which might have been written by the
Realist, Courbet: "There is not . . . any charm that the most inventive imagination ever em
ployed . . . that is not to be seen in Nature, more beautiful and more fitting than art has ever
22 realized or ever can." Unlike Durand, Kensett worked from sketches rather than from nature
direct. Though few of his landscapes are as arbitrarily fabricated as Cole's, in the best of his works
(ill. p. 68) he manipulated the atmosphere with a subtlety of taste and effect which forecasts the
work of George Inness, Homer D. Martin and William Morris Hunt. He relied, sometimes with
astonishingly beautiful results, on an infiltration of poetic feeling in interpreting the light and air
of his subjects. To the simplest themes he brought a new delicacy of emotion, a soft-spoken poesy
of nuance which gives him a particular if minor place in American 19th century landscape art.
Probably as a result of his seven years in Europe, the frontier spirit is conspicuously absent in
many of his works. (Symbolically he often painted the curved and open coastline, looking to the
sea and Europe.) For him nature was not always God, as it was for Cole, nor Truth, as it was for
Durand. It was the rhyme of the sonnet and the trill of the flute, to be read and heard in a rare
and dwindling hour.
In one of Durand's letters to a younger artist he wrote: "All the license that the artist can
claim or desire is to choose the time and place where Nature displays her chief perfections, whether
30 of beauty or majesty, repose or action." The dictum was accepted at face value by many land-
23James Jackson Jarves, The Art Idea, New York (fourth edition), 1877, p. 235.
rom 2a F Durand's letters to a young artist. Quoted from G. W. Sheldon, American Painters, New York (enlarge
edition), 1881, p. 132.
30G. W. Sheldon, op. cit., p. 132.

18
 scape painters of the generation which succeeded his own, and the work of men like Jasper Francis
Cropsey constitutes an index to those regions of America and Europe within which selection of
landscape subjects might safely be made. For Durand the fields of Hoboken had sufficed for a time,
for Cropsey the landscape of England, for Worthington Whittredge the countryside surrounding'
Dusseldorf. But there were artists of this generation who believed nature's "chief perfections"
were farther to seek and who joined the long line of 19th century artists traveling far in search of
the unspoiled and the exotic. Frederick Edwin Church, a pupil of Cole, belongs to this group. In
1853 and again in 1857 he went to South America and came home with numerous sketches which
resulted in such pictures as Cotopaxi, Ecuador (ill. p. 66). The choice of subject in this picture is
meaningful. Since the mid-18th century the Romantic cult for mountains had been steadily grow-
ing in intensity. By 1826, the year of Church's birth, few European mountain ranges remained
unexplored in fact or fancy; the Romantics were finally running out of mountains. Church, finding
the Catskills inadequate, solved the dilemma by going to Ecuador to sketch Cotopaxi, rising
nearly 19,000 feet in the Andes. The mountain was not only high but volcanic, a fact of particular
interest to the Romantics, for whom much of nature's fascination lay in its constant menace to
mankind. Moreover, Church's choice of subject emphasizes the process of exteriorization which
Romantic inspiration was undergoing. Whereas Baudelaire had referred to Delacroix as a "volcano
artistically concealed by a bouquet of flowers," now the volcano became a natural wonder to be
visited by man. In the one case Romanticism consisted in an inner tumult of imagination; in the
other it required strong legs for travel.
Having explored the tropics of South America, Church soon determined to see and paint their
absolute antithesis in Romantic iconography— the icefields of the North to which Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein monster had lumbered in search of peace. Church's interest in the subject had per-
haps been stimulated by Durand's engraving of an iceberg which the latter had seen and sketched
on his return trip from Europe in 1841." In any case Church read contemporary accounts of
the northern wastelands and finally sailed for Labrador, returning with sketches from which he
painted several pictures of icebergs. The subject had tremendous Romantic appeal in that it com-
bmed an exoticism of the unfamiliar with a Rousseauvian exoticism of the uninhabited."
Both kinds of exoticism were to be found in Church's own country and were there discovered,
twenty-five years after George Catlin had opened the American West to artists, by the German-'
born landscapist,^AlbertJBier6tadt. In 1858 Bierstadt joined General Lander's expedition and
worked northwest from St. Louis to the Nebraska Territory and southern Oregon. His presence
311 he theme had also been treated by the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich a fact wh.Vh
6
PlrUUal
"e™
""> 16,6 cTniry. ' kiMhiP bet Ameri and Romantic painter, during the fir., half of the

ere
0t
'i,U
a,CT
'7-
8l,ed
b " 'T"'' " ° P Un,il ' the cmta l»d "ad hi, disenchanting comment
June ~3, 1833 on his own trip to Labrador. In complaining of the Fur Company's inroads, he wrote- "Where
°n"W
"ie,
' ald p 238 ) n V,81t DatUre Undi8tUrbed? (D Culross Pea ed., Audubon's Africa, Boston,^

19
in the expedition is an indication of a rising scientism within the Romantic movement, implicit in
Bierstadt's paintings of the Rockies (ill. p. 67) and prefigured in the documentary art of Cat m
and Audubon (ill. pp. 60 and 59). Certain artists now came to feel that their work should have an
added justification as scientific documentation; the spirit persisted untd the overwhelming
estheticism of the late 19th century made science the subservient handmaiden of art itself, ot
only art lovers but cartographers, botanists and geologists admired Bierstadt s pictures, and
of his interest for his contemporaries lay in the supposed accuracy with which he represeute

the unfamiliar.
Many of Bierstadt's paintings depict buffaloes-an animal introdnced by Catlin to the vast
menagerie founded by the high Romantic movement and even now being added to by such modern
artists as Darrel Austin and Morris Graves (ill. pp. 128 and 126). The cult for animals had begun
in England, where private zoos were a requisite of the Romantic's estate. From England the cult
had spread to France, but in that country the more economical Romantic hero had been content
to have the State support his animals and had gone to visit them at the Jardin des Plantes. By the
early 19th century public zoos were sufficiently naturalistic in planning so that visitors such as
Gericault, Delacroix and Barye could convince themselves that they were face to face with lions
and tigers in their native habitat. But this was a different matter from Catlin's and Bierstadt s
experiences in The American West. There animals were both fierce and free, and on one occasion
a companion of Bierstadt wounded a buffalo slightly to permit the painter to stand near and sketch
its death charge. Another companion was within reason in writing of this event: "I doubt if there
be any other country but Kansas and Nebraska where the brush follows so hard on the rifle ... ••
Bierstadt's interest in the awesome scenery of the American West is echoed a generation
later in such a painting as Thomas Moran's Cliffs the Upper Colorado River, Territory
of 1882 (ill. p. 76). Meanwhile, in the East, a quieter and more lyric Romantic landscape was being
evolved, an art founded on a sensitive interpretation of nature's less declamatory moods. Blue
Hole Flood Waters, Little Miami River (ill. p. 65) by the Negro, Robert S. Duncanson, exemplifies
the new tendency, but a more striking example is afforded by Storm Approaching Larchmont Bay
(ill. p. 70), painted in 1868 by the little-known artist, M. J. Heade. In Heade's composition the
towering verticals of Bierstadt's mountain scenery have disappeared, to be replaced by a hori
zontal disposition of forms which is in itself symptomatic of a new repose in the Romantic spirit.
The thunderous opera of the 1830 generation was nearing its end, its players and audience a , e
exhausted by its passion of gesture and rhetoric. The time was ripe for a more professional lan -
scape art in which dramaturgy would count less than sensitivity and finish. Heade s love y
Larchmont
Bay, though reactionary in technique, leads to the new nature Romanticism o George
Inness' late career. Meanwhile American figure painting was undergoing a separate development
from the 1820s to the Civil War.
33 Henry T. Tuckerman, American Artist Life, New York, 1867, p. 392.

20
 Romantic Figure Painting of Americana; New York to the West

s In the late 1820s, when Cole was beginning to found the Romantic landscape tradition in thi
country, a native Romantic figure painting was being developed by John Quidor, born in 1801
near the Washington Irving country and a resident of New York City nearly all his life. There was,
however, the important difference that, while Cole was accepted as a prophet and master, Quidor
was almost unknown to his contemporaries and exerted little or no influence over the art of his
period. His earliest known painting, dated 1823, was of a scene from Don Quixote, and he subse
quently took a majority of his subjects from literature, particularly from that of his countrymen,
Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
Quidor s Ichabod Crane Pursued by the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow was exhibited in
1828 and inaugurated a career devoted to horror Romanticism —a depiction of witchery, dark
legend and terror which if anything intensified the macabre humor of its literary sources. There
are broad traces of European influence in Quidor's work, but none is so specific as might appear at
first glance. His figures seem a strange compound of Bosch and Magnasco. The pop-eyed cari-
catural handling of the heads instantly calls Daumier to mind, yet this treatment occurs in Qui
dor s earliest paintings, at a time when he could hardly have known the work of the French
master, who was his junior by seven years. Nor does it seem likely that he knew the works of his
slightly younger German contemporary, Moritz von Schwind, often so closely related to his own.
A more likely source of Quidor's figures is in the drawings of Hogarth and Rowlandson, whose
crusty vigor he shares. But Quidor s contours are notable for a mannered elegance quite different
from that of the Englishmen, and at times almost suggest a deliberate parody on the Italian
Mannerist and Baroque figure styles. Lacking more definite evidence, we must assume that
Quidor was a natural Romantic whose art evolved from the recesses of a distraught and power
ful imagination.
His landscapes are in the tradition of the 17th century banditti school but parallel the action
of the figures to an extent that Quidor's predecessors would have considered beyond credulity's
province. In many of his canvases nature is more than a sympathetic backdrop to outlaw activity,
as it was so often in the 17th century; it is a conniving and active agent in this activity. The back
ground trees and rocks of Leatherstocking Meets the Law of 1832 (cat. no. 174) parallel exactly the
compositional action of the figures. In The Money Diggers (ill. p. 58) the foreground figure and tree
are nearly identical in pose and intent, while the remainder of the landscape writhes with its own
sinister activity. For Quidor man and nature were related in evil far more intimately than Cole
had attempted to relate them for good.
At almost exactly the time when Quidor was painting his earliest important pictures, the
first prints of John James Audubon's great folio, The Birds of America , were being mailed to sub
scribers. Thus to the art of the Eastern Romantic there was opposed the art of an ornithologist

21
 whose material had been collected in wide peregrinations through the South and Midwest. The
work of Quidor was, of course, more truly and recognizably Romantic than that of Audubon. Yet
if Quidor was the illustrator of an openly Romantic literature, Audubon was the illustrator of a
science which was not without its Romantic overtones. The quest of birds was m a limited sense a
quest of the unknown and the exotic. However dispassionately it may have been conducted, it was
an exploration of the trees and underbrush-nature's tenements-with their darting, colorful life
of migration, nesting and song. And Audubon's prints, as is well known, were totally different
from the prints of earlier ornithologists. While striving for realism of detail and habitat Audubon
succeeded, perhaps unconsciously, in dramatizing his subjects beyond the requirements of orni
thological research. Certain of his prints, such as the White-headed Eagle (cat. no. 7), reflect the
savage grandeur of the struggle for survival as powerfully as Delacroix's studies of stallions fight
ing on the sands of Algiers. Audubon's Quadrupeds of America, begun in 1845, contains plates like
that of the Canada Lynx (ill. p. 59) in which the psychology of the animal is stressed as much as its
coloration and habitat. In his basic attitude toward animals Audubon was part and parcel of his
34 time— the high period of the Romantic movement. He studied birds and quadrupeds objectively
but appreciated and interpreted their instinctive savage wisdom, which so many Romantics con
sidered superior to man's untidy and vacillating logic. At times and in certain subjects he was as
much of a Romantic animalier as the French sculptor, Antoine Louis Barye.
As later, in the case of Winslow Homer, the Romantic cast to some of Audubon's work has
been obscured by the artist's avowed contempt for the workings of free imagination. Though
Audubon was born in Santo Domingo of a French father, his early manhood in this then Puritan
country apparently taught him to be embarrassed by emotional extravagance. His own writing is
primarily factual, and he disparaged the Romantic tendencies in the prose of the younger scientist-
painter, George Catlin. Catlin had traveled through the American Indian country for eight years,
beginning in 1832, with the fixed purpose of making an extensive graphic document of the Indian s
disappearing culture (ill. p. 60). In 1843 Audubon followed his footsteps to the Yellowstone country
to collect material for his own Quadrupeds of America. On May 17 he noted in his journal: "Ah!
Mr. Catlin, I am now sorry to see and to read your accounts of the Indians you saw—how very
different they must have been from any that I have seen! We saw here no 'carpeted prairies,' no
'velvety distant landscape'; and if these things are to be seen, why, the sooner we reach them the
35 better." On June 11 he added: "We have seen much remarkably handsome scenery, but nothing
at all comparing with Catlin's descriptions; his book must, after all, be altogether a humbug.

To appreciate the change in attitude toward animals which came in with the Romantic movement, one has only
to compare one of Delacroix's lions to the famous painting of a hippopotamus by the 18 th century artist, , I mtro
Longhi. In Longhi's picture, the hippopotamus is a circus animal, led docilely past a balcony of festival fi„ ,
In Delacroix's works the lion is free, menacing and restored to its natural identity as king of the beasts.
35Peattie, op. cit., p. 282.
« 3 Ibid., p. 298.

22
 Catlin's book was far from a humbug, but it was certainly Romantic and it remains an im-
pressive refutation of the theory that love of science thrives best in frigid hearts. No sooner had
Catlin arrived at the upper Missouri, at the beginning of his travels, than he was comparing
37 the Indians to the models of ancient Greek sculpture. The Missouri River was described in a
passage which Mrs. Radcliffe could scarcely have improved: "There is a redeeming beauty in the
green and carpeted shores, which hem in this huge and terrible deformity of waters . . . where the
mighty forests of stately cottonwood stand, and frown in horrid dark and coolness over the filthy
38 abyss below . . ." And later on, warming to his subject, he wrote of the same scenery: "A place
where the mind could think volumes; but the tongue must be silent that would speak, and the
hand palsied that would write. A place where a Divine would confess that he had never fancied
Paradise— where the painter's palette would lose its beautiful tints— the blood -stirring notes of
eloquence would die in their utterance— and even the soft tones of sweet music would scarcely
39 preserve a spark to light the soul again that had passed this sweet delirium." He concluded with
the words, "I mean the prairie . . and so he did.
It is not known whether Catlin's rhapsodic accounts of the Missouri country were read by
Missouri s own George Caleb Bingham. In any case they can have had little elfect, for while Catlin
came to the frontier as a Romantic scientist from the East, Bingham lived in Missouri from early
youth and knew its history, legend and daily incident from long and continuous experience. To
Catlin the territory had appealed as a virgin land inhabited by redskinned Greeks; to Bingham it
was the new America, explored and founded by men of extraordinary vigor and cunning. But
Bingham's paintings, for all their closer bond with reality, are no less Romantic than Catlin's and
have acquired enormous nostalgic interest over the hundred years since they were painted.
The story that Bingham was dramatically introduced to painting by watching Chester Hard-
ing paint a portrait of Daniel Boone has lately come under suspicion. 40Whether it is true or not,
Bingham's mature style— the style of his best genre pictures of the '40s and '50s, as opposed to
his early portraits and his late works, painted on his return from Diisseldorf —was almost certainly
inspired by his trip to Philadelphia in 1837. He studied in the Academy of Fine Arts for three
months and saw the genre paintings of Henry Inman and John Neagle's genre portrait of the
blacksmith, Pat Lyons. It seems likely that the latter picture impressed him deeply and accounted
in good part for his conversion from a straight portrait painter to a genre artist dealing with

8"f
o7ni®
P
.°nll
m t " mr Bc W was sho the A Rome, he had remarked: "How like a young Mohawk warrior!"
'ef°gsreSS Boston"^™ vol I ^'48 7 ^ Pr ° ArtS ° Design in the United Sta (new edition),
Apparently the comparison eould work both ways. When Catlin arrived in Paris in 1845 with his troupe of
Indians, Delacroix found their nobility of mien and gesture equivalent to that of antique sculpture. (Cf. Rav-
mond Eschoher, Delacroix, Pans, 1927, vol. II, p. 302.)
38George Catli in, Illustrations of the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians: in a Series
of Letters and Notes. London, 1845 (fifth edition), vol I d 18
'
P 33Ibid., vol. II, p. 3. ' '
Cf. Albert Christ-Janer, George Caleb Bingham of Missouri, New York, 1940, p. 13.

23
 recognizable personalities. Returning to Missouri, he designed a banner for the Whig Convention
of 1840 at Rocheport which bore the superb slogan, "Old Tippecanoe and Tyler too." He made a
number of drawings of scenes of local stump oratory, involving numerous figures, and he was soon
launched as a genre painter.
Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (ill. p. 61) is one of his earliest genre works,
and perhaps the most Romantic painting of his known career —a haunting and haunted master-
piece. In its almost Oriental economy, its wonderful atmospheric effect, its soft gradation of
space, its sensitivity to the light, air and glassy motion of the river —in all these, it is an unfor
gettable work of art. The ghostly pirogue slides into view from nowhere; its figures stare straight at
their audience, and in the prow sits the Poe-like bear, object of civilization's wonder and curiosity
and symbol of the fur traders' hard, free life in the great woods.
The hardier side of Bingham's Romantic nature is reflected in Daniel Boone Escorting a Band
of Pioneers into the Western Country (ill. p. 61), showing Boone (without the coonskin cap which
he is said to have loathed), his wife, daughter and companions coming over the mountains like
ancient prophets, in full consciousness of the epic moment which was theirs. The emotional impact
of the scene is acute; perhaps no other episode in American frontier history had been so grandly
presented in a painting. The grouping of the figures is masterly, as it nearly always was with
Bingham, attesting his knowledge of engravings from the Renaissance and Baroque and explained
in part by his practice of working up his compositions from numerous sketches. The landscape
seems based on those of the Hudson River painters or their 17th century models. But Bingham's
landscape is more real and powerful. Storms have passed through it with a more abrupt and wilder
vengeance: every tree and log in the foreground has been splintered; their wounds are portrayed as
such rather than as pastoral properties of the Romantic vista. The picture is an invaluable addition
to Romantic Americana. Taken with the Fur Traders and the other works of Bingham's mid-
career, it seems to justify the artist in "whispering sometimes to myself, that in the familiar line
which I have chosen, I am the greatest among all the disciples of the brush, which my native land
41 has yet produced."
In the documentary and figure painting of Audubon, Catlin and Bingham, as in the land
scapes of Bierstadt, Moran and Thomas Hill, the American West came into its own as a well-
spring of pictorial Romantic inspiration, rivaled only by the Old South. The West's fullest ex
ploitation awaited the invention of the moving pictures, but meanwhile its Romantic hold was
steadily increased through art, literature and song. The almost forgotten artist, Alfred J. Miller
(1810-74), traveled through the Rocky Mountains in 1837, only five years after Catlin's excur
sion, and painted a number of pictures of Indian life, most of which are now in Scotland. The
finest of them, such as the Buffalo Hunt (ill. p. 60), deserve greater recognition than they have
received. This recognition has been given instead to two artists of a later generation (both were
41From a letter by Bingham written in Philadelphia in 1853 (Christ-Janer, op. cit., p. 77).

24
 born in the 1860s), Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, who popularized the West's two
prmcipal and opposing dramatic figures— the Indian and the cowboy. Both men were ideally
equipped for their function. Their art was easily understood; it was skillful illustration; it was
accepted as true by the cowboys and by Theodore Roosevelt; it was expensive but widely repro
duced. In short, it was suited to become a natural target for a later generation's scorn. Yet it is
honest popular art and occasionally combines a rather impressive technical virtuosity with a
certain direct emotional appeal, as in the illustration on page 76. Nevertheless, the Far West still
awaits an interpreter of real authority in art. Though a number of the most talented modern
artists live and work there— C. S. Price, Darrel Austin, Morris Graves, Matthew Barnes— none
of them primarily records the local scene. The Far West has had no Bingham as Missouri had; it
has badly needed a Winslow Homer or even an Eastman Johnson. Such an interpreter may even
ity now appear, since of all Romantic lands the American West has shown the strongest immun
to disenchantment.

Romantic Painting After 1850

1. Page and Inness

At some point shortly after the mid -century —difficult to make precise but broadly signalized
by this nation s greatest emotional experience, the Civil War — the pioneer era of American Ro
mantic painting came to an end. Our artists continued to draw inspiration from the local scene, in
both landscape and figure painting, but they no longer received so strong a metaphysical impetus
from the newness, wildness and size of their country as had the earlier Romantics." Their concep
tion of America was particular rather than abstract, and they described it in terms of a more
private response than their predecessors, in a language freer of New World dialect. They tended
to center their careers not so much upon the wonder of citizenship in a new and powerful nation
as upon international intellectual faiths, esthetic, religious or both. Among them were the two
Swedenborgians, William Page and George Inness.
Page was born in Albany in 1811, and studied under Samuel Morse in his extreme youth. He
prepared for the ministry at Andover Theological Seminary and Amherst but then decided to
become a portrait painter. In 1849 he sailed for Rome, remained for eleven years and there ac
quired that curious eclecticism of style which is so apparent in his Portrait of Mrs. Page (ill. p. 69).
The picture suggests a Pre-Raphaelite Ingres in low key, yet its peculiar intensity of expression is
43 Page's own and recalls his dictum: "A true likeness shows one inside out." The author of New
Geometrical Method of Measuring the Human Figure, Page developed a Romantic theory of por
traiture which combined a faith in geometric laws of proportion with phrenology. In contrast to

42Even Winslow Homer's sea paintings, which seem an immediate refutation of this statement, were first inspired
by the seacoast of Tynemouth, England.
43Sheldon, op. cit., p. 222.

