Art: Landscapes

Many modern artists hold on to the past as a man holds his hat in a roller coaster. Manhattan’s Whitney Museum upholds U. S. tradition but it has distinguished itself for doing so gracefully.

The museum’s show of Winslow Homer in 1936 was a landmark in the recent appreciation of that 19th-Century artist, and year ago the museum made news with a lively exhibition of Luks, Bellows, Henri and other important U. S. painters of the early 1900s (TIME, Feb. 22). Last week the Whitney pulled off a triumph in a field where triumph was not expected: U. S. landscape painting of the 19th Century.

More than one critic has observed that that period is unusual for the quantities of mediocrity it produced. Indian maidens by waterfalls, snowy-breasted brooklets and 10¢-store moonlight still testify to the infinite sentimentality of its influence. Nevertheless, the Whitney show of 81 paintings by 47 artists proved that wholesale contemners of the 19th-Century landscape have been unable to see the woods for the trees. In Colonial America, there was little demand for landscapes. Unknown journeymen painters turned out a few which, like Runaway Horse (see cut), are still as fresh as daisies.

Serious U. S. landscape painting began with a Connecticut portraitist named Ralph Earl, one of whose clients paid him in 1800 to paint the view from his farm. The result. Looking East from Leicester Hills, was dim but sufficient evidence that the “U. S. Scene” was already discovered. Among Earl’s successors:

Washington Allston, an early U. S. cosmopolitan who spent four years in Rome, became acquainted with Wordsworth and Coleridge, painted powerful romantic landscapes, gradually atrophied in Boston.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Allston’s friend and pupil, whose fame for inventing the telegraph has obscured his gifts as an artist. One of the finest landscapes on display was Morse’s View From Apple Hill, Cooperstown, New York, a long, radiant vista of Lake Otsego.

Thomas Cole, founder of the “Hudson River School” of landscape artists. A contemporary of James Fenimore Cooper, Cole painted the first grandiose pictures of the U. S. wilderness.

George Inness, who rejected the literal-minded grandeur of this school for simpler, more warmly painted, atmospheric studies of nature. Place of honor at the Whitney last week was occupied by Inness’ The Home of the Heron, a scene of deep forest splashed with sun.

John La Farge, whose Paradise Valley, Newport, painted in 1866-68, was a notable precursor of Impressionism in its analysis of sunlight.