Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862

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As different as are the subjects he chooses are the bits of scenery
Hamilton Wild introduces in his pictures of life as it now is. His are
more truly historical paintings, although aspiring to no record of the
greatly bad and sorrowful transactions of our age. They represent the
joy and hope of youth, the cheerfulness and vivacity of the lowly, their
pleasantest pursuits, their most primitive customs, their characteristic
and often superb costumes; and wherever a passage of scenery occurs, it
is always that which has aided in developing the human life with which
it is associated.

There is never a discrepancy, nor is unison of sentiment ever achieved
by any bending of the truth. His keen sense of harmony never fails to
perceive, in the infinite range of tones and expressions of Nature, just
that which better than all others supports the character and action of
his group. With motives so healthful, it may be less difficult to find
that sympathy which Nature cheerfully gives; yet there is a tendency
with artists to be enticed away from Nature's joyousness, and especially
from her simplicity.

To this temptation Mr. Wild can never have been subjected. The freedom
which he manifests is not that which has been won, but into which he
must have been born, and with that grew the ability which transfigures
labor into play. Unto such a Nature the out-world presents unasked her
phases of joy and brightness, her light and life.

Does he seek Nature? No. Nature goes with him; and whether he tarry
among the Lagoons, where all seems Art or Death, or in the shadow and
desolation of the Campagna, in the unclean villages of the Alban Hills,
or where the shadows of deserted palaces fall black, broken, and jagged
on the red earth of Granada, there she companions him. She shows him,
that, after all, Venice is hers, and gives him the white marble enriched
with subtilest films of gold, alabaster which the processes of her
incessant years have changed to Oriental amber, a city made opalescent
by the magic of her sunsets. At Rome she opens vistas away from the
sepulchral, out into the wine-colored light of the Campagna, into
the peace gladdened by larks and the bleating of lambs; above are
pines,--Italian pines,--and across the path falls the still shadow of
blooming oleanders. She leads away from squalid towns, and gathers a
group of her children,--peasants, costumed in scarlet and gold, under
the grape-laden festoons of vines, while the now distant village glows
like cliffs of Carrara. How lavish she must have been of her old ideal
Spain, the while he dwelt in Granada!--the dance of the gypsies;
pomegranates heavy with ripeness hanging among the quivering glossy
leaves; olives gleaming with soft ashy whiteness, as the south-wind
wanders across their grove up to where the towers of the Alhambra lift
golden and pale lilac against the clear sky.

We have dwelt thus lengthily upon this primitive and apparently less
important branch of Landscape Art for several reasons: from a conviction
that its importance is, and is only apparently less; from the fact that
from it have been derived all other classes of landscape; and because a
comprehension of its scope and purpose aids more than any other agency
in understanding those of the pure and simple Landscape Art.

We have seen Nature ever ready with moods so related to the soul that
no ideal worthy of Art might be conceived beyond the range of her
sympathies. Even to that event involving all the intensity of human
thought and feeling, the last refinement of all spiritual emotion, and
a sense of mysteries more sublime than the creation of worlds,--even to
the Crucifixion,--Nature gathered herself, as the only possible
sign, the only expression for men, then and forever, of the awful
significance. The joyfulness of festivals, the pomp of processions,
the sublimity of great martyrdoms, the sorrow of defeats, the peace of
holiness, the innocence and sweetness of childhood, the hope of manhood,
and the retrospection of old age, when represented upon the canvas, find
in her forms and colors endless refrain of response.

This truth, that Nature is capable of such cooperation with the human,
that she confines herself to no country or continent, and that her
expressions are not relative, depending upon the suggestiveness of the
human action to which they correspond, but are positive and under the
rule of the immutable, enables the artist to evolve the first great
class of simple landscape-painting.