25
 the usual 19th century portraitists, whose attitude toward their subjects was matter-of-fact and
realistic, he had a supernatural, cosmic conception of his chosen field and was perhaps the purest
44 American Romantic in it. "The order of Nature," be wrote, "is fixed in portraits as in planets."
Page worshipped Titian's paintings and spent much of his time attempting to discover the
secret of the Venetian's technique. He constantly experimented on his own with the materials of
art, so that a number of his paintings have destroyed themselves through chemical reaction. His
efforts in this direction parallel those of such European Romantics as Victor Hugo, who attempted
to overthrow established physical techniques of painting and substitute for them a witches' brew of
self-invented pigments. A dissatisfaction with traditional materials was common to many Ro
mantic artists: these were painters of the enigma who wished to grind their own tones of moon
light, pallor and blood.
When Page returned to America, he settled in New Jersey near the home of his friend, George
Inness, who was in certain ways no less a mystic than himself. Like Page, Inness had studied
theology and metaphysics though without formal instruction. Except for brief training under
Regis Gignoux in New York and a year's apprenticeship as a map engraver, he was a self-taught
artist whose style was formed by inborn talent and several trips to Europe, the first in 1847.
Inness abandoned his plan to study in Diisseldorf and became a devoted disciple of the Barbizon
school. His magnificent early The Monk (ill. p. 75) shows the impact of a fifteen months' stay in
Rome and for dramatic strength is not to be matched by his later works. But it is these later works,
such as The Approaching Storm (ill. p. 75), which are the more personal. Their relation to the land
scapes of Rousseau and Daubigny is obvious, yet their trembling, soft, atmospheric effect is
original and in its way Romantic. The painter sought an almost secret communication with the
observer through delicate hints of mood and darkening hour. "A work of art does not appeal to the
intellect," he wrote. "It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify,
45 but to awaken an emotion. Its real greatness consists in the quality and force of this emotion."
2. Hunt, Vedder, La Farge
As Samuel Isham pointed out, the career of William Morris Hunt furnishes many parallels with
that of Washington Allston. Both were men of wide knowledge and interest, both occupied key
positions in the artistic life of Boston. More important still, both men in their person and work
were major factors in the elevation of American art from an insular to an international status.
Finally, both paid dearly for their conviction in a new and expanding country, where the strongest
currents of creative energy were directed into literary or material channels. Allston's statement
that his career might have prospered in Europe is echoed in Hunt's lament: "In another country
46 I might have been a painter!" But probably neither artist repented seriously the decision which
had brought him home to live and work.

44 Ibid., p. 222. 45McSpadden, op. cit., pp. 123-24.

46Helen M. Knowlton, Art Life of William Morris Hunt, Boston, 1899, p. 198.

26
 Hunt's early career reveals very clearly the changing focus of American art in the mid-
century. He left Harvard to live abroad with his family, turned his back on Diisseldorf after a
brief stay, disliked Rome and found in Paris and Barbizon the nerve centers of advanced con
temporary figure painting, as Inness found them in landscape. He became the pupil of Couture and
afterwards the disciple of Millet. His own art was greatly influenced by both French masters, but
he also admired the two key French Romantics, Delacroix and, above all, Gericault, whom he
described as "one of the greatest of modern painters" 47and whom he was said to resemble in ap
pearance. He returned to America in 1855, living first in Newport and, after 1862, in Boston,
where his collection of Millets and Baryes helped inaugurate the new taste for French art which
spelled the doom of the Diisseldorf vogue. To his pupils he continually railed against the precise
technique taught in the Diisseldorf studios. "You see a beautiful sunset," he said, "and a barn
comes into your picture. Will you grasp the whole at once in a grand sweep of broad sky and a
broad mass of dark building, or will you stop to draw in all the shingles on the barn, perhaps even
the nails on each shingle; possibly the shaded side of each nail? Your fine sunset is all gone while
48 you are doing this."
Hunt began to paint late enough in the 19th century so that his art carries few of the literary
connotations so common in the work of men like Allston and Cole. He once said: "I like Joy in my
studies! and I don't like literary indigestions /"« He had no faith whatever in a pre-existing Roman
ticism of subject, and was contemptuous of painters who depended upon mountains to make their
pictures impressive. Nevertheless, his art was in certain ways evolved from the Romantic premise
of the earlier generations, particularly in its emphasis on force and spontaneity of execution.
You want a picture to seize you as forcibly as if a man had seized you by the shoulder!" he
80 advised his pupils. And he believed that force was arrived at quickly or not at all. He himself
painted with extraordinary rapidity, keeping as many as one hundred and fifty bare canvases in
his studio so that he could record inspiration of various kinds simultaneously. His Talks on Art —
transcriptions of verbal advice given his pupils, recorded by one of them — constitute a running
tribute to the virtues of spontaneity. His conception of the artist was of a man to whom moments
of creative power come fleetingly and must be instantly exploited or lost. In this conception he
belongs to the Romantic tradition. Early in the century Byron had compared himself as a poet to
the tiger which goes growling back to its lair if it misses its first spring. Some years later Delacroix
issued his famous dictum on spontaneity: "If you are not skillful enough to make a sketch of a man
throwing himself out of a window, in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth floor to the
61 ground, you will never be able to produce great masterpieces." When Delacroix invited Hunt to

47Ibid., p. 66.
48W. M. Hunt's Talks on Art, First Series, Boston, 1875, pp. 1-2.
49Ibid., p. 69.
80 Ibid., p. 2.
81 Charles Baudelaire, La Vie et VOeuvre d'Eugene Delacroix, Paris, 1928, p. 43.

27
 his studio after seeing the latter's Marguerite in the Salon of 1852, the two men must have talked
with easy sympathy.
Hunt was primarily a studio artist who spent much of his career in his painting rooms at
Boston and Magnolia, yet a great number of his pictures were directly derived from objects or
scenes which he saw outdoors. Like Mount before him, he had a sketching van constructed, with a
studio and bunks, and traveled about in it. From 1874 to the end of his life he painted a number
of landscapes, including that inevitable subject for 19th century American artists —Niagara Falls.
His masterpiece, the first version of The Bathers (ill. p. 72), was inspired by the sight of two boys
bathing in the Charles River, one posed to dive from the other's shoulders. The subject was the
kind to appeal to a man of Hunt's temperament, since it depicted a split-second of suspended
action, never to come again. Hunt was perfectly conscious wherein the subject's charm for him
lay. "I don't pretend that the anatomy of this figure is precisely correct," he said of the picture.
"In fact, I know it is not. It's a little feminine but I . . . was chiefly occupied with the pose. I
do think the balancing idea is well expressed, and it is the fear of disturbing that which prevents
my making any changes in the figure. I know that I could correct the anatomy, but if the pose
62 were once lost I might never be able to get it again." In another connection he once declared:
63 "A thing that is corrected is like a whipped dog." The premise is as old as Romantic theory
itself. In 1714 Pier Jacopo Martelli had insisted that a flaw in a work of art was an indication of
its having been created by a superior artist.
Of Hunt's technical procedure full documentation exists in his Talks on Art. "Make flat mass
64 es of the right value," he said, "and put your care into the edges." As a technician he helped lead
American painting away from the tight realism, over -modeling and general literalism of the earlier
schools, and his importance in this regard can scarcely be overestimated. But his significance, like
that of Allston, is larger than this. He promoted a faith in a vocabulary of expression particular to
the art of painting. His pride in medium was salutary in a country whose Anglo-Saxon cultural
tradition was heavily overweighted with literature. To Boston in its literary prime he proudly
66 announced: "Painting, only, is worth the while."
One of Hunt's strongest convictions was that only artists could understand art, only artists
could teach it. He himself instantly appreciated the talents of Elihu Yedder, and he gave lessons
in painting to John La Farge. It was he who persuaded Yedder to exhibit in Boston and thereby
launched the career of one of the most puzzling figures in American art. For Vedder, the mystic
painter of enigmas, was in person a jocular, extraverted man, whose autobiography contains many
anti-Romantic references to his own works and is written in a spirit of rather heavy horseplay,
with innumerable references to tavern meetings with the "Boys." Visitors to the studio in Rome
62 Martha A. S. Shannon, Boston Days of William Morris Hunt, Boston, 1923, pp. 127-28.
63Knowlton, op. cit., p. 65.
64 Hunt, op. cit., p. 14.
66Knowlton, op. cit., p. 149.
 where he worked for eighteen years were invariably startled by the discrepancy in character be
tween the man and his work. The creator of The Roc's Egg, The Questioner of the Sphinx and The
Lair of the Sea Serpent was a man who once described painting as "such a fearful interruption to
56 smoking."
The Lair of the Sea Serpent (ill. p. 69) was painted in 1864, and Vedder asserts: "[I] drew it all
57 out of my own head with a common lead pencil." The "Boys" called the picture "The Big Eel,"
and McSpadden implies that Vedder freely admitted its model was an ordinary eel. Vedder denies
this in his autobiography, yet in writing of his childhood in the same book he says: "When very
little I used to be taken over to New Jersey on visits ... It was there that fishing in a ditch I
caught a great eel. I was frightened when I got the great brute out on the grass, for he seemed to
my childish eyes a veritable python, and I did not know what to do with him, or how to secure
him. . . 58The passage testifies to the power of subconscious inspiration based upon childhood
experience, even in cases where the artist ignores the role played by such inspiration.
The Lair of the Sea Serpent contributes to a native Romanticism of animals which, as might
be expected in a country of vast seaboards, is often concerned with monsters of the deep—the
sharks of Copley and Homer, the whales of Ryder and Melville. The painting retains much of the
attraction of menace which made it so well known in its day and led James Jackson Jarves to
write: "The Lair of the Sea-Serpent fascinates by its oppressive probability of fact." Jarves goes
on to draw a distinction between Vedder, who used a realistic technique to make the unbelievable
appear plausible, and Gustave Dore, who exaggerated the unlikely. "Dore," wrote Jarves, "appalls
5' the imagination; Vedder alarms the reason, lest these things be so." But Vedder can more profit
ably be compared to the Swiss Romantic, Arnold Bocklin, whose career began later than his own.
Like Bocklin he had inherited a strong sense of Germanic fantasy. Both men lived for long periods
in Italy, and both worked along comparable lines in isolation from the prevailing esthetics.
John La Farge, in his Wolf Charmer of 1907 (ill. p. 80), also contributed to the Romantic
menagerie, but the work was not typical and it would be difficult to imagine two artists more
opposite in temperament than himself and Vedder, though the men were friends. While Vedder
was a Bohemian artist of limited intellectual range, La Farge was a student of the physical sci
ences, a talented essayist and lecturer, an art critic who wrote the finest appreciations of Gericault
and Delacroix which have yet been published in this country. La Farge was what he appeared to
be in his self-portrait painted in 1859 (ill. p. 73): an esthete of exceptionally subtle thought and
poetic response, a professional of beauty with an amateur's eclecticism of taste, an easel painter
who also worked in stained glass, mosaics, ivory, mother-of-pearl, wood, metal and marble. He was
in short a new phenomenon in 19th century American art —an artisan-artist-connoisseur.
56Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V., Boston, 1910, p. 73.
57 Ibid., p. 264.
58Ibid., p. 11.
59Jarves, op. cit., p. 249.

29
 Before William Morris Hunt encouraged him to turn professional during the period of their
association in Newport in 1859, La Farge had traveled and studied in Europe and had briefly en
rolled in Couture's studio to learn painting as a leisure-time accomplishment. It is significant that
in Paris he was most deeply affected by the paintings of Chasseriau, that ill-fated artist who
wavered so long between the schools of Ingres and Delacroix and whose final decision in favor of
the latter school was an important indication of Romanticism's final ascendancy. La Farge also
saw a few Pre-Raphaelite paintings in England at the Manchester Exposition, and though one
80 critic has declared that he "skirted the Pre-Raphaelite peril," the influence of the Brotherhood
and William Morris was a dominant one throughout most of his career, as he himself admitted.
After working under Hunt at Newport, he returned to England and met Ford Madox Brown,
William Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Immediately thereafter he went to the Continent to
study the technique of stained glass, to which he was to devote so many years. In his conviction
that esthetic reform must extend to many media and must be accomplished through the inter
vention of the individual artist, he was a relatively typical second generation Pre-Raphaelite. And
this revivalist conviction was essentially Romantic. It represented a final and practical flowering
of the veneration for the Middle Ages which is so basic an ingredient of the Romantic philosophy;
it hailed the artist as a universal creator and sanctified both his imagination and his skill.
The search for Romantic subject matter had led certain artists more or less steadily westward
during the 19th century, from the Catskills to the Rockies, from New York to Missouri and the
Far West. La Farge, whose interest in the Orient had probably been stimulated by Hunt's collec
tion of Japanese prints and by the scholarship of Fenollosa, sailed for Japan in 1886 and somewhat
later went to Samoa, the Fiji Islands, Ceylon and Hawaii. (His voyage to the South Seas precedes
that of Gauguin by several years.) He thus added in paintings and watercolors to the store of
Romantic iconography devoted to the distant-in-place. The spirit in which he did so was far
different from that of earlier explorers like Church, but it was still Romantic beneath an outer
disguise of pure estheticism.
3. Whistler and Dewing
The estheticism of late century American painting reached its climax in the works and career of
this country's most famous artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In fact the art-for-art's-sake
dandyism of Whistler's art and person was so pronounced that it has tended to obscure the Roman
tic aspects of his theories and accomplishment. But, to begin with, he was an artist who believed in
that interdependence of the arts which in earlier Romantics had promoted a close alliance be
tween literature and painting and which in his own case promoted one between art and music. He
called his pictures symphonies, nocturnes and harmonies, and he thought of them as painted
music. He thus stressed the associational impetus of a medium other than his own. And further,
Whistler was no less sensitive to the poetry of mood and hour than so unmistakable a Romantic as
60Henri Focillon, "John La Farge," Creative Art —American Magazine of Art , May, 1936, p. 317.
 Ryder. He was often the painter of night, as in Nocturne in Blue and Silver: the Lagoon, Venice
(ill. p. 73) included in the present exhibition. So much —so much too much —has been written about
him that more will not be added here. But he belongs with those Romantics of the late 19th cen
tury to whom the passionate emotionalism of the 1830 generation passed, muted and endlessly
refined, but basically intact.
Thomas W. Dewing has been dead only five years, yet he seems primarily a 19th century
artist, and the works with which we are concerned here were painted before 1900. Perhaps it is the
fin de siecle spirit of Dewing's works which accounts for the fact that so little has been done lately
to commemorate them. Like all artists too intimate with fashion, he has suffered eclipse with the
change in general taste which has taken place since the years of his prime. But in his finest works
he was a subtle, original and engaging artist who deserves to be reexamined at full length.
as
T Dewing s Romanticism w of a special kind. It consisted in the extraordinary spatial arrange
ment of certain of his pictures and in their atmospheric content. In The Recitation (ill. p. 81), for
example, a strange rapport is established between the two figures, and between them and the sur
rounding empty spaces. The basis of Dewing's compositional economy is certainly to be found in
Japanese prints, hut to this basis he added a curious intimacy of emptiness, achieved through a
soft manipulation of the color and surface of his canvases. His atmosphere creates a Romantic
vacuum in which the figures are evocatively suspended. And further to confound reality, he often
painted interior scenes as though they were taking place outdoors, while outdoor subjects, such as
The Recitation , are grouped as if they were happening in a formal drawing room. He used per
spective as a metaphysical instrument and for its emotional effect. In the Girl with Flute in the
collection of the Freer Gallery, the figure is placed with a compositional daring which seems less
the result of willful interest in asymmetry than of a kind of dream dictation heeded by the artist.
Most of Dewing's best paintings have the same unreal accord between open space and figures.
It is a quality also to be felt in William Morris Hunt's The Ball Players (ill. p. 72) and in certain
pictures by the contemporary artist, Ben Shahn. But in Dewing's case its effect is heightened
81 by what a critic has called the "physical tenuity" of his figures. This tenuity extends to the
still life elements of his paintings, to his fragile furniture and exotic musical instruments, to the
general furnishings of his interiors and to his landscapes peopled with chairs. Unaccountably,
Dewing's canvases often call to mind the classical paintings of David, but of a David turned ele
gant, dreamlike and anti-dramatic, of a David turned like himself into a Romantic of hushed
space, fine objects and phantoms dressed by the haute couture.
4. Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer
Eastman Johnson is one of the many 19th century American painters who were only incidentally
Romantic and that infrequently. A number of his subjects have acquired an extrinsic nostalgic
interest over the years since they were painted, notably the Civil War scenes and the long series
61 INelson C. White, "The Art of Thomas W. Dewing," Art and Archeology, June, 1929, p. 259.

31
 depicting the making of maple syrup in the Maine woods. But Johnson was primarily a portrait
and genre artist whose training and inclination led him, during the years from 1859 to 1879, to a
realistic story -telling which was often sharp in phrase and eloquently delivered. He had studied in
Diisseldorf (1849-51), and thereafter had spent three and one half years in Holland, where he
learned that deft handling of bright crosslight through which he may have influenced Winslow
Homer. In occasional works, such as the almost Pre-Raphaelite Girl Picking Water Lilies (ill.
p. 71), he modified the realistic approach within which, it should be noted, he showed considerable
imaginative power. Nevertheless, he lacked the intense creative energy which sometimes forced
Winslow Homer, protesting bitterly, beyond the borders of realism and into Romanticism proper.
When Winslow Homer was asked whether he ever took liberties in painting his subjects, he
replied emphatically: "Never! Never! When I have selected the thing carefully, I paint it exactly
62 as it appears." It would in fact be difficult to think of an American painter who went to such
elaborate lengths to assure fidelity of representation. The Life Line (1884) was begun only after
Homer had made a trip to Atlantic City to learn the intricate handling of the breeches buoy; The
Fog Warning (1885) was painted from a dingy drawn up on a beach, with a model posed inside; for
The Lookout— AlVs Well! (1896) Homer used a clay model of a ship's bell which he himself made
after excursions to the junk shops of Boston had failed to turn up the real article. Moreover, it is
worth noting that the Romantic drama of suspense in certain of Homer's canvases is pointed up
for the spectator by titles which the painter himself had not given the pictures. The Fog Warning. ,
for example, was originally called simply Halibut Fishing , and under the latter title the plight of
the lone fisherman rowing for shore against an oncoming fog is of less unmistakable dramatic
interest.

Homer was primarily a realist, and it is with no intention of positive, over-all reclassification
that certain Romantic aspects of his painting are here considered. But it is worth noting that after
his trip to Tynemouth, England, in 1881, and more particularly after he moved permanently to
Prout s Neck, Maine, in 1884, the spirit of his paintings changed in the Romantic direction. His
attention to realism of representation, though continued, finds strong precedent in earlier Ro
mantic art, as already noted in connection with Benjamin West. And if we accept as fact that his
late career procedure was "To lie in wait for the rare or exceptional phase of nature, and especially
63 the dramatic," it should be remembered that he sometimes waited a full year for the sea or sun or
moonlight to he right for his purpose. The time seems unconscionably long for an artist reputed to
be interested only in outer reality. It is tempting to believe that, as in the case of Courbet, Homer's
businesslike, anti-esthetic attitude toward his own art was a shield to an underlying warmth and
emotionalism. A common phobia among Romantics, from and including Delacroix, has been a
dread of the term by which they are known.

1*~*°
'"" "SSS7 No,e
«EE The
Life
and
Wo,ks
mnshwB
32
 During the '80s and '90s, Homer painted a number of canvases which transcend the limits of
realism in dramatic content and handling. His Gulf Stream (ill. p. 79) was compared by his con
temporaries to Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and from one viewpoint is more Romantic in that it
emphasizes the elemental struggle between nature and man, while Gericault's picture is above all a
studio manifesto on a political issue. The Fox Hunt (1893) (ill. p. 78) is an unforgettable painting,
in which the wheeling attack of the crows establishes a separate animal world of inexorable vio
lence, an accomplishment to which many European Romantics futilely aspired. Summer Night
(ill. p. 78) with its haunting moonlight and poignant composition, surely deserves high place in
American Romantic art. It was painted outdoors at night, as all of Homer's moonlight pictures
seem to have been.
No artist's life could have been more prosaic than Homer's. At Prout's Neck, a point of land
which his brothers developed into a summer resort without worrying about the effect on Homer's
inspiration, he lived a life comparable to that of a shy, retired business man devoted to outdoor
4 recreation. He spoke of his work as the "picture line,"® and was little concerned with esthetic
matters. Such Romanticism as there was about him was in his art. In this he differed from his
contemporaries, Newman, Blakelock and Ryder, all of whom were true Romantics in person as in
their painting.

The High Romantic: Newman, Blakelock, Ryder

The earliest of America's three high Romantics was Robert Loftin Newman, born in Richmond,
Virginia, and brought up in Tennessee. During his long career Newman had only two public
exhibitions of his work; both were in 1894, the first at Knoedler's in New York, the second at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By comparison with Ryder and even with Blakelock, he has re
mained an obscure artist, though not without a devoted circle, and the reasons usually given for
his neglect are that he lived as a recluse and that his paintings are mostly small in size. The second
reason is probably the more valid (the fame of both Ryder and Winslow Homer was partly built
upon their Romantic status as hermits), for to a 19th century public accustomed to the panoramas
of the Hudson River school, largeness of scale was a likely complement to serious attainment.
There were few collectors and critics —and they were the ones who bought and encouraged both
Newman and Ryder —who realized that the entire Romantic spirit could be encompassed in the
fragment or the miniature, that Romanticism was undergoing a reaction against the overstate
ment of its own earlier period. Though Delacroix was himself one of the most prolific and ambitious
Romantics, his charge that Victor Hugo resembled a man of talent who said everything that came
into his head, is symptomatic of the change. From the mid-century on, a number of Romantics
were content to speak in a smaller but purer voice.
In our own century Newman has remained comparatively unappreciated because of those
44 William Ilowe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer, Boston and New York, 1911, p. 167.

33
 very qualities as a Romantic wherein he differs from Ryder. He was not a master of abstract
pattern as was Ryder, he painted rapidly and deliberately left a number of his pictures unfin
ished, •• and his principal charm lies in his highly professional orchestrations of color and distortions
of line (ill. p. 80). It is a charm not to be appreciated at a glance, particularly in an age which
expects such painterly emphasis to be accompanied by marked shock value in subject or lack of
subject. Newman was an artist who worked within narrow traditional themes, and he is perhaps
too close to European Romanticism for chauvinistic comfort.
Newman went abroad in 1850, intending to study in Diisseldorf. Like Hunt, Inness and La
Farge he changed his mind and instead went to Paris, where he enrolled in the inevitable studio of
Couture. His stay was of short duration, hut by 1854 he was back in Paris again and had met
Millet through William Morris Hunt. He spent several months as the neighbor and friend of the
Barbizon artist, who influenced him strongly toward a simple earthiness of theme, but his true
masters were Daumier and Delacroix. His hard, sweeping vigor of line, tenebrous modeling and
summary disposition of masses frequently recall Daumier, while in such paintings as The Attack
(cat. no. 155) the influence of Delacroix is paramount in both subject and handling. The sumptu
ous coloring of Newman's occasional still lifes of flowers (cat. no. 154) is also reminiscent of the
great French Romantic and, through him, of the 16th century Venetians.
For all Newman's affinity to French art, he is an original and rewarding painter and one of the
finest technicians in American art. As already noted, his Romanticism speaks a rather professional
language. Its dramatic content is minor, its virtues quiet but sure to claim gradually increasing
attention. Certain of his defenders have lately hailed him as superior to Ryder, since dark horses
can be rescued from their fate only by being allowed to come in first. This praise is far more than
he deserves; he hardly belongs in Ryder's rare company.
Ralph Albert Blakelock, in the years just before his death, came into such extraordinary fame
that one of his canvases was sold to a museum for $20,000. For this fame and patronage he paid a
tragic price: twenty years' incarceration in an asylum for the incurably insane. He was committed
in 1899, and gradually the story of his plight became known to art circles, promoting if not actually
impelling an interest in his paintings, as in the case of van Gogh. Considered in human terms
Blakelock's horrible life evokes the greatest sympathy, and the Romantic creed can have been
little comfort to him during his years of nightmare and delusion. But this creed included among its
tenets a respect for madness as a divine and mysterious state. From the safe ground of unwavering
sanity, even from the closer and more dangerous vantage point of terrifying neuroticism, the
Romantics looked upon lunacy as a transforming illness, releasing vast powers of imagination.
Now one of their number had experienced it himself. But he left no records to inform his colleagues;
all of his paintings were painted before 1899.
55The leading authority on Newman writes: "Most of his work appears to have been completed with great spon-
taneity; a few brush marks and the canvas was completed." (Marchal E. Landgren, "Robert Loftin Newman "
American Magazine of Art, March, 1935, p. 138.)

34
 These paintings, unlike those of Ryder, are nearly all landscapes. Their compositions were
sometimes inspired by such proto-Surrealist sources as the broken enamel in the artist's bathtub,
yet these compositions are nearly always organized within conventional formulas. Blakelock was
in no sense an innovator in design, as Ryder was, and the interest of his pictures derives almost
entirely fiom his dark and feverish handling of muted color. His best works were inspired by a
trip to the Indian territory of the West which he made as a young man. His Moonlight (ill. p. 77)
illustrates the full range of his accomplishment: a tender vision of the night expressed in earth
colors and golden reflections, limited, minor, but informed with its own sincerity of emotion. It is
the authenticity of his Romanticism rather than his gifts of imagination and technique which
places him in the company of Newman and Ryder.
During the quarter century since Albert Pinkham Ryder's death his name has become syn
onymous with Romanticism in American painting and for indisputable reason. He was in person
the very type of Romantic artist, exalted, solitary, living in constant and fierce communion with
his own inner world of imagination, awaiting inspiration as the faithful await miracles and forcing
66 it to its ultimate expression through a figurative "prayer and fasting." In contrast to Hunt, who
attacked his canvases impatiently, Ryder spent years finishing some of his pictures. He wrote
poems to accompany many of them and after 1900, his inspiration gone, he did nothing but re-
finish his earlier works in the hope of bringing them nearer perfection. He had an alchemist's rever
ence for the materials of his trade and a Romantic's contempt for the question of their durability.
It was the act of creation which was sacred to him, and when friends told him his canvases were
cracking badly he remarked: "When a thing has the elements of beauty from the beginning it
67 cannot be destroyed."
In his rather special mysticism Ryder has several European counterparts —the Englishman,
Samuel Palmer, and the Dutchman, Matthew Maris, among others. But in his painting itself he
was more individual than any other American artist save possibly Winslow Homer, and it is small
wonder that on his two brief trips to Europe he was unaffected by any of the paintings he saw,
though he admired the works of Corot and Maris. Fairly early in his mature career he worked out a
compositional system which revolved around "three solid masses of form and color—sky, foliage
68 and earth the whole battled in an atmosphere of golden luminosity." He varied the system with
extraordinary range of effect and developed a contrapuntal disposition of broad areas of sky, cloud
and earth which has made him a particular hero to 20th century artists interested in abstract
design. (A number of his paintings of seashore coves are as abstract as those of the modern French
artist, Georges Braque.) Whether he was painting Macbeth and the Witches (ill. p. 82), The Forest of
Arden (cat. no. 181) or simply one of his numerous sea pictures (ill. p. 84), his dramatic handling

66Frederic Fairchild Sherman, Albert Pinkham Ryder, New York, 1920, p. 38

67 Ibid., p. 43.
68Ibid., p. 13.

35
 depended not so much upon incidentals of subject as upon an over-all intensity of expression, an
emotive balance of arbitrary yet natural forms. Yet when he needed particularization his imagina
tion was more than adequate; the limp, collapsing boat and the surging whale in his masterwork'
Jonah (ill. p. 83), are proof for the most skeptical. And it should be remembered that each of
Ryder's abstract forms carries a distillate of meaning, attained through an endless manipulation
of the pigment. Ryder himself was clear on this point. "A daub of white will serve as a robe to
69 Miranda," he wrote. But he immediately adds that it will do so only "if one feels [in it] the
70 shrinking timidity of the young maiden as the heavens pour down upon her their vials of wrath."
He felt that paint must he not only color and surface hut symbolic magic, and in his devoted
hands it often was.
Except for a brief training in New York under William E. Marshall and even less formal
training in the school of the National Academy, Ryder was a self-taught artist, as were the major
ity of American Romantics in the 19th century. Consequently his art and that of certain of his
predecessors and contemporaries have a freshness not to be found in countries of longer artistic
tradition. He and they were visionaries who fought toward competence in order to release a new,
untutored beauty. They lived for the most part in their own imaginations, but they could still hear
acutely the sound of the elements against which older civilizations had adopted infinite precau
tions over the centuries. There were European Romantics of greater genius and accomplishment
71 than Ryder, but none more genuinely —to use his own phrase —"soaked in the moonlight."

The Twentieth Century

Transitional Painters
Of the comparatively few artists Ryder admitted to his studio, one was a painter whose career
spanned the transition from 19th to 20th century Romanticism. This was the "Grand Parnassian
and Transcendental Eagle of the Arts" —Louis M. Eilshemius. It appears likely that Eilshemius,
whose contempt for other living artists was admirably consistent, was least contemptuous of
Ryder. He went to the trouble of trying to improve upon the latter's Macbeth and the Witches and
Flying Dutchman ; he failed, of course, but not dismally. He was himself a Romantic eccentric of
the first order, who once described life as "merely a semblance of a series of nightmares diluted
72 very faintly with a parsimony of shortest delights." He traveled to those five-starred centers of
Romantic inspiration, Morocco and Samoa, and did numerous pictures of both countries. And
when he stopped painting around 1921 he had explored a wider range of Romantic iconography
than perhaps any other American painter —scenes from literature, moonlit nudes, melancholy
landscapes, Oriental subjects, stormy sea pieces, scenes of passion and disaster.
69 Ibid., p. 37. 70 Ibid., p. 37. 71 Ibid., p. 26.
72Louis M. Eilshemius, The Art Reformer, New York, 1911, vol. II, no. 2, p. 8.

36
 Some indication of this range may be had from the three paintings included in the present
exhibition, Don Quixote (ill. p. 86), Afternoon Wind (cat. no. 84) and Jealousy (ill. p. 86). As
sometimes happens with artists, his sensualism increased with age, reaching a climax in the ex
traordinary work, Jealousy, with its naive violence, surcharged atmosphere and instinctive pre
cision of compositional balance. Eilshemius brought to Romantic painting an almost inexhaustible
fantasy, expressed in a technique which is not yet fully appreciated for its quality or for its suitabil
ity to his changing purpose. The influence of Corot seems strongest in his works, though in 1911 the
list of artists he considered great contained the disparate names of Titian, Van Dyck, Rubens,
73 Gericault, David, Corodi [sic], Vereshtchagin, Fortuny and Bocklin. To all these artists he
romantically preferred himself.
The meeting between Ryder and Eilshemius is said to have taken place in 1908, a crucial
date in modern art on many scores. Cubism was launched then, and since that time modern
European painting, centered in Paris, has produced formal movements in bewildering succession;
two of these movements, Surrealism (1924) and Neo-Romanticism (1926), have been predomi
nantly Romantic in approach. American painting over the same period has been by comparison
a matter of individual direction, and its artists of Romantic tendency have usually painted in
spiritual isolation, without benefit of manifestoes or organized and continuous performances on
an agreed theme. Thus the group of painters which in 1908 opened the path for modern art in
7 this country was known characteristically as "The Eight." 4 The group consisted of artists who,
finding themselves more closely allied in friendship than in belief, formed their title by the anti-
doctrinal expedient of counting noses. They were an assorted lot, and the most Romantic of them
was Arthur B. Davies, whose soft, decorative, idyllic style continued the tradition of the early
La Farge and paid homage to the Renaissance masters, particularly Giorgione. Davies' Dream
(ill. p. 85), portraying a somnambulist figure in a landscape out of Odilon Redon, is obviously,
perhaps too obviously, within the Romantic province and not unrelated to Eilshemius' Afternoon
Wind in its atmospheric poesy. Along the Erie Canal (ill. p. 85) is an elegiac and delicate trans
formation of nature into a playground for otherworldly children. Both paintings illustrate Davies'
Romanticism of innocence and sweet aspiring.

Romantic Realism
Davies' Romanticism created a dulcet irreality. That of the painters now to be considered sprang
from reality itself —reality so projected as to reveal a Romantic appeal which had passed unnoticed
in the failing light of constant usage. These painters celebrated the contemporary scene, as Ro
mantic artists had done increasingly since the mid-19th century, and thereby helped confute

73Eilshemius, op. cit., vol. II, no. 1, page 7. *

74 Davies, Glackens, Henri, Lawson, Luks, Prendergast, Shinn and Sloan.

37
 Samuel Palmer's blunt premise: "The past for poets, the present for pigs."" John Sloan, a mem
ber of "The Eight," in such paintings as The City from Greenwich Village (ill. p. 88) interpreted
New York with love and transforming devotion, and was one of the founders of a street scene
Romanticism which continues to flourish among both painters and photographers. George Bellows,
though his The Picnic (ill. p. 87) is in the pastoral style of Davies, and though his illustrations for
the novels of Donn Byrne and H. G. Wells are purely imaginative, was more often a Romantic
Realist. His paintings and lithographs of actual prize fights (ill. p. 87) are in an opposite mood
from Davies' work and revert to that emotionalism of violent physical action of which the 19th
78 century prophet was Theodore Gericault. But for Gericault and his French contemporaries
boxing had been an aristocratic sport imported from England and reserved for the few. In America
and in Bellows period it was the people's spectacle and an outlet for group emotion, supported
and promoted by a press which to this day has made its sport pages the last refuge of an unabash
edly romantic prose.
As already noted in connection with Blakelock, madness deeply impressed certain artists of
the early 19th century, and Bellows' fine print, Dance in a Madhouse (cat. no. 19), combines the
Romantic appeal of insanity with that of the frenzied physical action mentioned above. Of this
action Rockwell Kent early in the century became a well-known protagonist in both his life and
his art. An explorer and traveler, he turned to the North countries, whose winter Romanticism of
ice and snow had attracted Church sixty years before. In his person he furnished that glamor of
hardihood and brave adventuring which is never entirely free of Romantic connotation. In his art
the Romantic Realism of his early sea pieces in oil (ill. p. 88) eventually gave way to the stylized
idealism of his woodcuts, which watered Blake's mystic potions to popular strength.
In 1924 Edward Hopper exhibited his watercolors in New York, and the success of the exhibi
tion led him after years of discouragement to work again in oils, a medium in which he has since
shown steadily increasing mastery. Of his own work Hopper has written: "My aim in painting
77 has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature."
F or our purposes it is the word "intimate" which is crucial in this definition. Like Winslow Homer,
Hopper is ostensibly a realist, intent upon a direct and forceful transcription of appearances,
without alterations either Romantic or Classic. His horizontal system of composition is simplicity
itself; his subjects are everywhere in America, for everyone to see. But it is the intimacy of
Hopper's impressions of the obvious which carries him into Romanticism, and this intimacy is of
a dramatic and thoroughly personal kind. In Gas (color plate opposite), for example, there is no
willful transformation of the scene, no aid to literary association, yet there is the loneliness of the

75 John Piper, British Romantic Artists, London, 1942, p. 31.

78One of Gericault's finest lithographs portrays a match between a white and a Negro boxer, a theme adopted by
Bellows. Apart from its exotic implications, the opposition of black figure to white affords the same emphasis
on dramatic chiaroscuro which endeared the piebald horse to the Italian masters of the Baroque.
77Edward Hopper, Retrospective Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1933, p. 17.

38
ROTHES
 highways at night, the weird relation of road to surrounding thick woods, the magic tonal opposi
tion of the gas station light to the evening gloom. The picture is blunt fact. It is also realism
brought to such a degree of perception that it becomes a Romantic sorcery, seen in a crystal,
crystal clear.

Occasionally in recent paintings Hopper has allowed himself a more overt display of emotional
participation^ in Shakespeare at Dusk (cat.no. 105), with its lyricism of mood and subtle capture
of twilight sky over New York. Occasionally he has permitted himself the luxury of an inherently
expressive subject, as in Cape Cod Evening (ill. p. 89)." Whereas dramatic incident is usually
reduced in his paintings to the flutter of a window curtain (in an earlier time Hopper might have
been known, respectfully be it understood, as "The Master of the Window Curtain"), here the
dog in the pathless grass, the watching woman and man, contribute what is almost a plot to the
picture. But it is the darkness of ground beneath the woods, the monotony of grass, the decorative
richness of the house in this far isolation, which create the painting's essential mystery. Hopper
is primarily a poet of the inanimate in figures as well as in landscape and architecture. In his
painting, as in the early art of his Italian contemporary, Giorgio de Chirico, the frenzied motion
of much early 19th and early 20th century Romanticism comes to an abrupt and slightly uneasy
repose. Whereas the Romanticism of Gericault and Bellows often celebrated strident action, that
of de Chirico and Hopper depicts a silent, expressionless waiting.
Though Hopper once wandered unmoved amid the fantastic scenery of the Southwest, finally
producing a watercolor of a locomotive which might equally well have been painted in New York,
the Rio Grande country of New Mexico has proved continuously inspiring to Georgia O'Keeffe.
She returns there year after year and there has painted some of her outstanding works. Her
Black Cross, New Mexico (ill. p. 90) and Deer's Skull and Pedernal (cat. no. 159) are essentially
Romantic paintings, devoted to a still-life metaphysics which, though deeply personal in style,
is technically related to the confessional realism of the German Nazarenes and the English Pre-
Raphaelites. Her crisp, flat handling of pigment parallels that of such precisionists as Charles
Sheeler, the later Demuth and Preston Dickinson, but is used to tell secrets of psychic response
rather than to record the glossy externals of a mechanical age. She uses with exceptional acumen
the ancient Romantic device of the fragment to suggest the whole. In Ranchos Church No. 3
(cat.no. 158), for example, the structure of the entire church and its landscape setting is evoked
by a condensed placing of fragmentary forms. Whereas earlier Romantics like Cole and Bierstadt
had suggested the monumental through panoramas, O'Keeffe seeks it by placing the spectator
in an enchanted, near corner, limiting his view to intensified essentials. Her method is reversed
by such younger painters of the Southwest as Peter Hurd and Vance Kirkland, who again paint the
West as mountainous and vast.

78Hopper prefers the title Cape Cod Evening to its story -telling alternate, Whippooruill, just as Winslow Homer
preferred Halibut Fishing to The Fog Warning.

39
 Romantic Expressionism

As early as 1913 John Marin was striving toward a Romantic Expressionism —if, indeed, all
Expressionism is not by definition Romantic. In the foreword to his exhibition of that year
Marin wrote: "In life all things come under the magnetic influence of other things; the bigger
assert themselves strongly, the smaller not so much, but still they assert themselves, and though
hidden they strive to be seen and in so doing change their bent and direction. While these powers
are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife
79 and there is great music being played." Considering that this passage describes Marin's reaction
to inanimate subject matter — the buildings of New York City — there can be little doubt of the
artist's anti-realist temperament. In watercolor Marin has since developed a technique whose
essence is emotional force, quickly and directly achieved. The fierce energy of sky in Sunset,
Casco Bay (ill. p. 91) is the work of a visionary for whom Expressionism has been a natural lan
guage. The Cubist angulation of outer forms in Lower Manhattan (cat. no. 137) and On Morse
Mountain, Small Point, Maine (cat. no. 138) is used for organizational effect but also, and perhaps
primarily, as a means of sharpening the central impression of the subject, as a diamond is cut to
lead light to the heart of the stone. Though Marin was trained to be an architect, he is a painter
of mirages rather than symmetrical order. Yet these mirages are cast by nature and retain much
of her image. Marin was within the tradition of nature Romanticism founded here by Thomas
Cole when he wrote: "Seems to me that the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the
elemental big forms — Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain — and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of
re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express
80 these, you have to love these, to be part of these in sympathy."
Both Max Weber and Marsden Hartley have been primarily Expressionist Romantics. Both
belonged with Marin to the group of artists which succeeded "The Eight" as the protagonists of
revolution in modern American art, though Weber's part in this revolution was earlier and
greater than Hartley's. They exhibited with Marin, Alfred H. Maurer and Arthur Dove at
Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, "291," in March, 1910, and formed a left wing to the assault on academic
standards led by Davies and Henri which reached its climax in the Armory show of 1913. But
the works of Weber and Hartley with which we are concerned here were painted only a very short
time ago, and both artists have been remarkable for the sustained creative power they have shown
in an age when premature collapse of such power has been depressingly frequent. They seem
more Romantic in these recent pictures than in those of their youth. Weber's Winter Twilight
(ill. p. 92) is in the tradition of "ruined" landscape, with bare foreground trees. His Chassidic
Dance (ill. p. 92) is a whirlpool of figures and flung gestures, Expressionist in technique, but

79Herbert J. Seligmann, ed., Letters of John Marin, New York, 1931, pp. 2-3.
80John Marin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, p. 20.