Had Art always been real and artists ever true, this consideration must
have called forth this class. It being true that natural scenery readily
allies itself with representations of the human figure in order to
express more perfectly than otherwise possible the ideal, it must be
through affinity with that which evolves the ideal, and only by indirect
relation to its sign or visible manifestation in form-language. Then why
not found a school of landscape by discarding the human figure as an
element of expression? A man comes who is born to the easel, yet who
feels no impulse to represent the practical effect upon human faces and
limbs of the various emotions, passions, and sentiments which demand
utterance. His thought is to hold himself to his kindred by more subtile
and far more delicate bonds. He knows that any one can look upon the
"Huguenot Lovers," by Millais, and feel responsive; for it occupies a
great plane, a part of which may be mistaken for passion. But he feels
that the love of Thekla and Max Piccolomini will permit no effigy but
that sacred bank beyond the cliffs of Libussa's Castle, whither come no
footsteps nor jarring of wheels, but only the sound of the deep Moldau
and of remote bells. It is the essence of the ideal which compels his
imagination, not the limited and restless circumstance which chanced
to occur as its revelator. Then the day uprises as if conscious of his
inner life and purpose. Then she gives him breadth after breadth of
color, within which is traced her no longer mystic alphabet. How
significant are the forms she gives him for the foreground, sweet
monosyllables! There are pansies, and rue, and violets, and rosemary.
Among these and their companions children walk and learn, and to the
child-man, the artist to be, she proffers these emblems. Should he
accept her gifts, then all this wonderful world of Art-Nature is open to
him. He inherits, possesses beyond all deeds, above all statutes,--as
does Mr. Gay, who painted that great, though unassuming, picture of "The
Marshes of Cohasset."

Because Art was not held to the highest, few men have known the
elevation of this department of landscape-painting. Too deep or too
devoted a life seems to have been required, too constant communion with
Nature, or too broad a study of her phenomena. Unfortunately, we have
few representatives of this class, in Italy,--Mr. Wild producing
only rarely works which to the principles hinted at are precious
illustrations. After the remarks we have made, we fear that allusion to
the existing facts of painting may be deemed disparaging. Not so; we
deprecate such a conclusion. One great and living picture marks the man.
To be true to himself and Nature is the first duty, even should he be
compelled to stand lifelong with his face towards the west, in order to
possess his soul in Art.

One of the pleasantest styles of landscape painting is that where the
artist, in a mood of deep peace, sits down in the midst of scenes
endeared by long and sweet association, and records in all tenderness
their spirit and beauty. Such scenery Italy affords, and the Alban
Hills seem to be the centre whence radiate all phases of the lovely and
beautiful in Nature. There her forms have conspired with all the highest
and rarest phenomena of light to render her state unapproachably
glorious.

There has also been given such an artist,--a woman altogether truthful,
strong, and nobly delicate; and although several years have passed since
she left Italy, her representations of scenery peculiarly Italian are
too remarkable to be passed unnoticed. Indeed, this lady, Miss Sarah
Jane Clark, is the only artist whose works are illustrative of a
style of simple Landscape Art which unites in itself the love and
conscientiousness of early Art and the precision and science of the
modern. Her picture of Albano is wonderful,--not from the rendering of
unusual or brilliant effects, but from a sense of genuineness. We feel
that it grew. The flower and leaf forms which enrich the near ground are
such as spring up on days like the one she has chosen. Another month,
and new combinations would have given another key to her work and
rendered the present impossible. In that real landscape had wrought
the secret vitality clothing the earth in leafage and bloom. In its
representation we see that a still more refined, a diviner vitality, has
evolved leaf, flower, and golden grain. Another fact associated with
this painting, as well as with some of its companions, is its character
of restraint.

Temperance in Landscape Art is very difficult in the vicinity of
Rome. In this picture the scene sweeps downward, with most gentle
and undulating inclination, over vast groves of olive and luxuriant
vineyards, to the Campagna with its convex waves of green and gold, on
which float the wrecks of cities, out to the sea itself, not so far away
as to conceal the flashing of waves upon the beach. Daily, over this
groundwork, so deftly wrought for their reception, are cast fields and
mighty bands of violet and rose, of amber and pale topaz, of blue,
orange, and garnet, upon the sea. It is as if an aurora had fallen from
Arctic skies, living, changeful, evanescent, athwart sea, plain, and
mountain. Here is sore temptation for the colorist; more, perhaps,
than by the wealth and combination of tints, he is affected by their
celestial quality. All is prismatic, or like those hues produced by the
interference of rays of light as seen in the colors of stars. Gorgeous
as are these phenomena, they are also as transitory; and although the
scene is repeated, it is with such subtile and such great changes as to
remove it from the grasp of the painter who wishes to study his work
wholly from Nature. The eye must be quick and the brush obedient, to
catch the fleeting glories of those Alban sunsets. Even the imperial
hand of Turner could give us only reminiscences.