40
 Romantic in its violent chaos of motion. It is a picture which Delacroix, the painter of the Con-
vulsionaries of Tangiers, might have stopped to admire.
Hartley's Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine (ill. p. 93) is organized according to Ryder's basic
principle of "three solid masses of form and color," and its abstract patterns of sky and clouds sug
gest the influence of the 19th century Romantic, whom Hartley knew well and admired profoundly.
But Hartley, unlike Ryder, was a magician of summary brushwork, and it is this fact which relates
him to Expressionism. The thundering immediacy of Evening Storm is near the spirit of Winslow
Homer, but more abruptly and emotionally managed. It is a different matter from Ryder's slow
alchemy, yet the two artists were allied in fundamental approach, and Hartley's statement on
Ryder applied equally to himself: "I have known [in Ryder] that wisdom which is once and for
all wisdom for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist there is but one agency
for the expression of self in terms of beauty, the eye of the imagination, that mystical third
81 somewhere in the mind which transposes all that is legitimate to expression."
The religious intensity of certain of Weber's paintings is a comparatively rare quality in
contemporary art, but a quieter, more restrained sentiment is to be found in the Fisherman (ill.
p. 94) by the Oregon artist, C. S. Price. Price, a contemporary of Marin, has arrived at a mature
and consistent style only in fairly recent years, after a long period of extremely conscientious
experiment. His square blocking of forms probably derives from his interest in abstract painting,
which he practices upon occasion, yet suggests a definite relationship with the angular style of
the German Expressionist, Carl Hofer. The appeal of Price's own paintings is above all Expres
sionist Romantic, proceeding from the richly worked pigment and resultant rough sincerity of his
compositions.
In contrast to the daylight Expressionism of Marin but allied to the murky handling of
Price's Fisherman, Benjamin Kopman has created an Expressionism of mournful mood and night,
of which A Lynching (ill. p. 95) is a good example. Much of the latter picture's impact is due to
the conviction with which its social commentary is stated, as is the case with Gropper's The
Defenders (ill. p. 95). This kind of commentary is conspicuously absent in George Grosz's Early
Moon (cat. no. 98), though Grosz was once among the most brilliant and savage satirists in Europe.
The fevered mood of this Cape Cod landscape relates it to that introspective variety of German
Expressionism which stirred the still earth to a whirlpool in which man's inner torment was
mirrored.
The Romantic Expressionist tendency continues to flourish among younger artists. Donald
Forbes paints a millstone as if it were a fragment from Stonehenge, an object for wonder and
riveted attention, lying huge in a Romantic gloom and isolation (ill. p. 99). Hyman Bloom's
painting carries strong vestiges of his Latvian birth and ancestry; its turbulent Expressionism is
similar to that of the Lithuanian, Chaim Soutine, in racial intensity and Baltic splendor of color.
81 Marsden Hartley, "Albert P. Ryder," The Seven Arts, May, 1917, p. 95.
 The Skeleton (cat. no. 30) is in the vein of traditional macabre Romanticism as to subject, but it
and The Bride (ill. p. 99) are primarily abstract labyrinths of color and interlaced forms, nervous,
sensitive and strangely evocative of emotion. The Expressionist direction is followed in Joseph
De Martini's mildly Romantic self-portrait (ill. p. 98). In Everett Spruce's The Hawk (cat. no. 188)
the thick impasto and broad modeling, so common in Expressionist technique, are again applied to
a rugged daylight subject.

A Romantic Cubist
Lyonel Feininger, despite his fourteen years as an instructor in the German Bauhaus and his
devotion to Cubist forms, has always revealed in his paintings a decided poetic preoccupation.
The Steamer Odin (ill. p. 100), for example, is the record of a mood as well as of mechanical appear
ances. In its strange mystery of horizon, ghostly lighting and still atmosphere, it is no less a
Romantic work than many more representational pictures; it as strongly suggests the hushed
drama of the docks at night. This fact seems less surprising when one remembers that Feininger
has long admired the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, some of whose compositions
he has adapted to his own Cubist vocabulary.

The " Gothick "

Perhaps the most concentrated, consistent and pure manifestation of Romanticism in 20th century
American art is to be found in the watercolors which Charles Burchfield executed between the
years 1916 and 1918. The existence of these watercolors is in itself a Romantic phenomenon,
for they were painted by a very young man living and working in Salem, Ohio, in more or less
complete isolation from contemporary esthetic currents and in almost total ignorance of the
European Romantic tradition. Certain of these pictures, such as The Night Wind (cat. no. 40)
and Church Bells Ringing —Rainy Winter Night (ill. p. 103), are primarily Expressionist in ap
proach and recreate in visual forms the sensations and alarms of Burchfield's childhood reactions
to the elements. But even these are marked by a macabre Romanticism which relates them to
the "Gothick" tradition brought to this country by Washington Allston. They are complemented
by a group of watercolors, including The First Hepaticas (ill. p. 102) and Garden of Memories
(cat. no. 38), in which the artist has recorded more literary Romantic visions of melancholy and
malaise.
There is in nearly all Burchfield's works of this period so clear an impetus of Romantic
revelation that they must rank among the most individual manifestations of the Romantic spirit
produced in this century and country. Their influence has been considerable. The menacing
Expressionism of the first group has been adopted by several painters older and younger than
Burchfield. The "Gothick" Romanticism of the second group recurs in Morris Kantor's Haunted
House (ill. p. 104), Aaron Bohrod's Tourist House (ill. p. 106) and in Philip Evergood's My

42

J: ' ' ' . -. i- i

 Forebears Were Pioneers (ill. p. 107), though tempered in the last-named case by a humorous
detachment on the artist's part. In the same spirit Hobson Pittman has evolved a personal art
largely devoted to haunted interiors and gardens, as in Old Friends (ill. p. 105) and The Widow
(cat. no. 169). The spiky, tapering style of his drawing is used to considerable effect to produce
an atmosphere of polite spookiness and uneasy elegance.
The "Gothick" novel, as is well known, was converted to contemporary terms by Henry
James in The Turn of the Screw, a book in which psychological innuendo became the instrument
of terror, replacing those physical contrivances of action and scenery upon which the 18th and
19th century writers had depended. In 1918 Charles Demuth completed five watercolors (ill.
p. 101) which were apparently intended as interpretations of James' story rather than as direct
illustrations to be published in conjunction with the text. The following year he finished three
watercolors on the theme of James' Beast in the Jungle. All eight works recapture with exceptional
acuteness the unspoken suspense and frightfulness of James' two masterpieces, and are fine
Romantic art in their own right.

Lyric Painting
In both figure painting and landscape the lyric tradition, followed in the 19th century by such
varied artists as Allston, Inness and La Farge, has been continued by painters of the 20th. Bernard
Karfiol's Boy (ill. p. 112), painted in 1924, is one of the earliest of the brooding Romantic figures
82 which artists like John Carroll and Henry Yarnum Poor were later to paint. Both Carroll and
Poor have done sensitive portraits illustrating the shy charm of children entering adolescence
(ill. p. 114) — that period of life which the late 18th century Romantics held sacred and of which
the boy poet, Thomas Chatterton, became the universal martyr-hero. Alexander Brook at one
time painted figure pieces influenced by the Spanish Mannerism of Picasso's Rose period, as in
The Tragic Muse (ill. p. 115). He has since progressed to a more individual art of marked technical
control and poetic charm. He now alternates between figure painting and landscape, and in both
categories shows an easy freshness. His Pasture at Elk (ill. p. 115) combines the atmospheric
Romanticism of a George Inness with a deliberate lyricism of subject in which a ruined locomotive
is substituted for the bare trees of the Hudson River school. The substitution points up the ten
dency of modern Romanticism to direct its nostalgia away from eternal nature toward that
which was recently made by man and is now outmoded — the Mansard houses of Burchfield and
Hopper, the derelict automobiles of Elizabeth Sparhawk -Jones.
The open romanticizing of architectural subjects to which certain painters turned in the
1930s is exemplified by Morris Kantor's South Truro Church (cat. no. 120). These painters were
following the lead of Burchfield and Hopper, whose watercolors of the mid-1920s had often dealt

82 The lethargic, introspective mood of Karfiol's figure piece was a persistent factor in the style of the Parisian
Neo-Romantic artists, though there was certainly no cross-influence between them and Karfiol.

43
 with Victorian architecture. But whereas the latter two artists had dramatized their subjects
through strong lighting which emphasized the forlorn, brave fantasy of such houses, the artists
of the 1930s were more deliberately Romantic. For example, Hopper had painted the early 19th
century church at South Truro several years before Kantor. He had portrayed the subject objec
tively, in clear sunlight, while Kantor's version is enveloped in an abstract half-light which creates
a subjective mood.
The tendency toward an atmospheric Romanticism is felt in numerous paintings of the
past ten years, in the portraits of Carroll and Brook, in Karl Zerbe's shimmering, strange Terror
(ill. p. 96) and in Arnold Blanch's superbly dreamy Suwannee River (ill. p. 116). In all these
cases, however, the handling of atmosphere is naturalistic by comparison with Kantor's abstract
usage, and reverts to that soft manipulation of tremulous light and air of which George Inness
was the most consistent 19th century practitioner.
Lyric Romanticism has attracted a number of painters of a still younger generation. Julian
Levi has developed a quiet but extremely agreeable poetry of the seashore in such paintings as
Buoys (ill. p. 113). His art is comparable to that of the Parisian Neo-Romantic, Leonid Berman,
though arrived at independently. Eugene Ludins' pictures appear at casual glance to be matter-
of-fact and primarily notable for their skillful naturalism. But he is a subtle fantasist as well.
The strange activities of the foreground figures in Interlude (ill. p. 117), the mysterious, endless
pipe from which emerges a black dog—these suggest a bewitched countryside whose inhabitants
have stepped from the pages of a Washington Irving.

The Ryder Tradition

Throughout his mature career Henry Mattson has sacrificed the recognition which comes from
being definably "modern," and has remained a thorough Romantic in the 19th century tradition
which reached its climax in this country in the art of Ryder. Mattson's recent Jungle Play (ill.
p. 109) is a Delacroix subject. As such it would have been unpopular with the avant garde of the
1920s and 1930s, which had become accustomed to the gunplay of contemporary esthetic revolt
and knew that Delacroix's Romanticism was never even remotely the issue. But Mattson is not
the first important American artist to have ignored the main direction of art in his time, nor would
he be the first in so doing to arrive by shortcut at a destination which a later generation approves.
Romanticism appears to be a growing force in American art, though still scattered in effect, and
Mattson's fine Stars and Sea (ill. p. 108) may yet link Ryder's sea pieces to a more general revival
of Romantic subject matter and treatment.
In continuing the Romanticism of night and mystery developed by Ryder, Mattson has
not worked alone. The California artist, Matthew Barnes, within the past ten years has produced
a number of paintings comparable in viewpoint. But whereas Mattson is a professional painter
of long experience and great technical dexterity, Barnes is a self-taught artist. His technique is

44

)
crude but nevertheless eloquent for his purpose. Like Ryder and Mattson he has worked within
a restricted iconography; nearly all of his paintings are of the same obsessive chimera whose
symbolic properties are ghostly houses, unlikely hills and streets, lumpy phantoms running inex
plicable errands, and over all the moonlight. High Peak (ill. p. Ill), Night Scene (cat. no. 14) and
Ghost Homes (cat. no. 16) illustrate with what untiring conviction he has rearranged these prop
erties in each new canvas. He has recently worked away from his earlier over dependence on
Ryder (and in special instances on Hartley) and has emerged as an independent artist, one of the
few to learn to speak in middle age the Romantic language of youth.
Ryder's perennial influence reappears in the patterned chiaroscuro of Elliot Orr's Desecration
(ill. p. 110). His tenebrous atmosphere has been adopted by Paul Mommer in At Night (ill. p. 109)
and The Betrayal (cat.no. 148), though Mommer's Romanticism is far less cosmic than Ryder's,
its emotion deliberately nearer the surface as in the Expressionist works of Kopman.

Regionalism
During the 18th and 19th centuries Romanticism was continually being related by its adherents
to a given locale. The Roman campagna, the English Lakes, the Rhine, the American Catskills
and Rockies — all became centers of Romantic activity and provided a regionalist faith for their
particular enthusiasts. In our own century, as many remember, a regionalist philosophy was
revived in the early 1930s in Missouri and Kansas and found its prophet in the eloquent isola
tionist, Thomas Craven. The philosophy took an extreme form. Whereas earlier regionalism had
segregated certain areas as Romantic Meccas open to all and had actually touted for trade, the
recent variety adopted more snobbish standards of admission. It declared that artists must derive
inspiration from an intimate and continuous association with the place of their birth or very early
adoption; further, that this inspiration should express itself in terms of a local realism. For cen
turies certain great painters have exemplified this premise in their works. But the fact remains
that other equally great artists have worked in foreign lands, in sections of their own countries
remote from their birthplaces, or in international art centers. It is the stubborn denial of this
historical truth, together with the bully -boy, xenophobic and almost secessionist temper in which
Midwestern regionalism was conducted ten years ago, that made its propaganda so perverse
and inflated.
Perhaps the artists themselves were not to blame for this, and a number of them have pro
duced pictures which are of considerable interest. Thomas Benton's Moonlight on the Osage (ill.
p. 119) is an orthodox Romantic work, calculated and self-conscious, but more likely to assure
him posterity's attention than his murals. John Steuart Curry's Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake (ill.
p. 119) is a forceful, original example of animal Romanticism and has the plausibility of daily
incident on the Kansas farmlands. Because of its intense localism it escapes responsibility for
the serious charge which must be brought against the recent regionalism as a whole: that while

45
 claiming to free American art from European domination, it often merely changed the source of
this influence from the French 19th and 20th centuries to the Flemish 15th century (Grant
Wood) or to the Mannerist-Baroque period in Italy (Benton).

The International Tradition

Since the beginning of art in this country certain American painters have worked in particularly
close relation to foreign traditions, among them West, Trumbull, Allston, Page, Hunt, La Farge
and Whistler. In our own century Davies, Marin, Weber and Hartley have all for varying intervals
of their careers been caught up in international currents in painting and taken their impetus from
contemporary art abroad or from the great European traditions of the past. A comparable inter
nationalism is a distinguishing mark among the artists now to be considered.
The first of these is Franklin Watkins, an artist of decided ability and heartening ambition.
The shock—the pleasant shock—caused by the appearance of his Suicide in Costume (ill. p. 120)
in 1931 and his Soliloquy (ill. p. 121) the following year is still memorable. After a decade of
painting in which abstraction and the American Scene were predominating forces, here suddenly
was a vigorous, proud, elegant and imaginative art in the grand manner. Coming on the heels of
Mann's impulsive plein-airisme, following closely Hopper's concentration on American reality,
Watkins' painting was a studio art, using the rich devices of the Mannerist and Baroque figure
styles. Though its relation to European tradition was obvious, at its best it was a solid, original
and courageous accomplishment. Whereas painters like Marin had founded their esthetic upon
the consecutive release of quick impressions, Watkins helped revive the individual painting as
the summary of a relatively long experience on the artist's part. This is not to say that his accom
plishment was greater than that of his predecessors, but that it was rewardingly different. Nor
has he foundered on a single, obsessive theme as Allston did in BelshazzaFs Feast. The very range
of his Romanticism has been impressive; it extends from the melodrama of Suicide in Costume to
the witching melancholia of Soliloquy, and thence to the "Gothick" mood of Rocky Coast (cat.
no. 202).
The individual painting as the summary of considerable experience and accumulated imagery
is exemplified, too, in Edwin W. Dickinson's impressive work, Figures and Still Life (ill. p. 123),
begun in 193o and completed in 1937. The artist himself has furnished no concise interpretation of
its iconography. Its general effect is that of a well furnished studio exploded into disorder, as if
Geiicault s Raft of the Medusa had struck a mine while it was being painted. But this violence
has been wreaked by Dickinson's own Romantic imagination, and with infinite care despite the
unfinished state of the composition. It would be difficult to think of another modern canvas in
which a Grand Style theme has been so painstakingly built up, only to find its true grandeur in
an unacademic and mysterious state of ruin.
Elizabeth Sparhawk -Jones pays tribute to Tiepolo in Lady Godiva (ill. p. 121), an engaging

46
work which transcends dependence upon its stylistic source. Jon Corbino's Stampeding Bulls
(ill. p. 122) is in the Rubens-Gericault tradition of furious action and is of interest primarily as
an attempt —perhaps too faithful an attempt —to revive the Baroque compositional strategem.
Within the last ten years a few younger American artists have evolved a Neo-Baroque figure and
landscape painting, based in part upon 17th century models, in part upon the contemporary
Neo -Romanticism of Christian Berard and Eugene Berman. Among these American artists are
Richard Blow (ill. p. 125), Edward Melcarth and Walter Stuempfig (ill. p. 124). All three have
produced honest and handsome pictures, though theirs is an art which appeals most to those who
love its sources, enjoy being reminded of them and like to believe that they are coming to life
again (as who can say they may not?). In Raymond Breinin's The Cloak (ill. p. 125) the American
flavor of Stuempfig's Dalliance at Cape May is replaced by a style more closely related to Italian
M annerism or that of El Greco.
Rico Lebrun was born in Italy and lived there until he was twenty -four, hence his Baroque
style seems more deeply rooted than that of the artists just mentioned. He is one of the most
finished draftsmen of the younger generation, though not necessarily among the most expressive.
In recent years he has been absorbed in interpreting the terrors of bombing, which he remembers
from firsthand experience in the Italian army of the First World War. He has portrayed the
desperate epileptic energy which cripples can summon to flee hospitals under attack (ill. p. 122).
In subjects of peace as of war he is above all interested in extremes of tension, physical and
emotional, and in this predilection he seems altogether Romantic. Gericault's taste for the vio
lence and horror of butcher shops is echoed in Lebrun's drawings and paintings of the slaughter
houses of Southern California.
There is a considerable group of young American artists whose work is related to European
Surrealism. Thus John Atherton's Foggy Day (ill. p. 124) adopts the incongruous juxtaposition of
unlikely objects which formed so important a part of Surrealist procedure. In this particular
painting the inclusion of the antique sculpture seems a conscious and rather unsuccessful conceit,
lacking the true Surrealist air of irrational compulsion. But the painting of the architecture,
figures and rainy sky is masterly, and it should be noted that Atherton has since proceeded to a
more direct and convincing interpretation of his subjects, while retaining a hyper-clarity of
technique which goes beyond acute observation to Romantic reappraisal. Also within the wider
Surrealist orbit, Arthur Osver's Melancholy of a Rooftop (ill. p. 125), with its long shadows, black
arches and towering chimney, owes much to the pictures of Giorgio de Chirico's early period.
Its Romantic treatment contrasts vividly with the realism Charles Sheeler and Preston Dickinson
applied to similar scenes twenty years earlier.

47
 Romantics of the Subconscious

In describing his technical procedure Darrel Austin has written: "I size my canvas and then applv
83 the paint, usually with no preconceived idea of subject matter. ' Though Austin disclaims interest
in the work of other artists past or present, his conception of the painter as the agent of a spon
taneous, subconscious inspiration is rooted in earlier Romantic philosophy and is the basis of
contemporary Surrealism. Following the dictates of such inspiration, Austin has created a rich,
if somewhat narrow, mythology of eerie animals and landscapes. He molds the heavy impasto
of his canvases into a phosphorescent domain for the creatures of a wholly Romantic imagination
(ill. p. 128).
Loren Maclver is more truly the recorder of subconscious inspiration than Austin, and her
art shows less formalizing interference on the part of conscious thought. A subtle and varied
colorist, she is an impressionist of poetic recognition, capturing the secrets of rare childhood and
adult responses and projecting them as an abstract gossamer (ill. p. 127).
84 To use his own phrase, Morris Graves is a painter of the "inner eye," that third eye some
where in the mind, to which Marsden Hartley referred in describing Ryder. Through this inner eye
Graves has beheld the lunar visions of Snake and Moon (cat. no. 93), Blind Bird (color frontispiece)
and Owl of the Inner Eye (ill. p. 126). Through it he has seen Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye
(cat. no. 95), which affords a striking comparison with Ryder's Dead Bird (ill. p. 84). For while
Ryder's picture is an interpretation of external reality, however personal and Romantic this
interpretation may be, Graves' painting is complete improvisation. With Graves, as with the late
Paul Klee, Romanticism arrives at an interior, symbolic expression, inventing a language of
signs and omens to describe an intimate communion between the artist's innermost imagination
and his medium. The ectoplasmic scribble within which Graves' figures take shape is related to
Mark Tobey's "white writing," utilized by the latter in a number of his works with deliberately
mystic intent. Graves freely acknowledges his debt to the older artist, hut he is himself perhaps
the most consistent young American exponent of that doubly introspective Romanticism for which
precedent may be found from the 16th to the 19th centuries but which has reached its widest
application in the past twenty years. Among younger men, such as the startlingly talented William
Fett (ill. p. 126), this kind of Romanticism still appears to he gaining converts. Graves speaks for
himself and for them when he declares: "I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external
world."
James Thrall Soby

83Americans 1942, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942, p. 11.

84 Ibid., p. 51.

48
COPLEY: Watson and the Shark. 1778. Oil, 72^ x 90^". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
TRUMBULL: The Sortie from Gibraltar (2nd version). 1788. Oil, 20 x 30". Cincinnati Art Museum.

opposite above: WEST: Saul and the Witch of Endor. 1777. Oil, 20 x 26". Private collection.

opposite below: WEST: Death on the Pale Horse. 1802. Oil, 21 x 36". Philadelphia Museum of Art.
ALLSTON: The Deluge. 1804. Oil, 48 x 65%". Metropolitan Museum of Art.

opposite above: ALLSTON: Moonlit Landscape, c. 1827. Oil, 24 x 35/' Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Not in the exhibition.

opposite below: ALLSTON: Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase. 1805. Oil, 6634 * 97%." Collection
Mrs. Algernon Coolidge.

53
MORSE: The Chapel of the Virgin at Subiaco. 1830—31. Oil, 30 x 37". Worcester Art Museum.
DURAND: Kindred Spirits [Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant]. 1849. Oil, 45x36". New
York Public Library.
QUIDOR: The Money Diggers. 1832. Oil, 16% x 21%". Collection Mrs. Sheldon Keck
AUDUBON: Barn Owl. 1833. Aquatint
colored by hand. 33% x 22%". Weyhe
Gallery.

AUDUBON: Canada Lynx. 1845.

Colored lithograph, 21% x 27%". Ken
nedy & Co.

59
 CATLIN: Ha-won-je-tah, the One Horn;
First Chief of the tribe; Mee-ne-cow-e-gee
band, upper Missouri [Sioux (Dah-co-ta)]. c.
1832. Oil, 21]/g x 23". United States National
Museum, Washington.

Alfred J. MILLER: Buffalo Hunt. c. 1840.

Oil, 30 x 44". Collection Victor D. Spark.

^
Si I

60
BINGHAM: Daniel
Boone Escorting a Band
of Pioneers into the West
ern Country, c. 1851. Oil,
37 x 50". Washington
University, St. Louis.

BINGHAM: Fur Traders

Descending the Missouri,
c. 1845. Oil, 2934 x 3634".
Metropolitan Museum" of
Art.

61
CURRIER & IVES: The Life of a Hunter. A Tight Fix. 1861. Colored lithograph,
after painting by A. F. Tait; 18% x 27". Collection Harry T. Peters.

CURRIER & IVES: The Lightning Express Trains. Leaving the Junction. 1863. Color
lithograph by F. F. Palmer; 17% x 27%". Collection Harry T. Peters.
62
Artist unknown: Meditation by the Sea. 1860-65. Oil, 13% x 19%". Private collection.

Artist unknown: Buffalo Hunter. 19th century. Oil, 40% x 51%". Collection
Mr. and Mrs. Buell Hammett.

63
 above: MOUNT : Landscape with Figures.
1851. Oil, 19 x 2834"- Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts.

left: Lilly M. SPENCER: Reading. 1852.

Oil, x 37 1/%'. Collection Victor D. Spark.
New title.

opposite above: Robert S. DUNCANSON:

Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami
River. 1851. Oil, 2934 x 4234"- Cincinnati
Art Museum.

opposite below: CROPSEY: Eagle Cliff. 1851.

Oil, 35 x 53". Private collection.

64
KENSETT: Seashore. 1860. Oil, 18 x
30". New York Public Library, Stuart
Collection.

William H. BEARD: The Balloon.

1882. Oil, 48 x 333/2". Collection Vic
tor D. Spark.
William PAGE: Portrait of Mrs. Page. c. 1860.
Oil, 6034 x 3634"- Detroit Institute of Arts.

VEDDER: The Lair of the Sea Serpent. 1864.

Oil, 2134$x 3634s". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
HUNT: The Bathers. 1877. Oil, 24 x 16
Worcester Art Museum.

HUNT: The Ball Players. Oil, 16 x 24". Detroit

Institute of Arts.
 LA FARGE: Portrait of the Artist. 1859.
Oil, 16 x 113^". Metropolitan Museum of
Art.

WHISTLER: Nocturne in Blue and Silver:

The Lagoon, Venice, c. 1880. Oil, 20^ x
/g./ 25j Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
EAKINS: Elizabeth at the Piano. 1875. Oil, 72 x 48". Addison Gallery of American
Art, Andover.
. INNESS: The Monk. 1873. Oil, 383^2 x 643^ r/ Collection Stephen C. Clark.

INNESS: The Approaching Storm, c. 1880. Oil, 273^ x 42". Addison Gallery of American Art.
.
,r BLAKELOCK: Moonlight. 1889. Oil, 2734 x 32^ Brooklyn Museum.

opposite above: MORAN: Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming Territory. 1882. Oil, 15^8 x
233^2". National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington.

opposite below: REMINGTON: Fired On. Oil, 26^4 x 3934"* National Collection of Fine Arts,
Washington.

77
 HOMER: The Gulf Stream. 1899. Oil, 3034 x 5034". Metropolitan Museum of Art.

opposite above: HOMER: The Fox Hunt. 1893. Oil, 38 x 68". Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts. Not in the exhibition.

eu opposite below: HOMER: Summer Night. 1890. Oil, 3034 x 4034"- J de Paume Museum, Paris.
Not in the exhibition.

79
 LA FARGE: The Wolf Charm
er. 1907. Oil, 80^ x 62^".
Washington University, St.
Louis.

NEWMAN: The Fortune

Teller. Oil, 10 x 14". Metro
politan Museum of Art.

80
DEWING: The Recitation. 1891. Oil, 30 x 55". Detroit Institute of Arts.

.SARGENT: Robert Louis Stevenson. 1885. Oil, 20}^ x 24^". Collection Mrs. Payne Whitney
 .' ,

RYDER: Macbeth and the Witches. 1890—1908. Oil, 28^ x 36". Phillips Memorial Gallery, Wash
ington.
RYDER: Jonah. Oil, 21% x 34%". National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington. Not in the exhibi
RYDER: Moonlight — Marine. Oil, ll^g x 12" . Metropolitan Museum of Art.

RYDER: Dead Bird. 1890—1900. Oil, 434 x 934 " • Phillips Memorial Gallery.
Arthur B. DAVIES: Along the Erie Canal. 1890. Oil, 1834 x 40". Phillips Memorial Gallery.

DAVIES: Dream. Before 1909. Oil, 18 x 30". Metropolitan Museum of Art.

EILSHEMIUS: Don Quixote. 1895. Oil, 20 x 30". Kleemann Galleries.

EILSHEMIUS: Jealousy. 1915. Oil, 19)4 x 25". Valentine Gallery.

George BELLOWS: The Picnic. 1924. Oil, 30 x 44". Lewisohn Collection.

BELLOWS: A Knock-out. 1921. Lithograph, 1534 x 21%". Albert H. Wiggin Collection, Boston
Public Library.
Edward HOPPER: Cape Cod Evening. 1939. Oil, 30 x 40". Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery.

opposite above: John SLOAN: The City from Greenwich Village. 1922. Oil, 26 x 34". Kraushaar
Galleries.

opposite below: Rockwell KENT: Toilers of the Sea. 1907. Oil, 37J^ x 44". Lewisohn Collection.

89
 r 1m Iff

Georgia O'KEEFFE: Black Cross, New Mexico. 1929. Oil, 39 x 30". Art Institute of Chicago.
 SHjSS

John MARIN: Sunset, Casco Bay. 1919. Watercolor, 16 x 193^". Collection Georgia O'Keeffe.
>J'* -'
Marsden HARTLEY : Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine. 1942. Oil, 30 x 40". Museum of Modern Art.

opposite above: Max WEBER: Chassidic Dance. 1940. Oil, 32 x 40". Collection Mr. and Airs. Milton
Lowenthal.

opposite below: WEBER: Winter Twilight. 1940. Oil, 30 x 40". Collection Mr. and Mrs. Buell Ham-
mett.
C. S. PRICE: Fisherman. 1941. Oil, 34 x 42". Detroit Institute of Arts.

opposite above: Benjamin KOPMAN: A Lynching. 1930. Oil, 29 x 47". Collection Mr. and Mrs.
Bernard Reis.

opposite below: William GROPPER: The Defenders. 1941. Oil, 20 x 24". A.C.A. Gallery.

94
Karl ZERBE: Terror.
1943. Encaustic, 29 x
363/2". Downtown
Gallery.

Theodore C. POLOS
Green Landscape
1940. Oil, 16% x 20"
Owned by the artist.
George GROSZ: No Let-up. 1940. Oil, 29 x 21". Collection Mr. and Mrs. Frederick B
Adams, Jr.
Joseph DE MARTINI: Self-portrait. 1943. Oil, 48 x 30". Phillips Memorial
Gallery.
Hyman BLOOM: The Bride. 1941. Oil, 2034 x 49 Museum of Modern Art,

Donald FORBES: Millstone, c. 1936. Oil, 2634 x 36". WPA Art Program
 Lyonel FEININGER: Steamer Odin. 1927. Oil, 26^ x 393^". Buchholz Gallery.

% FEININGER: The Bird Cloud. 1926. Oil, 17Y x 28^". Collection J. B. Neumann.
DEMUTII: Two illustrations for The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. 1918.
Watercolor, 8 x lO^". Collection Frank C. Osborn.
 Charles BURCHFIELD: House of
Mystery. 1924. Tempera with oil glaze,
293^ x 233^ ". Art Institute of Chicago.

opposite: BURCHFIELD : Church Bells

Ringing — Rainy Winter Night. 1917.
Watercolor, 30 x 19". Collection Mrs.
Louise M. Dunn.

BURCHFIELD: The First Hepaticas.

1918. Watercolor, 21% x 21%%. Mu
seum of Modern Art.

102
Morris KANTOR: Haunted House. 1930. Oil, 37 x 3334 " • Art Institute of Chicago.
Hobson PITTMAN: Old Friends, c. 1940. Oil, 3034 x 4034"• Collection Philip L. Goodwin.
Aaron BOHROD: Tourist House. 1941. Oil, 21 x 28^. Associated American Artists,
Philip EVERGOOD: My Forebears Were Pioneers. 1938-39. Oil, 48% x 35%". Collection
Lt. and Mrs. Bruce Ryan.
Henry MATTSON: Stars and Sea. 1941. Oil, 36 x 42". Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery.

opposite above: MATTSON: Jungle Play. 1941. Oil, 26 x 40". Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery.

opposite below: Paul MOMMER: At Night. 1940. Oil, 30 x 40". Owned by the artist.

108
\vfs
Wmmrn
Matthew BARNES: High Peak. 1936. Oil, 3634 x 4234". Owned by the artist.

opposite above: Elliot ORR: Desecration. 1941. 24 x 30". Collection Lt. and Mrs. Alastair Bradley-
Martin.

opposite below: John C. PELLEW: East River Nocturne, No. 2. 1941. Oil, 2834 x 363<£". Contempo
rary Arts.

Ill
Bernard KARFIOL: Boy. 1924. Oil, 36 x 27". Phillips Memorial Gallery.
 >*-

' i ;
: - '

£ l<**i

Julian LEVI: Buoys. 1939. Oil, 18 x 22". Collection John L. Sexton.

John CARROLL: Rate de
Ballet. 1941. Oil, 60 x 30".
Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Alexander BROOK: The Tragic Muse. 1933. Oil,
40 x 24". Newark Museum.

Alexander BROOK: Pasture at Elk. 1939. Oil, 20 x

28". Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
. <! Kt*Mil
Eugene LUDINS: Interlude. 1940. Oil, 3634 x 4824". Associated American Artists.

opposite above: Arnold BLANCH: Suwannee River. 1940. Oil, 30 x 48". Associated American Artists.

opposite below: Roll BEMAN: Brummitt's Cornfield. 1939. Oil, 2434 x 3634'' '• WPA Art Program.

117
 William C. PALMER:
Spring Landscape
with Ruins. 1938.
Tempera and oil, 24 x
30". Midtown Galler
ies.

Robert ARCHER:
Approaching Storm,
c. 1938. Oil, 2434 x
3014". WPA Art Pro
gram.

118
 John Steuart
CURRY: Hogs Kill
.
ing a Rattlesnake.
1932. Oil, 30 x 38".
Associated American
Artists.

Thomas BENTON:
Moonlight on the
Osage. 1938. Tem
pera, 14 x 17J4".
Collection Boetius
H. Sullivan, Jr.

119
Franklin C. WATKINS: Suicide in Costume. 1931. Oil, 3634 x 4434"* Philadelphia Museum of Art.
WATKINS: Soliloquy. 1932. Oil, 25 x 30". Whitney Museum of American
Art.

mgm

Elizabeth SPAR-
HAWK-JONES: Lady
Godiva. 1941. Water-
color, 20 x 24". Col
lection Mrs. Otto L.
Spaeth.
Rico LEBRUN: Migration to Nowhere. 1941. Gouache, 30 x 48". Owned by the artist.

Jon CORB1NO: Stampeding Bulls. 1937. Oil, 28 x 41 . Toledo Museum of Art.

Edwin DICKINSON: Figures and Still Life. 1933-37. Oil, 97 x 11%". Passedoit Gallery.
John ATHERTON: Foggy Day. 1941. Oil, 26341x 3634s".Julien Levy Gallery.

Walter STUEMPFIG:
Dalliance at Cape May.
1943. Oil, 30 x 36".
Durlacher Brothers.
above: Raymond BREININ: The Cloak. 1943. Oil, 32 x 50". Downtown Gallery.
below left: Richard BLOW: The Painter. 1938. Oil, 28 x 32". Metropolitan Museum of Art.
below right: Arthur OSVER: Melancholy of a Rooftop. 1942. Oil, 48 x 24". Museum of Modern Art.

125
Morris GRAVES: Owl of the Inner Eye. 1941. Gouache, 20^4 x 36%". Museum of Modern Art.

William FETT: The Dangerous Night. 1943. Watercolor, 1734 x 26%". Smith College Museum of
Art.

126
Loren MacIVER: The Violet Hour. 1943. Oil, 90^ x 57%". Pierre Matisse Gallery.
Darrel AUSTIN: The Black Beast. 1941. Oil, 24
x 30". Smith College Museum of Art.

Julia THECLA: This. 1936. Pastel and water

color, 1934 x 14". Collection David Porter.
Biographies of the Artists and Catalog of the Exhibition

An asterisk (*) indicates that the work is illustrated. dio. Childhood interest in ornithology. 1803 to father's
Works not illustrated here bear a reference if reproduced in estate in Pennsylvania. 1807, after unsuccessful business
another of the Museum's publications. Unless otherwise ventures, to Kentucky to open frontier store; neglected
stated, all paintings are oil on canvas. Dimensions are in business for bird study which increasingly absorbed
inches and height precedes width. him; by 1810 had made 200 drawings. 1812-19 at Hend
erson, Ky.; bankrupt, began drawing portraits. 1819-20
position in Dr. Daniel Drake's natural history museum,
ALLSTON, Washington. 1779-1843. Born on planta Cincinnati; decided on unprecedented project: to por
tion, Waccamaw region, S. C.; grew up in Newport, tray all the birds of America, in full action and in natural
R. I. Harvard 1800, class poet. Returned to Charleston; habitat. 1820 down Mississippi by flatboat to New
1801 to England with Malbone; studied Royal Academy Orleans; painted portraits, tutored, while pursuing proj
under Benjamin West. 1804 to Paris with Yanderlyn to ect. 1826 sailed from New Orleans to Liverpool to find
study art collected by Napoleon; then 4 years in Rome, publisher for drawings. Successful in London, Edin
where he knew Coleridge, Washington Irving, Thor- burgh, Paris; got subscribers; elected to learned and
waldson. 1809 returned to America; 1811 to England scientific societies. Publication of The Birds of America
with Morse. Successful professional and social career in begun 1827 by Lizars of Edinburgh, completed by
England 1811-17. 1818 returned to America; studio in Havell of London 1838. Visit to America 1829; return to
Boston, later in Cambridgeport. Essayist, poet, critic, England 1830. Published Ornithological Biography 1831-
teacher, a brilliant leader in Boston's cultural life for 25 39, to accompany The Birds of America. 1831 to Amer
years. Died Cambridgeport. ica to continue and complete bird studies in Florida,
Labrador, etc. 1839 began work on Quadrupeds of
*1 The Deluge. 1804. 48 x 65%". Lent by Metropolitan America, going west to North Dakota and Montana;
Museum of Art. III. p.53. publication begun 1845. Died New York.
2 Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea. 1804. 38% x 51 '.
Lent by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 7 White-headed Eagle. 1828. Aquatint colored by
hand, 25% x 38%". Lent by Old Print Shop.
*3 Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase (Swiss
Scenery). 1805. 66% x 97%". Lent by Mrs. Alger *8 Barn Owl. 1833. Aquatint colored by hand, 33% x
non Coolidge. III. p.52. 22%". Lent by Weyhe Gallery. III. p.59.
4 Portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (unfinished). 9 Wood Ibis. 1834. Aquatint colored by hand, 34% x
1806. 30 x 25". Lent by Henry Wadsworth Long 27 % ". Lent by Old Print Shop.
fellow Dana. *10 Canada Lynx. 1845. Lithograph colored by hand,
21% x 27%". Lent by Kennedy & Co. III. p.59.

ARCHER, Robert. Born 1905. Worked on WPA Art

Project, New York. AUSTIN, Darrel. Born Raymond, Wash. 1907. Grew up
in Portland, Ore. Studied art Columbia University,
*5 Approaching Storm, c. 1938. 24% x 30%". WPA Notre Dame and in Portland. Worked on Oregon WPA
Art Program. III. p. 118. Art Project. Lives New York.

*11 The Black Beast. 1941. 24 x 30". Lent by Smith

ATHERTON, John. Born Brainerd, Minn. 1900; State College Museum of Art. 111.p. 128.
of Washington 1906-18. U. S. Navy 1918-19. Worked
12 The Dark River. 1941. 20 x 24". Lent by Phillips
in mines, shipyards, at sign painting, etc. California
Memorial Gallery.
School of Fine Arts, San Francisco 1922-25. Since 1926,
successful advertising artist. To New York 1929. Lives 13 The Black Bullock. 1942. 20 x 24". Lent by Perls
Ridgefield, Conn. Galleries.

*6 Foggy Day. 1941. 26% x 36%". Lent by Julien

Levy Gallery. III. p. 124. BARNES, Matthew. Born Scotland 1880. To U. S. 1904;
New York until 1906; then settled San Francisco. Self-
taught. Worked on California WPA Art Project.
AUDUBON, John James. 1785-1851. Born Les Cayes,
Santo Domingo, son of wealthy French naval officer. 14 Night Scene. 1932. 36% x 42%".
Brought up in France; studied drawing in David's stu *15 High Peak. 1936. 36% x 42%". III. p. 111.

129
 16 Ghost Homes. 1938. 20 x 24". BIERSTADT, Albert. 1830-1902. Born Solingen, Ger
Nos. 14-16, lent by the artist. many. To America at 2 years, grew up in New Bedford,
Mass. 1853 to Diisseldorf to study 4 years; worked in
Rome and Switzerland. Returned to U. S. 1857; 1858
BEARD, William Holbrook. 1825-1900. Born Paines- joined expedition through unopened territories of West,
ville, Ohio. Itinerant portrait painter; 1850 worked in followed by several later trips. Hugh canvases of Rockies
Buffalo, N. Y. Studied and painted in Rome, Switzer and other Western scenery popular here and abroad in
land, Diisseldorf. Settled in New York 1860. Popular in '60s and '70s; received medals from Czar of Russia,
his day for paintings of animals satirizing human foibles. Sultan of Turkey and others. Died New York.
Died New York.
24 A Stream in the Rocky Mountains, c. 1860. 39% *
17 The Witches' Sabbath. 1876. 38 % x 58%". Lent by 30%. Lent by A. F. Mondschein.
Robert C. Yose Galleries. *25 Snow Scene with Buffaloes. 1860s? Oil on mill
*18 The Balloon. 1882. 48 x 33%". Lent by Victor D. board, 18 x 24". Lent anonymously. III. p. 67.
Spark. III. p.68.

BINGHAM, George Caleb. 1811-79. Born Augusta Co.,

BELLOWS, George Wesley. 1882-1925. Born Colum Va.; with family to Missouri 1819. c. 1827 cabinet
bus, Ohio. Ohio State University; newspaper cartoonist maker's apprentice; studied law and theology; first
in spare time. Studied with H. G. Maratta, Chicago; painting instruction supposedly from Chester Harding,
1904 New York with Henri and Hayes Miller. Taught c. 1830 began to paint portraits of neighbors, c. 1835
Art Students' League and National Academy (1913). to St. Louis; c. 1837 to study at Pennsylvania Academy,
Brilliant younger member of Henri's group although did Philadelphia. 1840-44 painted portraits, Washington,
not exhibit with "The Eight." Died New York. D. C.; to Missouri 1844. First genre and landscape
paintings 1845. Visit to New York 1849; in Philadelphia
19 Dance in a Madhouse. 1917. Lithograph, 18% x 1853-54. To Europe 1856; in Diisseldorf until 1859;
24%". Lent by H. Y. Allison & Co. returned to Missouri. In Union Army 1861. Active in
state and local politics throughout life; professor of art,
*20 A Knock-out. 1921. Lithograph, 15% x 21%". Lent University of Missouri 1877. Died Kansas City.
by Albert H. Wiggin Collection, Boston Public
Library. III. p.87. *26 Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, c. 1845.
*21 The Picnic. 1924. 30 x 44". Lent by Lewisohn Col 29% x 36%". Lent by Metropolitan Museum of
lection. III. p.87. Art. III. p.61.
*27 Daniel Boone Escorting a Band of Pioneers into
the Western Country, c. 1851. 37 x 50". Lent by
BEMAN, Roff. 1891-1940. Born Chicago. Studied in Washington University, St. Louis, through City
Paris; with Sloan and Emil Armin. Worked on Illinois Art Museum, St. Louis. III. p. 61.
WPA Art Project. Lived in Chicago.

*22 Brummitt's Cornfield. 1939. 24% x 36%". WPA BLAKELOCK, Ralph Albert. 1847-1919. Born New
Art Program. III. p. 116. York; graduated College of the City of N. Y. 1867;
medical education but gave this up for music and paint
ing. Could not afford instruction or European travel,
BENTON, Thomas Hart. Born Neosho, Mo. 1889. At 17 worked alone, ignored by art circles and public. Worked
newspaper cartoonist, studying Art Institute of Chicago. his way through the West, inspired by scenery and
1908 to Paris for 5 years. U. S. Navy, World War. After Indian life. Returned to New York, painted under in
1925 identified with American regionalist movement. creasing financial and family difficulties. At 52 mental
Murals, New School for Social Research (1930) were breakdown, 18 years in asylum. Never profited from
among first non-academic American mural paintings; increasing popularity and value of his paintings. Died
other murals, Whitney Museum, N. Y., Indianapolis, in Adirondacks.
Jefferson City, Mo. Taught Art Students' League, New
School for Social Research, Kansas City Art Institute. *28 Moonlight. 1889. 27% x 32%". Lent by Brooklyn
1943 artist-correspondent on U. S. Navy project. Lives Museum. III. p.77.
Kansas City.