The allurements to adopt a style of coloring involving these effects
must have been great to one whose love of color amounted to a passion.
Only a still greater love could have drawn her of whom we speak to the
more subdued, but higher plane upon which she stands,--and that must
have been a love of truth, and of that which has appealed to her nature
through repetition's sweet influences. This is the scene lying in deep
repose in open, permanent day. Trees, hills, plain, and sea forget the
flying hours. Yesterday they did not remember, serene and changeless as
ivy on the wall. So gradual has been the transition, so slowly has the
surface of the grain lifted from the rippling blade to the billowy
stalk, so continually have the scarlet poppies bloomed since May came,
that, to her, this is ever the same beneficent and dear spot, sacred to
her soul, as well as fitting type and sign of her pure Art.

The class of landscape-painting which deals with morning and evening
phenomena, and is based upon the fleeting and transitory, is the only
one that finds representation at present in Italy. Mr. Brown has
developed new and peculiar strength since his return to America, and
must require place from his new stand-point. Abel Nichols, whose copies
of Claude were so truthful, and whose original pictures ever strove to
be so, who through surpassing sacrifice became great, who lived, if ever
man has, the wonderful Christ-life, now sleeps the sleep of peace, the
last peace, under the sod of the landscape of his nativity.

There remains to be considered a series of undeniably remarkable
pictures, executed in Rome by John Rollin Tilton.

This artist's landscapes are remarkable for the conflicting effects
which they have produced on the public. They have excited, as they have
been exhibited in his studio in Rome, great enthusiasm, and admiration
which would listen to no criticism. Until perhaps the present year,
which is one of prostration in Rome, his works could not be purchased,
each one being the fulfilment of a commission given long before. These
commissions were given not by men merely wealthy, but by men widely
known for cultivation, discrimination, and for refinement of that taste
which requires the influences of Art. On the other hand, men equally as
remarkable for their accomplishments in matters of taste have expressed
their condemnation of all the paintings of Mr. Tilton, or rather for
those executed prior to 1859, and there were those who heaped them with
ridicule. In admiration and condemnation we have often shared;--in the
sentiment of ridicule never; for in all attempts there have been the
hintings of worthy purpose and a desire to excel.

Those who most despise Mr. Tilton's style and productions are men whose
tendencies are to the theories of English pre-Raphaelism. Viewed in
relation to those principles, his pictures have little value. The
purchasers of them are the men who regard with enthusiastic admiration
the evanescent splendors of Nature.

Mr. Tilton's early ambition was to be the painter to fulfil the demands
of this latter class. He not only sympathized with it in its greater
admiration for "effects" in Nature, but he found associated therewith an
enthusiasm which inspired him with unbounded hope and energy.

When he came to Rome, the Campagnian sunsets were found to be
representative of the peculiar class of effects which he regarded as the
manifestation of his feeling; and so he forthwith took possession of
that part of the day which was passing while the sun performed the last
twelve degrees of his daily journey. Other portions of the twenty-four
hours did not appear to excite even ordinary interest; and whenever
conversation involved consideration of scenery under other than the
favorite character, he was prone to silence, or to attempts to change
the subject. Yet he has been known to speak in terms of commendation
of certain sunrises, and once was actually caught by a friend making a
sketch of Pilatus at sunrise across the Lake of Lucerne.

The objects in the immediate foreground shared in the neglect which
attached to certain seasons. They were ignored as organized members of
what should be a living foreground, and their places were concealed by
unintelligible pigment. As to life there, he wanted none: light,--light
that gleams, and color to reflect it, were his aim. As an inevitable
attending result of these principles, or practices, the structure of the
whole landscape was ambiguous. The essential line and point were evaded,
and one perceived that the artist had _watched_ far more attentively
than he had studied Nature.