*23 Moonlight on the Osage. 1938. Tempera on gesso, BLANCH, Arnold. Born Mantorville, Minn. 1896.
14 x 17%". Lent by Pfc. Boetius H. Sullivan, Jr. Studied Minneapolis School of Fine Arts, Art Students'
III. p. 119. League. U. S. Army, World War, drawing maps for In-

130
telligence Corps; after War 2 years in France and Italy. Fine Arts mural, Post Office Department, Washington.
Guggenheim fellowship 1933; to Southern France. 1943 to Panama and Caribbean as artist-correspondent.
Taught California School of Fine Arts, Art Students' Lives in New York.
League, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Section of
Fine Arts murals, Norwalk, Conn., Fredonia, N. Y., *35 The Tragic Muse. 1933. 40 x 24". Lent by Newark
Columbus, Wis.; worked on WPA Art Project, New Museum. III. p. 115.
York. Lives Woodstock, N. Y. *36 Pasture at Elk. 1939. 20 x 28". Lent by Wadsworth
Atheneum. III. p. 115.
*29 Suwannee River. 1940. 30 x 48 ". Lent by Associated
American Artists. III. p. 116.
BROWN, Eliphalet, Jr., publisher, New York.
BLOOM, Hyman. Born Latvia 1913. To U. S. 1920, 37 U. S. Steam Frigate Mississippi in a Typhoon. 1857.
living ever since in Boston. Studied under Harold Zim Lithograph colored by hand, 16 x 20%". Lent by
merman and Denman Ross, Boston. Worked on Massa Old Print Shop.
chusetts WPA Art Project.

30 Skeleton, c. 1936. 12 x 68". Lent by Nat Sharfman. BURCHFIELD, Charles. Born Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio
1893. 1898-1921 lived in Salem, Ohio. 1911-16 Cleve
*31 The Bride. 1941. 20% x 49%"- Museum of Modern
land School of Art. Until 1921 worked as costs account
Art, Purchase Fund. III. p. 99.
ant in automobile parts factory. Army training camp
1918. 1921-28 in Buffalo, N. Y. as wallpaper designer;
BLOW, Richard. Born La Salle, 111.1904. Studied Na 1928 resigned job to devote full time to painting. Lives
tional Academy, Art Students' League, Art Institute of Gardenville, N. Y.
Chicago. Before the war lived Florence, Italy and New
York. Now in U. S. Army. 38 Garden of Memories. 1917. Crayon and watercolor,
25% x 22%". Museum of Modern Art, gift of Mrs.
*32 The Painter. 1938. Oil on fibre board, 28 x 32". John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (by exchange). 111.Burch-
Lent by Metropolitan Museum of Art. III. p. 125. jield, no. 25.
*39 Church Bells Ringing —Rainy Winter Night. 1917.
Watercolor, 30 x 19". Lent by Mrs. Louise M.
BOHROD, Aaron. Born Chicago 1907. Studied Art
Dunn. III. p. 103.
Institute of Chicago; 1929 to New York, Art Students'
League 2 years with Boardman Robinson, Sloan, Hayes 40 The Night Wind. 1918. Watercolor, 21% x 21%".
Miller. Guggenheim fellowship 1936, renewal 1937. Lent by A. Conger Goodyear. III. color portfolio ,
Worked on Illinois WPA Art Project. Section of Fine no. 18.
Arts murals, Clinton, Galesburg and Yandalia, 111.1942 *41 The First Hepaticas. 1918. Watercolor, 21% x
artist-in-residence, Southern Illinois Normal University. 27%". Museum of Modern Art, gift of Mrs. John
1943 to South Pacific as artist-correspondent. Lives D. Rockefeller, Jr. III. p. 102.
Chicago.
*42 House of Mystery. 1924. Tempera with oil glaze on
*33 Tourist House. 1941. Oil on composition board, board, 29% x 23%". Lent by Art Institute of Chi
21 x 28 %". Lent by Associated American Artists. cago. III. p. 102.
III. p. 106.
CARROLL, John. Born Kansas City, Kan. 1892. Stud
BREININ, Raymond. Born Vitebsk, Russia 1910. To ied Mark Hopkins Institute, San Francisco, 1903-06;
U. S. 1923. Studied Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago University of California 1911; and with Frank Duveneck
Academy of Art. Worked on Illinois WPA Art Project; 1913-15. U. S. Navy, World War. To Paris on Guggen
Section of Fine Arts murals, Wilmette, 111. Artist-in- heim fellowship 1926. Taught Art Students' League,
residence, Southern Illinois Normal University, Car- Society of Arts and Crafts, Detroit. Section of Fine Arts
bondale. mural, Clemson, S. C. Lives East Chatham, N. Y.

*34 The Cloak. 1943. 32 x 50". Lent by Downtown *43 Rate de Ballet. 1941. 60 x 30". Lent by Honolulu
Gallery. III. p. 125. Academy of Arts. III. p. 114.

BROOK, Alexander. Born Brooklyn 1898, of Russian CATLIN, George. 1796-1872. Born Wyoming Yalley,
parentage. Studied Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; Art Stu Pa. 1817-18 studied law, practised 2 or 3 years; then
dents' League. 1924-27 assistant director, Whitney self-taught portrait painter; 1824-30 painted in Wash
Studio Club. Guggenheim fellowship 1931. Section of ington, Albany, Richmond. 1829 saw group of Western

131
Indians in Philadelphia on way to Washington; inspired COLE, Thomas. 1801-48. Born Bolton -le-Moors, Lan
to devote talents to recording Indian life. 1832 for about cashire, England. As child worked on engravings for
8 years traveled among 48 tribes making 310 oil por calico in a print works. At 19 to U. S. with family, living
traits and 200 oils recording ceremonies, hunting, vil Philadelphia, then Steubenville, Ohio, where he worked
lages, etc. 1841 published Illustrations of the Manners, with father in wallpaper factory. Taught himself to
Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians. paint; itinerant portrait painter. 2 winters in Philadel
1837-52 "Indian Gallery" with accompanying troupe of phia in extreme poverty; then 1825 to New York where
Indians toured U. S., England, France. 1846 collection his landscape paintings attracted enthusiasm of Trum
offered to Smithsonian Institution; accepted 1879. bull, Durand, Dunlap. Inspired by Hudson River and
Traveled and painted in South and Central America Catskill scenery and romantic literature dealing with the
1852-57; in Europe 1858-70. Died Jersey City, N. J. region; established studio at Catskill, N. Y. 1829 to
England, France, Italy until 1832. Again to Europe
*44 "Ha-won-je-tah, the One Horn; first chief of the 1841-42. Pioneer painter of landscape in this country.
tribe; Mee-ne-cow-e-gee band. Upper Missouri Died Catskill, N. Y.
[Sioux (Dah-co-ta)]; hair tied on his head in form
of a turban, and filled with glue and red earth, or
51 Scene from Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. 1827.
vermilion." c. 1832. 27% x 23". III. p.60.
25% x 35". Lent by Wadsworth Atheneum.
45 "View on Upper Missouri —Back view of the Man-
dan Village, showing their mode of depositing their 52 Mt. Chocorua, New Hampshire. 1827. Oil on wood,
dead, on scaffolds, enveloped in skins, and of pre 23 x 32 ". Lent anonymously.
serving and feeding the skulls; 1800 miles above *53 The Expulsion from Eden. 1828. 39 x 53%". Lent
St. Louis. Women feeding the skulls of their rela anonymously, through Museum of Fine Arts, Bos
tives with dishes of meat." c. 1832. 11% x 14%". ton. III. p.54.
46 "Buffalo Hunt under the wolf-skin mask." c. 1832.
*54 The Oxbow (Connecticut River near Northamp
19 x 26%".
ton). 1836. 51% x 76". Lent by Metropolitan
Nos. 44-46, lent by United States National Mu
Museum of Art. III. p. 55.
seum, Smithsonian Institution.
47 Flamingo Shooting in South America. 1857. 19 x 55 The Vision, c. 1846? Oil on wood, 12 x 18". Lent by
26%". Lent by Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. Brooklyn Museum.

CHAMBERS, T. Active 1820-40. Painted Hudson COPLEY, John Singleton. 1737 or 1738-1815. Born
River region, Natural Bridge, Washington's tomb, Ni Boston, of Irish parentage. Encouraged by stepfather,
agara Falls, Franconia Notch, New York and Boston Peter Pelham, the engraver, started career as portrait
Harbors. painter. Became our most eminent Colonial painter;
successful career in New England and other colonies. To
48 Niagara Falls, c. 1820-40. 21% x 29%". Lent by Europe 1774, visiting Italy and settling in London the
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. following year; never returned to America. Became one
of London's leading painters of portraits, historical and
religious canvases. Died London.
CHURCH, Frederick Edwin. 1826-1900. Born Hart
ford, Conn. Pupil of Thomas Cole at Catskill, N. Y.
First painted Catskills, then 1853 and 1857 to South 56 Watson and the Shark. Ink, 19 x 23%". Lent by
Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University.
America to paint the Andes; later to Labrador to paint
icebergs. 1866 to Jamaica; 1868 first visit to Europe and *57 Watson and the Shark. 1778. 72% x 90%". Lent
Near East. Extremely successful, U. S. and Europe. by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. III. p.49.
Died New York.

*49 Cotopaxi, Ecuador. 1862. 48 x 85". Lent by New CORBINO, Jon. Born Vittoria, Sicily 1905. To New
York Public Library, Lenox Collection. III. p.66. York 1913. Studied art Ethical Culture School, N. Y.;
Art Students' League, Pennsylvania Academy. Origi
CODMAN, Charles. 1800-42. Painted clock faces, signs nally a sculptor, then painter. Guggenheim fellowships
and fire buckets until about 1828. Became successful 1936 and 1937. Section of Fine Arts mural, Long Beach,
landscape painter. Exhibited at Boston Atheneum 1828- N. Y.; worked on WPA Art Project. Teaches summer
34. Lived Portland, Me. school, Rockport, Mass. Lives Scarsdale, N. Y.

50 The Pirates' Cove. c. 1830. 23% x 31". Lent by *58 Stampeding Bulls. 1937. 28 x 41%". Lent by Toledo
Old Print Shop. Museum of Art. III. p. 122.

132
 COWLES, Russell. Born Algona, Iowa 1887. Studied DAYIES, Arthur Bowen. 1862-1928. Born Utica, N. Y.
National Academy, Art Students' League; American At 18 to Mexico as draftsman for engineering expedi
Academy in Rome fellowship 1915-17. U.S. Naval Intel tion. Studied Academy of Design, Chicago; Art Insti
ligence, Italy, 1917-20. Traveled Europe and Far East; tute of Chicago, and in New York. Magazine illustrator.
worked 10 years in New Mexico. Lives New York. To Italy 1893; influenced by Giorgione, El Greco, Blake,
Cubism, Persian miniatures, Greek vase painting. 1908
59 Old World. 1943. 43% x 30%". Lent by Kraushaar exhibited with "The Eight", New York; president and
Galleries. moving spirit of Association of American Painters and
Sculptors, which organized Armory Show, New York,
1913. Traveled widely; tapestries, prints, sculpture, as
CROPSEY, Jasper Francis. 1823-1900. Born Rossville, well as painting. Died near Florence, Italy.
Staten Island, N. Y. Worked in architect's office 5 years.
Turned to landscape painting, studied National Acad *67 Along the Erie Canal. 1890. 18% x 40". Lent by
emy. 1847 to Europe, 3 years in Italy; 1857-63 studio Phillips Memorial Gallery. III. p. 85.
in London. In brief return to architecture, designed *68 Dream. Before 1909. 18 x 30". Lent by Metropoli
"El" stations in N. Y. C. Painted chiefly Hudson River tan Museum of Art. III. p.85.
scenery. Died Hastings-on-Hudson, N. Y.

*60 Eagle Cliff. 1851. 35 x 53". Lent anonymously, De MARTINI, Joseph. Born Mobile, Ala. 1896. Studied
through Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, III. p.65. National Academy. Worked on WPA Art Project, New
York. Lives New York.

CURRIER and IYES. Between 1835 and 1907 Nathan 69 Moonlit Cove. 1941. 26 x 32". Lent by George L.
iel Currier and the succeeding firm of Currier & Ives, a Shaskan.
partnership formed in 1857, published some 6,700 differ
ent lithographs. *70 Self-portrait. 1943. 48 x 30". Lent by Phillips
Memorial Gallery. III. p. 98.

*61 The Life of a Hunter. A Tight Fix. 1861. Colored

lithograph, after painting by Arthur F. Tait, DEMUTH, Charles. 1883-1935. Born Lancaster, Pa.
. 18% x 27". III. p. 62. Studied Pennsylvania Academy under Chase and An
62 Life on the Prairie —The Trapper's Defense. "Fire shutz; 1904 to Paris for 2 years. 1912 again to Paris,
Fight Fire." 1862. Colored lithograph, after paint Colarossi Academy. 1914 return to U. S. Outstanding
ing by Arthur F. Tait, 18% x 27%." watercolorist; vaudeville subjects, architecture, still
life, illustrations for Henry James, Zola, Poe, Balzac.
*63 The Lightning Express Trains. Leaving the Junc Lived in Lancaster with frequent trips to New York.
tion. 1863. Colored lithograph by Fanny F. Palmer, Died Lancaster.
17% x 27%". III. p. 62.
64 The Champions of the Mississippi. A Race for the Five illustrations for The Turn of the Screw by Henry
Buckhorns. 1866. Colored lithograph by Fanny F. James. 1918. Watercolor, each 8 x 10%":
Palmer, 18% x 27%". 111. Trois Siecles cTArt aux 71 "She had picked up a small flat piece of wood . .
Etats-Unis, pi. 10. 111. Modern Painters and Sculptors as Illustrators ,
p.91.
65 The Great Fire at Chicago, Oct. 8, 1871. Colored
lithograph, 16% x 24%". *72 "Did I steal?" III. p.101.
Nos. 61-65, lent by Harry T. Peters. 73 "I can see—the way —his hand —passed from one
crenelation to the next."

CURRY, John Steuart. Born Dunavant, Kan. 1897; *74 "Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placid
grew up on father's farm. 1916 Kansas City Art Insti ity . . III. p. 101.
tute; Chicago Art Institute; Art Students' League; Nos. 71-74, lent by Frank C. Osborn.
Russian Academy, Paris. 1932 traveled several months 75 "At a House in Harley Street." 8x11". Museum of
with Ringling Brothers Circus. Section of Fine Arts mu Modern Art, gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
rals, Departments of Justice and Interior, Washington.
Since 1936 artist -in-residence, University of Wisconsin.
DEWING, Thomas Wilmer. 1851-1938. Born Boston.
*66 Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake. 1932. 30 x 38". Lent by Pupil of Lefebvre and Boulanger, Paris, 1876-79. Set
Associated American Artists. III. p. 119. tled in New York. With Twachtman, Weir, Tarbell and

133
others, 1898, formed "Ten American Painters," group 1841, devoted himself to landscape painting, working
which opposed academic tradition and favored individ directly outdoors (unusual at the time). A founder of
ual experiment. Painted very little after 1920. Freer National Academy in 1826; succeeded Morse as its
Gallery, Washington, set aside room for his paintings, president, 1845-61. Died Jefferson Village, N. J.
pastels and silverpoints. Died New York.
*81 Kindred Spirits [Thomas Cole and William Cullen
*76 The Recitation. 1891. 30 x 55". Lent by Detroit Bryant]. 1849. 45 x 36". Lent by New York Public
Institute of Arts. 111.p.81. Library. III. p.57.

DICKINSON, Edwin W. Born Seneca Falls, N. Y. EAKINS, Thomas. 1844-1916. Born Philadelphia. Stu
1891. Studied with Chase and Charles Hawthorne. To died Pennsylvania Academy; physician's course in anat
France 1937. Taught 1939 Art Institute of Buffalo, Art omy, Jefferson Medical College. Paris 1866-69, Ecole
Students' League. Worked on Massachusetts WPA Art des Beaux-Arts under Gerome, also with Bonnat and
Project. Lived at Provincetown; now lives Wellfleet, sculptor Dumont; traveled in Spain and other parts of
Mass. Europe. Settled in Philadelphia 1870, painting, doing
some sculpture, teaching at Pennsylvania Academy and
*77 Figures and Still Life. 1933-37. 97 x 77% "• Lent by Philadelphia Art Students' League. Series of rowing,
Passedoit Gallery. III. p. 123. sailing, hunting, baseball pictures 1871-75; prize fights
1888-89. Portraits, noted today for penetrating honesty,
78 Portrait of a Man. 1941. 20 x 23". Lent by Pas
drew adverse criticism; greatly underestimated as an
sedoit Gallery.
artist during his lifetime. Died Philadelphia.

DOUGHTY, Thomas. 1793-1856. Born Philadelphia. *82 Elizabeth at the Piano. 1875. 72 x 48". Lent by
Abandoned successful career as leather merchant to Addison Gallery of American Art. III. p.74.
paint. Self-taught, one of first Americans to paint land
scapes exclusively; forerunner of Cole in founding native EILSHEMIUS, Louis Michel. 1864-1941. Born near
landscape school. Scenes painted near Philadelphia and Newark, N. J., of Dutch descent. Educated Geneva and
New York popular in Paris, London and U. S., but met Dresden. At 17 returned to America, studied bookkeep
with little financial success. Died New York. ing, then agriculture at Cornell. Studied Art Students'
League; 1886 under Bouguereau, Paris. Traveled Eu
79 In Nature's Wonderland. 1835. 24% x 30". Lent by rope, Africa, South Seas, and U. S. for 20 years, occa
Detroit Institute of Arts. sionally returning to New York. Met Ryder 1908.
Painting admired by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, at Inde
pendent show, New York, resulting in exhibitions,
DUNCANSON, Robert S. 1821-71. Negro, born Cin
Societe Anonyme 1920, 1924. A prolific painter until
cinnati. Spent part of boyhood in Canada, returning to
1921, was little-known until after 1932, in spite of deter
Cincinnati where his talent attracted attention about
mined self-advertising. Died New York.
1840. Sent to study in Scotland by Anti-Slavery League.
Upon return became respected member of Cincinnati
*83 Don Quixote. 1895. 20 x 30". Lent by Kleemann
group of artists; numerous portrait and mural commis
Galleries. III. p.86.
sions from prominent families. Returned to Europe,
exhibited allegorical and historical canvases with con 84 Afternoon Wind. 1899. 20 x 36". Museum of Mod
siderable success in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. ern Art, given anonymously. 111. Painting and
Revisited Cincinnati late '60s, painted Western scene Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, p.37.
under influence of James H. Beard and Duveneck. *85 Jealousy. 1915. Oil on board, 19% x 25". Lent by
Valentine Gallery. III. p.86.
*80 Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River. 1851.
29% x 42%". Lent by Cincinnati Art Museum. EVERGOOD, Philip. Born New York 1901. Educated
III. p.65. at Eton and Cambridge, England. Apprenticed to
Havard Thomas, sculptor, Slade School, London 1921-
DURAND, Asher Brown. 1796-1886. Born Jefferson 23; Art Students' League, New York, 1923-24; Julian
Village, N. J. 1812 apprenticed 5 years to engraver, Academy, Paris, 1924; British Academy, Rome, 1925.
Peter Maverick. 1820-23 engraved Trumbull's Declara 1940-41 artist-in-residence, Kalamazoo College, Mich.
tion of Independence, which gained him prominence. WPA mural, Richmond Hill, N. Y.; Section of Fine Arts
About 1835 gave up successful career as commercial mural, Jackson, Ga. Lives Woodside, Long Island.
engraver of tickets, banknotes, etc.; turned to portrait
painting, practising in Washington. 1840 to Europe, *86 My Forebears Were Pioneers. 1938-39. 48% x
copying old masters in London and Italy. Upon return, 35%". Lent by Lt. and Mrs. Bruce Ryan. III. p. 107.

134
FEININGER, Lyonel. Born New York 1871. Son of 93 Snake and Moon. 1938-39. Gouache and water-
two musicians; studied violin. To Germany 1887. color, 25% x 30%". 111.Americans 1942, p. 55.
Abandoned musical career; art training Kunstgewerbe-
*94 Blind Bird. 1940. Gouache, 30% x 27". Color fron
schule, Hamburg; Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. Widely
tispiece.
known as illustrator and cartoonist for German and
French papers, 1906-07 for Chicago Tribune. Turned to 95 Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye. 1941. Gouache,
painting, studying in Paris 1907; influenced by Cubism. 21 x 36%". 111.Americans 1942, p. 56.
Exhibited with Marc, Kandinsky, Klee in Berlin 1913. *96 Owl of the Inner Eye. 1941. Gouache, 20% x 36%".
Taught painting and graphic arts at Bauhaus, Weimar III. p. 126.
and Dessau 1919-34. Returned to U. S. 1936; 1937 Nos. 93-96, Museum of Modern Art, Purchase
taught at Mills College, Oakland, Calif. Lives New Fund.
York.

*87 The Bird Cloud. 1926. 17% x 28%". Lent by GROPPER, William. Born New York 1897 of Lithuan
J. B. Neumann. III. p. 100. ian parentage. 1913-18 National Academy, New York
School of Fine and Applied Art. Well-known graphic
*88 Steamer Odin. 1927. 26% x 39%". Lent by Buch-
artist; cartoonist for New York Herald Tribune 1919;
holz Gallery. III. p. 100.
then for Rebel Worker, Daily Worker, The Liberator,
Vanity Fair, New Masses. 1927 to Russia with Theodore
FETT, William. Born Ann Arbor, Mich. 1918. Studied Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Guggenheim fellowship
Art Institute of Chicago 4 years, graduating 1941. To 1937. Painter, illustrator, author. Section of Fine Arts
Mexico on traveling fellowship for 14 months. Lives murals, Detroit and Department of Interior, Washing
Michoacan, Mexico. ton. Lives Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y.

*97 The Defenders. 1941. 20 x 24". Lent by A.C.A.

*89 The Dangerous Night. 1943. Watercolor, 17% x
Gallery. 111.p.95.
26%". Lent by Smith College Museum of Art.
III. p. 126.
GROSZ, George. Born Berlin 1893. Studied at Dresden
Academy and Kunstgewerbeschule, Berlin. 1913 to
FORBES, Donald. Born Auburn, Neb. 1905. Self-
Paris. In German army 1914-18. Famous for satirical
taught. Worked on New York WPA Art Project. Lives
drawings of World War. Dadaist in Berlin, 1919. 1932
New York.
to U. S. Has taught at Art Students' League intermit
tently since 1932. Guggenheim fellowship 1937 and
*90 Millstone, c. 1936. 26% x 36". WPA Art Program. 1938. Lives Douglaston, Long Island.
III. p.99.
91 Jose. 1940. 19 x 15". Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. 98 Early Moon. 1939. 20 x 26". Lent by Associated
Simon Guggenheim Fund. American Artists.
*99 No Let-up. 1940. 29 x 21". Lent by Mr. and Mrs.
Frederick B. Adams, Jr. III. p.97.
FULLER, George. 1822-84. Born Deerfield, Mass.
Studied briefly with sculptor H. K. Brown, Albany. 3
years as itinerant portrait painter; studied in Boston. HALL, Carl. Born Washington, D. C. 1922. 1939-41
Lived in New York 12 years. 1859 trip to Europe. Little Meinzinger Art School, Detroit, under Carlos Lopez.
success with portraits or landscapes; 1860 retired to Now in U. S. Army.
family farm in Deerfield, painting only in leisure time
until 1876 when he exhibited in Boston with financial 100 Interlochen, Michigan. 1940. 24% x 40". Lent by
and artistic success. Studio in Boston. Died Brookline, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Mass.

92 And She Was a Witch. 30 x 40". Lent by Metro HART, "Pop" (George Overbury). 1868-1933. Born
politan Museum of Art. Cairo, 111. Self-taught except for few months at Art
Institute of Chicago and Julian Academy, Paris. From
1900 traveled and painted, doing odd jobs to pay his
GRAVES, Morris. Born Fox Valley, Ore. 1910. Since way, in Italy, Egypt, South Pacific islands, West Indies,
1911 lived chiefly in western Washington; high school Iceland, France. 1907 bought land and built shack,
in Beaumont, Tex. Trip to Japan, 1930; Puerto Rico, Coytesville, N. J.; painted signs for amusement parks
1940. Worked on Washington WPA Art Project. Lives and movie sets, Fort Lee, N. J. until 1920; from 1921
Anacortes, Wash. worked only at own painting. Trips to South America,

135
Mexico, North Africa, etc. Draftsman, print maker, 105 Shakespeare at Dusk. 1935. 17 x 25". Lent by
watercolorist; recognition as artist after 1925. Died Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery.
New York.
*106 Cape Cod Evening. 1939. 30 x 40 ". Lent by Frank
K. M. Rehn Gallery. III. p. 89.
101 The Sultan's Messenger. 1929. Watercolor and
*107 Gas. 1940. 26 x 40 . Museum of Modern Art,
pastel, 16^ x 22^". Museum of Modern Art,
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. Color plate facing
given anonymously.
p.38.

HARTLEY, Marsden. 1877-1943. Born Lewiston, Me. HULSART, Cornelius B., publisher, New York.
At 15, Cleveland School of Art; 1899 Chase School, New
York; 4 years National Academy. Knew Ryder. 1908 108 Capturing a Sperm Whale. 1835. Aquatint colored
work shown by Stieglitz at "291." To Europe 1912; by hand; engraved by J. Hall; painted by William
1914-16 France, Germany, exhibited Munich and Berlin Page from sketch by C. B. Hulsart; 16 % x 24
with Kandinsky, Klee, Marc. 1918-20 Southwest U. S. Lent by Old Print Shop.
1921 to Europe, 4 years in Germany; 1926-27 France.
Guggenheim fellowship 1930; to Mexico. From 1931, in
New York and Maine. Worked on New York WPA Art HUNT, William Morris. 1824-79. Born Brattleboro,
Project. Published poems and essays. Died Ellsworth, Vt. 3 years at Harvard, then to Europe. Intended to
Maine. become sculptor. Studied in Rome; c. 1844 in Paris with
Barye; c. 1846 Diisseldorf where he disliked the teach
*102 Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine. 1942. Oil on ing. Returned to Paris to take up painting. Favorite
composition board, 30 x 40 ". Museum of Modern pupil of Couture c. 1847-52; then associated with Millet,
Art, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. living near him in Barbizon. Returned to*America 1855,
III. p.93. worked in Brattleboro and Newport, R. I.;, from 1862
in Boston. Influential as teacher, patron, led trend away
from Diisseldorf to French art. Murals in Albany State
HEADE, Martin Johnson. Active 1847-84. Born Bucks Capitol (later ruined). Drowned, Isles of Shoals, N. H.
County, Pa. Began as portrait painter. Studied 2 years
in Italy. To Brazil making sketches for proposed book 109 The Jewess. Between 1847-52. 22 x 18J£" (oval).
on hummingbirds of South America. Studio in New Lent anonymously, through Museum o^Fine Arts,
York; worked also in Philadelphia, Trenton, St. Louis, Boston.
Boston, Providence.
*110 The Ball Players. 16 x 24". Lent by Detroit Insti
tute of Arts. III. p.72.
*103 Storm Approaching Larchmont Bay. 1868. 32 x
*111 The Bathers. 1877. 24 x 16". Lent by Worcester
54^8 ". Lent by Ernest Rosenfeld. III. p.70.
Art Museum. III. p.72.

HOMER, Winslow. 1836-1910. Born Boston. Litho INMAN, Henry. 1801-46. Born Utica, N. Y. Appren
grapher's apprentice, 1855. New York 1859; studied ticed to Jarvis 7 years; traveled with him in U. S.
National Academy and with Frederic Rondel. Illustra Known for portraits, miniatures and genre paintings,
tions for Harper's Weekly and other periodicals 1858-76. although he preferred landscapes. Successful in New
War correspondent 1862-64. First oils, 1862. Paris 1867. York and Philadelphia until 1838 when health failed.
Virginia, 1876-80. England, 1881-82. Settled at Prout's 1844 to England with commissions from friends to paint
Neck, Maine, 1884; first of large marines. Subsequently Wordsworth and others. Died New York.
visited Canada and the Adirondacks, the Bahamas,
Cuba, Florida, Bermuda. Died Prout's Neck. 112 A Picnic in the Catskills. 48 x 34j/£". Lent by
Brooklyn Museum.
*104 The Gulf Stream. 1899. 30J^ x 50^"- Lent by
Metropolitan Museum of Art. III. p. 79.
INNESS, George. 1825-94. Born near Newburgh, N. Y.;
family moved to Newark, N. J. Started as shopkeeper,
HOPPER, Edward. Born Nyack, N. Y. 1882. 1900-05 then apprenticed to map engraver; turned to landscape
Chase School under Henri and Hayes Miller. 1906-07 painting. Brief study under Regis Gignoux, New York,
in Paris, influenced by Impressionism; 1909 and 1910 but practically self-taught. 1847 to London and Rome
summers in Europe. Illustrator until 1924; known for for 15 months; to Paris early 1850s for 1 year, influenced
etchings. 1924 successful show of watercolors; gave up by Barbizon. 1871 to Paris and Rome for 4 years. Lived
commercial work and returned to oil painting. Lives last 15 years in Montclair, N. J. While traveling in
New York. Scotland, died at Bridge of Allan.

136
*113 The Monk. 1873. 38% x 64%". Lent by Stephen KENSETT, John Frederick. 1818-72. Born Cheshire,
C. Clark. III. p.75. Conn. Apprenticed to engraver, his uncle, Alfred Dag
*114 The Approaching Storm, c. 1880. 27 3^ x 42". Lent gett; painted in leisure time. 1840 to Europe with
by Addison Gallery of American Art. III. p.75. Durand; 7 years in England, Germany, Switzerland,
Italy. Sent home paintings which established reputation
, ^ in U. S. Settled in New York by 1848; successful career.
JOHNSON, Eastman. 1824-1906. Born Lovell, Me. At Trip West 1866. Died New York.
15 apprenticed to Boston lithographer. At 18 started
drawing portraits; before 1846 was well established in *122 Seashore. 1860. 18 x 30". Lent by New York
Washington," D. C. 1846-49 Boston; portraits of Long Public Library, Stuart Collection. III. p.68.
fellow, his family and friends. 1849 to Diisseldorf to
study, sharing studio with Leutze. Visited Paris and KENT, Rockwell. Born Tarrytown Heights, N. Y.
London; painted 3% years at The Hague. 1855 to U. S. 1882. Studied with Chase, Henri, Hayes Miller, Abbott
1856-57 painted Indians and frontier life, Wisconsin. Thayer. In Newfoundland 1914-15; Alaska 1918; south
1857 portraits in Cincinnati; 1859 in Washington; then ern France, Ireland; Greenland 3 years; Tierra del
settled in New York. Turned to genre; followed Union Fuego 1922. Painter, illustrator, print maker, author.
Army during Civil War, sketching. Trips to Fryeburg Formerly President of United American Artists, C.I.O.
and Kennebunkport, Me., Catskills; from 1870 summers Lives Ausable Forks, N. Y.
at Nantucket. From mid-1880s painted chiefly portraits.
Died New York. *123 Toilers of the Sea. 1907. 37% x 44". Lent by
Lewisohn Collection. III. p.88.
115 A Ride for Liberty —The Fugitive Slaves, c. 1862-
63? Oil on academy board, 21%x26%". Lent by
Brooklyn Museum. KIRKLAND, Vance H. Born Conway, Ohio 1904.
Studied Cleveland School of Art with H. G. Keller.
*116 Girl Picking Water Lilies. 1865. Oil on academy
Section of Fine Arts murals, Eureka, Kan., Sayre, Okla.
•board, 18)^ x 15%". Lent by Mr. and Mrs. I. M.
Director, Kirkland School of Art, Denver.
Cohen. III. p.71.
*117 Study for The Wounded Drummer Boy. c. 1870? 124 A Misty Landscape. 1943. Watercolor, 29 x 41 ".
Oifon academy board, 26%x2\%" . Lent by Fine Lent by the artist.
Arts Society of San Diego. III. p.71.
118 Sdgaring Off (unfinished), c. 1865-71? 52^ x 96". KOPMAN, Benjamin. Born Vitebsk, Russia 1887. To
Lent by Curt Valentin. New York at 17. 1905-09 National Academy. Worked on
New York WPA Art Project. Lives Far Rockaway,
Long Island.
KANTOR, Morris. Born Minsk, Russia 1896. To U. S.
1909. 1914 started as cartoonist. Studied with Homer
*125 A Lynching. 1930. 29 x 47". Lent by Mr. and Mrs.
Boss, Independent School, New York, 1916-17. Spare-
Bernard Reis. III. p.95.
time painter for many years, until 1927 to Paris for a
year. Worked on WPA Art Project, New York. Lives
KURZ and ALLISON, publishers, Chicago.
New York and New City, N. Y.
126 The Great Conemaugh -Valley Disaster, Flood and
*119 Haunted House. 1930. 37 x 33 %". Lent by Art
Fire at Johnstown, Pa. 1889. Color lithograph,
Institute of Chicago. III. p. 104.
17%x 25". Lent by Old Print Shop.
120 South Truro Church. 1934. 24% x 27". Museum
of Modern Art, gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, LA FARGE, John. 1835-1910. Born New York. Studied
Jr. (by exchange). law and architecture; at 22 turned to the arts. To Eu
rope 1856; studied briefly with Couture, Paris; Munich,
Dresden, London, influenced by Pre-Raphaelites. Work
KARFIOL, Bernard. Born near Budapest of American ed with Hunt at Newport, R. I., who strongly influenced
parents, 1886. To U. S. as child. 1900 studied National him. 1886 to Japan; later Samoa and other Pacific is
Academy; 1901 Julian Academy, Paris; in France 5 lands. Essayist, lecturer, connoisseur; murals, stained
years. Returned to U. S. 1906. Lives Irvington-on- glass, mosaics, sculpture. Died Providence, R. I.
Hudson, N. Y.
*127 Portrait of the Artist. 1859. Oil on wood, 16 x
*121 Boy. 1924. 36 x 27". Lent by Phillips Memorial 11%". Lent by Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gallery. III. p. 112. III. p. 73.

137
 *128 The Wolf Charmer. 1907. 80% * 62 %". Lent by MARIN, John. Bom Rutherford, N. J. 1870. Worked
Washington University, St. Louis, through City in architects' offices 4 years. Earliest watercolors 1888.
Art Museum of St. Louis. III. p.80. 1899-1901 Pennsylvania Academy with Anshutz; 1901-
03 Art Students' League, New York. 1905 to Europe for
4 years; lived in Paris; traveled Italy, Holland, Bel
LEBRUN, Rico. Born Naples, Italy 1900. Studied art
gium, England. Etchings, oils, watercolors. 1909 first
in Naples. Italian Army, World War. To U. S. 1924 to
show at Stieglitz' gallery "291"; returned to U. S.
establish branch of Naples stained glass factory in
1910-11 to Europe again; Paris, Tyrol, Germany. In
Springfield, 111.To New York 1925. Guggenheim fellow
U. S. since 1911. Lives Cliffside, N. J. and Maine.
ships, 1935 and 1937. Taught Art Students' League;
Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles; Sophie New-
*136 Sunset, Casco Bay. 1919. Watercolor, 16 x 19%".
comb College, New Orleans. Lives Westport, Conn.
Lent by Georgia O'Keeffe. III. p. 91.
*129 Migration to Nowhere. 1941. Gouache on board, 137 Lower Manhattan. 1920. Watercolor, 21% x
30 x 48". Lent by the artist. III. p. 122. 26%". Lent by Philip L. Goodwin. 111. Art in
Our Time, no. 212.
130 Cicada. 1943. 35 x 40". Lent by the artist.
138 On Morse Mountain, Small Point, Maine. 1928.
Watercolor, 21 x 16%". Lent by Philip L.
LEVI, Julian E. Born New York 1900. Studied Penn Goodwin. 111.in color John Marin, facing p.22.
sylvania Academy. To Europe 1920; Italy, 4 years in
139 Storm Over Taos, New Mexico. 1930. Watercolor,
France. Worked on New York WPA Art Project. 1943
15% x 21". Lent by An American Place. 111.John
artist -correspondent on U. S. Navy project. Lives New
Marin, color frontispiece.
York.

*131 Buoys. 1939. 18 x 22". Lent by John L. Sexton. MATTSON, Henry Elis. Born Gothenburg, Sweden
III. p. 113. 1887. To U. S. 1906. Worked as mechanic, Worcester,
Mass., studying at Art Museum. Largely self-taught.
LUDINS, Eugene David. Born Russia 1904. To New To Sweden to study art but returned to America; work
York as a child. Studied Art Students' League. Worked ed for International Harvester Co., Chicago. Guggen
on New York WPA Art Project. Since 1930 has lived heim fellowship 1935. Section of Fine Arts mural, Port
Woodstock, N. Y. land, Me.; worked on New York WPA Art Project.
Since 1916 has lived in Woodstock, N. Y.
132 Rotten Foundations. 1938. 3034?x 5034?". Lent by
140 Moonlit Still Life. 1938. 24 x 36*. 111.Art in Our
Associated American Artists.
Time, no. 129.
*133 Interlude. 1940. 36% x 48%". Lent by Associated *141 Stars and Sea. 1941. 36 x 42". III. p. 108.
American Artists. III. p. 117. *142 Jungle Play. 1941. 26 x 40". III. p.109.
143 Night Witchery. 1941. 16 x 24".
MacIYER, Loren. Born New York 1909. Studied Art Nos. 140-43, lent by Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery.
Students' League, National Academy. Worked on New
York WPA Art Project. Lives New York.
MEEKER, Joseph Rusling. Born Newark, N. J. 1827.
*134 The Violet Hour. 1943. 90% x 57%". Lent by To New York 1845, studied National Academy. Painted
Pierre Matisse Gallery. III. p. 127. 3 years in Buffalo; 1852-59 in Louisville, Ky., later,
studio, St. Louis. Landscape, figure and portrait painter.

MANGRAVITE, Peppino. Born Lipari Island, Italy 144 Lake Pontchartrain. 1876. 20% x 36". Lent by
1896. To U. S. 1912; to live 1915. Studied Cooper Union Mrs. Leighton K. Montgomery.
1915-16; Art Students' League 1917. Guggenheim fel
lowships 1932 and 1936. Section of Fine Arts murals,
Department of Labor, Washington, Atlantic City, N. J., MELCARTH, Edward. Born Louisville, Ky. 1914.
Flushing and Hempstead, N. Y. Taught Colorado Studied Chelsea Art School, London; Academie Ran-
Springs Fine Arts Center, Cooper Union, Sarah Law son, Paris; with Karl Zerbe, Boston, 1935-36. 1942 to
rence College, etc. Lives New York. Iran as truck driver in construction work; now able-
bodied seaman, Merchant Marine.
135 The Abduction of a Beautiful Lady. 1935.
Gouache, 17%xll%". Lentby Whitney Museum 145 Girl's Head. 1943. 12 x 10". Lent by Durlacher
of American Art. Brothers.

138
MILLER, Alfred Jacob. 1810-74. Born Baltimore. 151 The Greek Boy (Christos Evangelides). 1828.
Studied with Sully. Successful in Baltimore and Wash 21 x 17" (oval). Lent by M. Knoedler & Co.
ington. To Europe 1833, studying in Paris, Florence, *152 The Chapel of the Virgin at Subiaco. 1830-31.
and Rome where he knew Thorwaldson, Greenough. 30 x 37". Lent by Worcester Art Museum. III.
1837 in New Orleans met Scotsman, Sir William Drum- p.56.
mond Stewart, who traveled with him to Rocky Moun
tains and commissioned series of Indian paintings now
in Scotland. 1841 in Scotland, painting portraits. Re MOUNT, William Sidney. 1807-68. Born Setauket,
turned Baltimore; painted portraits until his death Long Island, N. Y. About 1824 apprenticed to brother,
there. a portrait and sign painter in New York; 1826 studied
National Academy. 1829, studio in New York, portrait
*146 Buffalo Hunt. c. 1840. 30 x 44". Lent by Victor and genre painter. 1836 poor health caused return to
D. Spark. III. p.60. Long Island. 1843 visited Cole at Catskill. Painted local
farm and village life, designed horsedrawn "portable
studio." Painted for Currier & Ives. Died East Setauket.
MILLMAN, Edward. Born Chicago 1907. Studied Art
Institute of Chicago; fresco painting in Mexico. WPA *153 Landscape with Figures. 1851. 19 x 28%". Lent
murals, Chicago; Section of Fine Arts frescoes, Decatur by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. III.
and Moline, 111., St. Louis. Lives New York. Now in p.64.
U. S. Navy.

147 Two Ghosts. 1942. 24 x 30". Lent by the artist. NEWMAN, Robert Loftin. 1827-1912. Born Richmond,
Va. 1838 family moved to Clarksville, Tenn. 1850 to
Paris, studied with Couture; 1854 again to Paris; asso
MOMMER, Paul. Born Duchy of Luxembourg 1899.
ciated through Hunt with Millet at Barbizon. Returned
Practically self-taught. In German army, World War;
to South to paint. Conscripted by Confederate Army in
2 years in England as prisoner-of-war. Merchant seaman
Civil War; 1865-66 worked way to New York, painting
1920-21. To U. S. 1921. Has had various jobs; paints
political banners in Baltimore. Lived rest of life in New
only in spare time. Worked on New York WPA Art
York, occasional trips to Paris and London. Died New
Project. Lives New York.
York.
148 The Betrayal. 1939. 30 x 40". Lent by the artist.
154 Chrysanthemums. 29% x 25". Lent by Frank
*149 At Night. 1940. 30 x 40". Lent by the artist. III. K. M. Rehn Gallery.
p. 109.
155 The Attack. 12 x 18". Lent by Frank K. M. Rehn
Gallery.
MORAN, Thomas. 1837-1926. Born Lancashire, Eng
land. To America 1844. Wood engraver and illustrator *156 The Fortune Teller. 10 x 14". Lent by Metropoli
in Philadelphia; turned to painting. Twice to Europe, tan Museum of Art. III. p.80.
influenced by Turner and Claude Lorraine. 1871 and
1873 accompanied government exploring expedition to O'KEEFFE, Georgia. Born Sun Prairie, Wis. 1887.
Yellowstone region. Huge canvases of Western scenery Studied Art Institute of Chicago; Art Students' League
very popular. Studio Easthampton, Long Island. Died with Chase. Gave up painting; several years as advertis
Santa Barbara, Calif. ing artist; then studied with Bement at University of
Virginia, and with Dow at Teachers' College, New
*150 Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming York. Head of art department, West Texas State Nor
Territory. 1882. 15% x 23%". Lent by National mal College 4 years; began to paint again. In 1916 col
Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution. lection of drawings exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz; gave
III. p. 76. up teaching to paint. Lives New York and New Mexico.