At the same time the pictures produced in this studio were marked by
qualities of great beauty. The peculiarly ethereal character of the vast
bands of thin vapors made visible by the slant rays of the sun, and
illuminated with tints which are exquisitely pure and prismatic, was
rendered with surprising success. On examination, the tints which were
used to represent the prismatic character of those of Nature were found
to present surfaces of such excessive delicacy, that the evanescence of
the natural phenomena was suggested, and apprehensions were indulged as
to the permanency of the effects. That noble north light of a cloudless
Roman sky did not extend far, hardly to Civita Vecchia, certainly not
to England, Old or New; and with a less friendly hand than his own to
expose his work, under sight still less kind, there might be presented a
picture bereft of all but its faults. Such has been the case.

We here dismiss willingly further recollection of the works to which we
have called attention. They are marked by error in theory, inasmuch as
they show neglect of the specific and essential, and by feebleness of
system, inasmuch as under no other light than that in which they were
painted could their finer qualities be perceived. Yet it is but just
to add that these were produced during a state of transition from one
method of applying pigments to another of totally different character.

This period of the painter's experience was brought to a close by the
better one of a summer residence at Pieve di Cadore, a village among the
Friulian Alps. Thither he might have gone merely to make a pilgrimage
to the birthplace of Titian; for other reason than _that_ he stayed in
Cadore. He stayed for life, truth, and correction, and he found all. No
other place on the continent could have afforded Mr. Tilton the benefit
that this mountain village did. Here was no ambiguity, no optical
illusion, but frank; ingenuous Nature. The peaks which guarded the
valley were clear and immutable. They suffered no conflicting opinions;
accident had done little to disguise, their true character, but Nature
held them as specimens of the essential in mountain structure. That the
lesson of these peaks might not be forgotten, the student finds them
copied accurately in nearly every landscape painted by Titian. The
magnificent one in "The Presentation in the Temple" was his favorite.
The sketches of this period show that the artist's attention was divided
between the study of these hill forms and of the luxuriant vegetation
of the sloping fields and pastures so characteristic of Swiss scenery.
Cadore is most richly endowed in this respect. The hill-sides are
burdened with flowers, many of which are large and of tropical splendor.
The green of the broad fields is modified by the burden of blossoms. We
have seen against the background of one of these steepest fields what
seemed to be a column of delicate blue smoke wreathing up the hill-side.
In reality it was a bed of wild forget-me-nots, which marked the course
of a minute rill. Under such influences as these, a man born to be a
painter, to whom Art is all, whose hand never fails to execute, and
whose mind has risen above any erroneous combination of principles which
may have checked his progress toward the greatly excellent, must
find himself with new strength, a chastened imagination, and broader
conceptions of his art.

The results of Mr. Tilton's labors since the summer in the Alps prove
that such was the effect upon him. His pictures have of late occupied
nearly every class of Landscape Art. The works now wrought in his Roman
studio are indicative of great changes in feeling, and are marked by
surprising improvements in execution. Yet the individuality of the
artist is impressed upon every canvas. The changes to which we refer are
these,--foregrounds suggested by or painted from living forms. In one
view of Nemi we saw a superb black, gold, and crimson butterfly resting
on a flower. Yet these foregrounds require more strength, more "body,"
more of that which artists achieve who achieve nothing else. We notice
far more individualism in tree forms. The ideal tree, that is, the tree
as it should be, and the conventional one coming against the sky on one
side of the composition, the one bequeathed by Claude, have given place
to Nature's homelier types. The question as to the meaning of passages
no longer arises. The lines are drawn with a decision, with a sense of
certainty, raising them above all doubt. In the rendering of distant
mountains, Mr. Dillon evinces new knowledge of what such forms
necessarily imply,--their tendency to monotone and to flatness, yet
preserving all their essential surface markings, and their inevitable
cutting outline against the sky,--which sharpness Mr. Tilton as yet has
only hinted at, not represented. Positive edges are the true.--But we
have no further space to devote to these particulars of landscape form.
In these Mr. Tilton has many rivals and not a few superiors.