MORSE, Samuel Finley Breese. 1791-1872. Born *157 Black Cross, New Mexico. 1929. 39 x 30". Lent
Charlestown, Mass. Yale 1810. Pupil of Allston, ac by Art Institute of Chicago. III. p.90.
companying him to England 1811; remained 4 years. 158 Ranchos Church No. 3. 1929. 15 x 11 ". Lent by
Friend of Turner, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Coleridge, An American Place.
Wordsworth. 1815 returned to U. S.; painted portraits
159 Deer's Skull and Pedernal. 1936. 36 x 30". Lent by
for a living with only moderate success. A founder of
An American Place.
National Academy of Design, its first president 1827-45;
also 1861-62. After 1832 devoted much time to his inven
tion of the telegraph, eventually giving up painting. ORR, Elliot. Born Flushing, Long Island, N. Y. 1904.
Introduced daguerreotype to America. Died New York. Studied with Luks; Grand Central Art School. Worked

139
 on Massachusetts WPA Art Project. Lives Waquoit, PICKENS, Alton. Born Seattle 1917. Studied about
Mass. Now in U. S. Navy. 6 months Portland Museum Art School. Came to New
York 1939, where he now lives.
160 The Treasure. 1939. 12 x 10". Lent by Kleemann
Galleries. 168 The Blue Doll. 1942. 42% x 35". Lent by the
161 The Dying Ship. 1941. 30 x 20%". Lent by artist.
Kleemann Galleries.
*162 Desecration. 1941. 24 x 30". Lent by Lt. and Mrs. PITTMAN, Hobson. Born Tarboro, N. C. 1900.
Alastair Bradley-Martin. III. p. 110. Studied Pennsylvania State College, Columbia Univer
sity, Carnegie Institute. To Europe 1928, 1930 and 1935.
Director of Art, Friends' School, Overbrook, Pa. Lives
OSVER, Arthur. Born Chicago 1912. Art Institute of Upper Darby, Pa.
Chicago traveling fellowship 1937. Worked on Illinois
WPA Art Project. Lives New York.
169 The Widow. 1937. 15 x 25". Lent by Whitney
Museum of American Art.
*163 Melancholy of a Rooftop. 1942. 48 x 24". Museum
of Modern Art, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. *170 Old Friends. 1941. 30% x 40%". Lent by
III. p. 125. Philip L. Goodwin. III. p. 105.

PAGE, William. 1811-85. Born Albany, N. Y. 1820 to POLOS, Theodore C. Born Greece 1902. To U. S. at 14.
New York; at 14 in law office; left to study briefly with Settled in the West 1922. Studied with Xavier Martinez,
the portrait painter, James Herring; then with Morse at Spencer Mackay. Worked on California WPA Art Proj
National Academy. About 1828 decided to enter Pres ect. Lives San Francisco.
byterian ministry; 2 years study at Andover and Am
*171 Green Landscape. 1940. 16% x 20". Lent by the
herst. 1830 returned to art; from 1835 recognized por
artist. III. p.96.
trait painter. Worked in Boston and New York; 1849 to
Europe, living mostly in Rome until return to New York
1860. Friend of Inness. 1866 settled in Tottenville, PRICE, Clayton S. Born on a ranch, Iowa 1874. Until
Staten Island, where he died. about 45, cowhand and ranchman, chiefly in Wyoming.
Taught himself to draw animals on the range. At 31
164 Self-portrait. 1860. 59 x 36". Lent by Detroit spent 1 year at St. Louis School of Art. 1909-10 maga
Institute of Arts. zine illustrator, Portland, Ore. 1918 to San Francisco
*165 Portrait of Mrs. Page. c. 1860. 59 x 36%". Lent and Monterey to paint. 1929 to Portland to live.
by Detroit Institute of Arts. III. p.69. Worked on Oregon WPA Art Project.

*172 Fisherman. 1941. 34 x 42 ". Lent by Detroit Insti

PALMER, William C. Born Des Moines, Iowa 1906. tute of Arts. III. p.94.
Studied Art Students' League with Hayes Miller,
Boardman Robinson, Benton; fresco painting at Fon-
tainebleau. Taught Art Students' League 4 years. WPA QUIDOR, John. 1801-81. Born Tappan, N. Y. Studied
murals, New York; Section of Fine Arts murals, Post briefly with Jarvis, New York. Unsuccessful as portrait
Office Department, Washington, Boston, Monticello, painter, made living painting signs, coaches, fire engines.
Iowa. Director, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Preoccupied with literary sources, used themes from
School of Art, Utica, N. Y. Irving and Cooper. Lived mostly in New York.

*166 Spring Landscape with Ruins. 1938. Tempera and *173 The Money Diggers. 1832. 16% x 21%". Lent by
oil on canvas, 24 x 30 ". Lent by Midtown Galler Mrs. Sheldon Keck. (From Irving Tales of a
ies. III. p. 118. Traveller.) III. p. 58.
174 Leatherstocking Meets the Law. 1832. 27% x
34%". Lent by New York State Historical Asso
PELLEW, John C. Born Penzance, Cornwall, England ciation. (From Cooper The Pioneers .)
1903. At 14 apprenticed to firm of marine engineers;
worked on patrol boats. To U. S. 1921. Sign painter until
1929. Lives Astoria, Long Island. REMINGTON, Frederic. 1861-1909. Born Canton,
N. Y. Studied Yale School of Fine Arts, Art Students'
*167 East River Nocturne, No. 2. 1941. 28% x 36 %". League. Went West as cow-puncher. Magazine and book
Lent by Contemporary Arts. III. p. 110. illustrator and writer, painter and sculptor of Western

140
life, particularly Indians and cowboys. Illustrator of National Academy with Leon Kroll and Charles Haw
Theodore Roosevelt's books on West. Greatest popular thorne. Merchant seaman during World War. To Paris
ity in '90s. Studio at New Rochelle, N. Y. Died near 1930-31, studied with Andre Lhote. Worked on New
Ridgefield, Conn. Remington Art Memorial (museum), York WPA Art Project. Lives Jamaica, Long Island.
Ogdensburg, N. Y.
183 Trees. 1943. 22 x 28". Lent by Contemporary Arts.
*175 Fired On. 26% x 39 %". Lent by National Collec
tion of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution. III.
p.76. SLOAN, John. Born Lock Haven, Pa. 1871; grew up in
Philadelphia. At 16 supported family; studied at night
with Anshutz at Pennsylvania Academy. Staff artist
RICHARDSON, Constance Coleman. Born Berlin, on Philadelphia Press. To New York 1905; magazine
Germany 1905, of American parents. Studied 3 years at illustrator. One of "The Eight," who first exhibited in
Pennsylvania Academy. Lives Detroit. 1908. Helped organize Armory Show, 1913. Distin
guished as etcher and painter of New York life. Taught
176 Morning in the High Pasture. 1941. Oil on gesso, Art Students' League 1914-31; its president 1931-32;
20 x 26)4 ". Lent by Macbeth Gallery. president Society of Independent Artists since 1918.
Section of Fine Arts mural, Yonkers, N. Y. Lives New
York and Santa Fe, N. M.
RYDER, Albert Pinkham. 1847-1917. Born New Bed
ford, Mass. To New York with family about 1867. *184 The City from Greenwich Village. 1922. 26 x 34".
Studied briefly with William E. Marshall and 1871 Lent by Kraushaar Galleries. III. p.88.
National Academy of Design. To Europe 1893 with
Daniel Cottier; England, Holland, Italy, Spain, Moroc
co. Exhibited National Academy 1873-88; Society of SPARHAWK -JONES, Elizabeth. Born Baltimore,
American Artists 1878-87; Armory Show 1913. Died 1885. Studied 3 years with Chase at Pennsylvania
Elmhurst, Long Island. Academy; won traveling scholarship. Lives Westtown,
Pennsylvania.
*177 Dead Bird. 1890-1900. Oil on wood, 4% x 9%".
Lent by Phillips Memorial Gallery, courtesy 185 New Hampshire, September 1938. 1938. Water-
William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas color on canvas, 20% x 19%". Lent by Frank
City. III. p.84. K. M. Rehn Gallery.
*178 Macbeth and the Witches. 1890-1908. 28% x 36". *186 Lady Godiva. 1941. Watercolor on canvas, 20 x
Lent by Phillips Memorial Gallery. III. p.82. 24". Lent by Mrs. Otto L. Spaeth. III. p. 121.
*179 Moonlight — Marine. Oil on wood, 11% x 12".
Lent by Metropolitan Museum of Art. III. p.84. SPENCER, Mrs. Lilly Martin. 1847-1902. Born Eng
180 Elemental Forces. 21% x 33%". Lent by Addison land of French parentage. To America at 5; grew up in
Gallery of American Art. Cincinnati. Portrait and genre painter. Lived Newark,
N. J. and New York, where she died.
181 The Forest of Arden. 19 x 15". Lent by Stephen
C. Clark. 111.Art in Our Time, no. 28.
*187 Reading. 1852. 50% x 37%". Lent by Victor D.
Spark. New title. III. p.64.
SARGENT, John Singer. 1856-1925. Born Florence,
Italy, of American parents. As boy studied art, Italy,
SPRUCE, Everett Franklin. Born near Conway, Ark.
Germany, France. 1874 entered studio of Carolus
1907. Brought up on farm in Ozarks. Studied art Dallas,
Duran, Paris; 1879 studied Velasquez in Spain. 1881
Texas 1926-29. Worked at Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
turned definitely to portraiture. Successful in Paris until
1930-40; assistant director from 1935. Since 1940 has
1884, then to London. Lived mostly in London; many
taught College of Fine Arts, University of Texas. Lives
trips to America. During World War, official artist with
Austin, Tex.
British Expeditionary Forces in France. Died London.
188 The Hawk. 1939. Oil on composition board, 19% x
*182 Robert Louis Stevenson. 1885. 20 % x 24 %". Lent 23%". Museum of Modern Art, Purchase Fund.
by Mrs. Payne Whitney, through Metropolitan 111.Americans 1942, p.121.
Museum of Art. III. p. 81.

STUEMPFIG, Walter J. Born Germantown, Pa. 1914.

SIEVAN, Maurice. Born Gomel, Russia 1898. To U. S. Studied Pennsylvania Academy; 1934 traveling fellow
1907. Studied Pratt Institute, Educational Alliance, ship. Lives Collegeville, Pa.

141
 189 Et Ego in Arcadia. 1943. 26 x 32". Lent by TWACHTMAN, John Henry. 1853-1902. Born Cin
Durlacher Brothers. cinnati, Ohio. Studied with Duveneck there; 1775
with Loefftz, Munich; with Boulanger and Lefebvre,
*190 Dalliance at Cape May. 1943. 30 x 36". Lent by Paris. Returned to U. S. 1885; settled near Greenwich,
Durlacher Brothers. III. p. 124. Conn. One of first Americans to experiment with Im
pressionist theories. Helped organize "Ten American
Painters," 1898. Died Gloucester, Mass.
THECLA, Julia. Born Illinois, of Scotch-Irish parent
age. Has exhibited, watercolor annual, Art Institute of
197 Landscape. 35 x 46%". Lent by Whitney Museum
Chicago, since 1931. Worked on Illinois WPA Art Proj
of American Art.
ect. Lives Chicago.

*191 This. 1936. Pastel and watercolor, 19% x 14". YANDERLYN, John. 1775-1852. Born Kingston, N. Y.
Lent by David Porter. III. p. 128. Worked in New York print store, studied drawing at
night. Aaron Burr became his patron, sent him to
192 Hand by the Sea. 1936. Pastel and watercolor,
Philadelphia to study with Gilbert Stuart; 1796 financed
12 x 12 ". Lent by David Porter.
trip abroad. In Paris 5 years, first American to study in
France instead of England. 1803-15 lived and painted in
THON, William. Born New York 1906. Self-taught England; in Rome with Allston, Paris for 7 years. Re
except 1 month at Art Students' League. 1933 shipped turned to U. S. 1815; exhibited nude, Ariadne, which
with treasure-hunting expedition to Cocos Island, South caused uproar. Painted portraits, exhibited his pano
America. Now in U. S. Navy. ramas of European cities, without much success. Died
Kingston.
193 The Brothers. 1943. 23% x 48%". Lent by Mid-
town Galleries. 198 Death of Jane McCrea. 1803-05? 32% x 26%".
Lent by Wadsworth Atheneum.

TOBEY, Mark. Born Centerville, Wis. 1890. Self-

YEDDER, Elihu. 1836-1923. Born New York. Studied
taught. Lived in Chicago and New York; to Seattle
in Paris and Italy. From 1867 lived in Rome and Capri,
1923. Taught art 1931-38 at Dartington Hall, Totnes,
visiting and exhibiting in U. S. Illustrations, Rubaiyat
South Devon, England. Worked on Washington WPA
of Omar Khayyam, 1884; murals, Library of Congress,
Art Project. Lives Seattle.
Washington, in '90s. Died Rome.
194 The Flow of the Night. 1943. Gouache on card
*199 The Lair of the Sea Serpent. 1864. 21% x 36%".
board, 20% x 15%". Lent by the artist.
Lent by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. III. p.69.

TRUMBULL, John. 1756-1843. Born Lebanon, Conn. WATKINS, Franklin Chenault. Born New York 1894.
Harvard 1773. Taught school, Lebanon; painted with Has lived chiefly in Philadelphia. Studied University of
homemade materials. Aide-de-camp to Washington in Virginia, 1911-12; Pennsylvania Academy, 1916-17,
Revolutionary War. 1778 gave up army to study art. 1920-21. In Europe 1921 on scholarship. Teaches Stella
1780 to Paris and London; worked in studio of Benjamin Elkins Tyler School of Fine Arts of Temple University,
West. 1784 began series of historical canvases, including Philadelphia. Lives Germantown, Pa.
The Declaration of Independence. Numerous trips to
England, carried out diplomatic missions for new Amer *200 Suicide in Costume. 1931. 36% x 44%" (oval).
ican government. Finally settled in New York; 1816-25 Lent by Philadelphia Museum of Art. III. p. 120.
president American Academy of Fine Arts. 1815 com
missioned to decorate rotunda of Capitol in Washing *201 Soliloquy. 1932. 25 x 30". Lent by Whitney
ton; murals finished 1824, aroused criticism. 1831 Museum of American Art. III. p. 121.
turned over series of historical paintings to Yale Uni 202 Rocky Coast. 1933. 28 x 34". Lent by Miss Anna
versity in exchange for annuity. Died New York. Warren Ingersoll.

*195 The Sortie from Gibraltar (2nd version). 1788.

20 x 30". Lent by Cincinnati Art Museum. III. WEBER, Max. Born Vialostok, Russia 1881. To Amer
p. 51. ica 1891; lived in Brooklyn. Studied 1897-1900 Pratt
Institute with Dow. Taught art, 1900-05, public schools,
196 View of Niagara from below Great Cascade, on Lynchburg, Va. To Paris 1905; Julian Academy with
British Side. 24 x 36". Lent by Wadsworth Athen- Laurens; knew Henri Rousseau, Picasso, Matisse, with
eum. whom he studied 1907. To Spain 1906; Italy 1907. Re-

142
 turned to New York 1909. Exhibition 1910 at Stieglitz' Venice 1879; Paris to live 1892; 1902 returned to Lon
"291." Taught Art Students' League 1920-21, 1926. don, where he died.
Author of essays and poems. Lives Great Neck, Long
Island. *208 Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice,
c. 1880. 20% x 25%". Lent by Museum of Fine
*203 Winter Twilight. 1940. 30 x 40". Lent by Mr. and Arts, Boston. III. p.73.
Mrs. Buell Hammett. III. p.92.
*204 Chassidic Dance. 1940. 32 x 40". Lent by Mr. and
WINTERS, Denny. Born Grand Rapids, Mich. 1909.
Mrs. Milton Lowenthal. III. p.92.
Studied with Weisenborn; Chicago Academy of Fine
Arts, Art Institute of Chicago. To California 1938.
WELLS, Cady H. Born Southbridge, Mass. 1904. Worked on California WPA Art Project; also stage de
Studied in Boston and with Andrew Dasburg, Taos, signing. Lives Los Angeles.
N. M. Lives Southbridge and Taos. Now in U. S. Army.
209 Wind in the Marshes. 1943. 26 x 34". Lent by
205 Summer Rains, Jacona. 1941. Watercolor, 22 x the artist.
29%". Lent by Addison Gallery of American Art.
WYANT, Alexander Helwig, 1836-92. Born Port Wash

I
i
WEST, Benjamin. 1738-1820. Born Springfield, Pa. of
Quaker family. Went to Pennsylvania College; some art
instruction in Philadelphia and New York, where he
ington, Ohio. Harness-maker's apprentice; painted
signs. When about 20, saw paintings by Inness in Cin
cinnati, went East to seek Inness' advice. 1865 to study
briefly in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Hans Gude; pre
painted portraits. To Rome 1760 until 1763 when he
ferred works of Turner and Constable. Returned to New
went to London to live. Became foremost historical
York. 1873 joined government expedition to Southwest;
painter of his day in England; 1772 made historical
suffered paralytic stroke; learned to paint with left
painter to court of George III. Studio a popular center
hand. Lived Arkville in Catskills. Died New York.
of teaching, especially for American artists. Charter
member of Royal Academy; succeeded Sir Joshua Rey 210 Moonlight and Frost. 28 x 36". Lent by Brooklyn
nolds as its president, 1792 until death. Died London. Museum.
*206 Saul and the Witch of Endor. 1777. 20 x 26". Lent
by Mrs. Frederic S. Gould. III. p.50. ZERBE, Karl. Born Berlin 1903. Studied at Munich
*207 Death on the Pale Horse (study). 1802. 21 x 36". Academy and in Italy, 1922-26. To U. S. 1934. Worked
Lent by Philadelphia Museum of Art. III. p.50. on Massachusetts WPA Art Project. Since 1937 head of
(One of two extant studies for large canvas, 1817, Department of Painting, School of Museum of Fine
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.) Arts, Boston. Lives Cambridge, Mass.

*211 Terror. 1943. Encaustic on canvas, 29 x 36%".

WHISTLER, James Abbott McNeill. 1834-1903. Born Lent by Downtown Gallery. III. p.96.
Lowell, Mass. 1843-49 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where
father, a U. S. Army engineer, was supervising railroad
construction. 1851 to West Point; dismissed end of 3rd ARTISTS UNKNOWN
year. 1855 to Paris; studied with Gleyre 2 years. 1859
settled in England. Influenced by Courbet, Manet, *212 Buffalo Hunter. 19th century. 40% x 51%". Lent
Degas, Fantin-Latour, Pre-Raphaelites, Velasquez. by Mr. and Mrs. Buell Hammett. III. p.63.
Early work followed French realists; 1860s interest in *213 Meditation by the Sea. 1860-65. 13% x 19%".
art of Far East; 1865 began "arrangements," "sympho Lent anonymously, through Museum of Fine Arts,
nies," "nocturnes." Whistler-Ruskin lawsuit 1878. To Boston. III. p.63.

143

*a!
 Index to Plates

Allston pages 52, 53 Demuth 101 Mattson 108, 109

Archer 118 Dewing 81 Miller 60
Artists unknown 63 Dickinson 123 Mommer 109
Atherton 124 Duncanson 65 Moran 76
Audubon 59 Durand 57 Morse 56
Austin 128 Eakins 74 Mount 64
Barnes 111 Eilshemius 86 Newman 80
Beard 68 Evergood 107 O'Keeffe 90
Bellows 87 Feininger 100 Orr 110
Beman 116 Fett 126 Osver 125
Benton 119 Forbes 99 Page 69
Bierstadt 67 Graves frontispiece , 126 Palmer 118
Bingham 61 Gropper 95 Pellew 110
Blakelock 77 Grosz 97 Pittman 105
Blanch 116 Hartley 93 Polos 96
Bloom 99 Heade 70 Price 94
Blow 125 Homer 78, 79 Quidor 58
Bohrod 106 Hopper 38, 89 Remington 76
Breinin 125 Hunt 72 Ryder 82, 83, 84
Brook 115 Inness 75 Sargent 81
Burchfield 102, 103 Johnson 71 Sloan 88
Carroll 114 Kantor 104 Sparhawk- Jones 121
Catlin 60 Karfiol 112 Spencer 64
Church 66 Kensett 68 Stuempfig 124
Cole 54, 55 Kent 88 Thecla 128
Copley 49 Kopman 95 Trumbull 51
Corbino 122 La Farge 73, 80 Yedder 69
Cropsey 65 Lebrun 122 Watkins 120, 121
Currier and Ives 62 Levi 113 Weber 92
Curry 119 Ludins 117 West 50
Davies 85 Maclver 127 Whistler 73
De Martini 98 Marin 91 Zerbe 96

Seven thousand five hundred copies of this book have been printed in November, 1943, for the Trustees
of The Museum of Modern Art by The Plantin Press, New York. The color inserts have been printed
by IT illiam E. Rudge's Sons, New York.
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