There is left us the pleasant privilege of alluding to an ability which
we believe he shares with none, and which enables him to give his
present pictures their great value. This is the power to discriminate
accurately between the several classes of color,--the local, the
reflected, and the prismatic. It will be found on reference to most
landscapes, especially those of the English schools, that it is the
understanding, already informed on the subject, which accepts as
reflected the continual attempts to render this kind of color: they are
regarded as indicative. But the eye, which should have been satisfied
first, recognizes nothing more than local coloring. Near objects, under
broad, open daylight, yield us their local coloring,--as the surfaces
of stones, the trunks of trees, and the many tints of soil and
vegetation,--yet even here all is modified by reflections. We remember
a cliff at L'Ariccia, which, gray in morning light, became, as evening
approached, a marvellous beryl green, upon which some large poppies cast
wafts of purest scarlet. Farther away, both local and reflected color
lose their power. The rays no longer convey information of surfaces as
separate existences. Nature gathers up into masses, and these masses
tide back to the foreground colors far removed in character from the
near. Vast combinations of rays and atmospheric influences have wrought
this change. As we have said, noon gives us the earth clean and itself;
but, as the sun declines, flushes of color pass along the ground. Their
character we have already described. The particles which fill the
atmosphere just above the surface of the earth become illuminated and
visible in radiant masses. Farther away there is floated over the
mountains a miraculous bloom, a bloom like that upon virgin fruit; and
still more remote, upon the far sea, there is a dream of amber mantling
the sleeping blue. To render these effects, to give us the illuminated
air, the soft green which the mossy sod casts upon the shaded cliff, the
precious bloom upon the hills, and the tints diffused along the sea,--to
achieve this so completely that there never shall be any doubt, to give
us upon the canvas what shall be all this to the beholder, is great, and
this Mr. Tilton has performed.

THE EXPERIENCES OF THE A. C.

"Bridgeport! Change cars for the Naugatuck Railroad!" shouted the
conductor of the New York and Boston Express Train, on the evening of
May 27th, 1858. Indeed, he does it every night, (Sundays excepted,)
for that matter; but as this story refers especially to Mr. J. Edward
Johnson, who was a passenger on that train, on the aforesaid evening,
I make special mention of the fact. Mr. Johnson, carpet-bag in hand,
jumped upon the platform, entered the office, purchased a ticket for
Waterbury, and was soon whirling in the Naugatuck train towards his
destination.

On reaching Waterbury, in the soft spring twilight, Mr. Johnson walked
up and down in front of the station, curiously scanning the faces of the
assembled crowd. Presently he noticed a gentleman who was performing
the same operation upon the faces of the alighting passengers. Throwing
himself directly in the way of the latter, the two exchanged a steady
gaze.

"Is your name Billings?" "Is your name Johnson?" were simultaneous
questions, followed by the simultaneous exclamations,--"Ned!" "Enos!"

Then there was a crushing grasp of hands, repeated after a pause,
in testimony of ancient friendship, and Mr. Billings, returning to
practical life, asked,--

"Is that all your baggage? Come, I have a buggy here: Eunice has heard
the whistle, and she'll be impatient to welcome you."

The impatience of Eunice (Mrs. Billings, of course) was not of long
duration; for in five minutes thereafter she stood at the door of her
husband's chocolate-colored villa, receiving his friend.

While these three persons are comfortably seated at the tea-table,
enjoying their waffles, cold tongue, and canned peaches, and asking
and answering questions helter-skelter in the delightful confusion of
reunion after long separation, let us briefly inform the reader who and
what they are.

Mr. Enos Billings, then, was part owner of a manufactory of metal
buttons, forty years old, of middling height, ordinarily quiet and
rather shy, but with a large share of latent warmth and enthusiasm in
his nature. His hair was brown, slightly streaked with gray, his eyes a
soft, dark hazel, forehead square, eye-brows straight, nose of no very
marked character, and mouth moderately full, with a tendency to twitch
a little at the corners. His voice was undertoned, but mellow and
agreeable.

Mrs. Eunice Billings, of nearly equal age, was a good specimen of the
wide-awake New-England woman. Her face had a piquant smartness of
expression, which might have been refined into a sharp edge, but for her
natural hearty good-humor. Her head was smoothly formed, her face a full
oval, her hair and eyes blond and blue in a strong light, but brown and
steel-gray at other times, and her complexion of that ripe fairness into
which a ruddier color will sometimes fade. Her form, neither plump nor
spare, had yet a firm, elastic compactness, and her slightest movement
conveyed a certain impression of decision and self-reliance.

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