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Historically, Johnson’s work has been under-examined in the modern art literature, but awareness and interest in this artist has been on the rise in recent years. President Obama created a buzz when he selected four of Johnson’s works from the Smithsonian’s collections—the most by any one artist—to decorate the White House. Now, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) has joined with Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, to bring Johnson’s work to communities across the nation. This fall marks the opening and release of William H. Johnson: An American Modern, a traveling exhibition and scholarly book of the same name. 

(Above) William H. Johnson, Self Portrait (c. 1923-1926). Collection Smithsonian American Art Museum.  All other images courtesy Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD.artes fine arts magazine  

W.H. Johnson, Boats on Keterminde (1938)

Forty years ago, in 1971, after receiving a historic donation of over 1000 pieces of Johnson’s art from the William Harmon Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum published the first book on Johnson, cataloging their collection of his work. Although Johnson had reached a level of fame and exhibited widely in the 1930s and early 1940s, his career came to abrupt halt in 1945 with the onset of severe medical issues, and his subsequent institutionalization. This book re-introduced Johnson’s art to the world through black and white reproductions, along with a biography of the artist and a brief analysis. Twenty years later, scholar Richard J. Powell published his groundbreaking monograph, Homecoming: the Art and Life of William H. Johnson. His biographical-critical overview of Johnson’s life and work was grounded in extensive research and brought Johnson to the fore—inspiring multiple exhibitions, articles, a children’s book, and new analysis of his art. 

Today, 20 years after Powell published Homecoming, a new book from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Morgan State University introduces a range of scholarly debate currently surrounding the artist. Thanks to the foundation of knowledge laid by Powell and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, William H. Johnson: An American Modern is able to present Johnson in a new light and analyzes important themes and patterns in his work. The book also examines Johnson’s work on a different scale: This volume considers just 20 paintings from Morgan State’s holdings. The Morgan collection encapsulates the pivotal stages in Johnson’s career as a modernist painter, including post-impressionist and expressionist works reminiscent of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Soutine, and the vernacular paintings in which he articulates his specific, unforgettable voice as an artist. 

Aunt Alice (1944)

These works were acquired in 1967 by James E. Lewis, then the director of the Museum of Art at Morgan State. The terms of the Harmon Foundation donation to the Smithsonian enabled Mr. Lewis, along with representatives from a handful of other historically black colleges and universities, to select works by Johnson for their institutions’ permanent collections. Lewis was the first to arrive and had first choice of the works available. His keen eye aided him in selecting these specific 20 pieces, which together offer a concise overview of Johnson’s life and work. 

This new book presents Johnson as a quintessential modern painter firmly planted in the pantheon of great American artists. In this new text, some of the world’s premier scholars of William H. Johnson and African American art history examine the artist and his modern artistic genius in fresh new ways, including his relationship with one of his earliest patrons, the Harmon Foundation; the critical role played by scholars at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities; the context of Johnson’s experiences living in Harlem and his deep southern roots; and Johnson as a trailblazer in the genres of still life and landscape painting. 

Among the essays presented in his volume are two new works by Richard Powell, grounded in his lifetime of studying Johnson and his work: “Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Expressionism,” and “Devotion and Disrepute: William H. Johnson’s Florence, South Carolina, Paintings, circa 1944.” Viewed as discreet analyses, each tells the story of a moment of change in Johnson’s style. Read in tandem, however, they tell a story of profound artistic growth and maturation. “Trembling Vistas” explores Johnson’s hesitant departure from his academic training into the realm of European modernism, and “Devotion and Disrepute” examines Johnson’s “vertiginous turn” away from the visual language of Expressionism to the neo-primitive vernacular employed in the final period of his career (William H. Johnson: An American Modern, 92). 

Cagnes, White Houses (c. 1928-29)

For many critics, the decisive shift in Johnson’s style discussed in Powell’s second essay constituted “mutin[y] against predictable techniques” (91). Powell acknowledges that the use of this vernacular was a significant risk for Johnson, as it “contradicted what many people expected from an academically trained, European associated artist” (90); however, Powell’s analysis of Johnson’s oeuvre throughout the two essays supports Johnson’s own explanation of his new style, which he voiced in a 1946 interview with the New York Amsterdam News: “It was not a change but a development.” 

Powell muses over the significance of this statement in his second essay (93): “Describing his French and Scandinavian landscapes as developmental works prior to the largely figurative paintings of the 1940s is intriguing, suggesting that the lessons learned as an Expressionist charted the path to becoming a neo-primitive.” 

His reference to “the lessons learned” during Johnson’s Expressionist days indirectly points to his earlier essay in this volume (“Trembling Vistas”), in which he presents Johnson’s first ten years abroad as a period of continued art education (albeit in the modernist tradition). In “Trembling Vistas,” Powell documents Johnson’s initially cautious “experiments in various forms of modernism” and attempts to “work out a style of [his] own” (29, 27). His cogent analysis reveals that over a period of one decade, Johnson’s work become progressively bolder, his paint thicker, and his colors more brightly hued as he absorbed various artistic influences and immersed himself deeper into the art and social scene of European Expressionism. 

Lofoten Island (1937)

Although Johnson eventually abandons his thick impasto technique and solid Expressionist approach in favor of an “emphatic[ally] two-dimensional” style, the impact of other lessons learned in his Expressionist period is evident in Johnson’s vernacular work (90). Of particular note, says Powell, is Johnson’s early epiphany that “to truly represent the world around them, the artist must become one with his/her subject” (24). Throughout his career, Johnson focuses on his individual subjective experience of his subjects, rather than trying to capture objective reality. He articulated this objective to a Scandinavian journalist in 1932, saying, “my aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually.” In doing so, Powell claims, Johnson is “articulat[ing] in line, shape, and hue the social and psychological dimensions of peoples and places and their interconnections”—a focus which he began to develop in his early days in Europe but which is seen most clearly in his later work (25). 

Danish Youth (1930)

In his 1946 interview with the New York Amsterdam News, Johnson asserts that, “In all my years of painting, I have had only one absorbing and inspired idea…– to give, in simple and stark form – the story of the Negro as he has existed.” While Johnson’s achievement of this goal is readily apparent in his later works, his early works seemed to deviate from this idea. However, Powell argues in “Trembling Vistas” that Johnson’s interest in “primitiveness and tradition” is evident even in his early years as a professional painter. For one image, inspired by a brief trip home to the American South, Johnson expresses his hope “‘to abstract’ and to put onto canvas that ‘something’ which the surrounding ‘little Negro boys and girls’ possessed” in a letter written to a sponsor in 1930, eight years before he begins exploring African American subject matter in depth (28). In addition, Johnson’s depictions of rural Scandinavian folk culture served as an important foundation for his later exploration of black folk life in the U.S. Although Johnson ultimately—in Powell’s analysis—came to find his voice as “an authentic community commentator,” highlighting the importance of the African American story his paintings told, his “attraction to the primitive was neither race-based nor specific to non-Western cultural traditions,” as evidenced by his earlier work in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (91, 31). 

Ring around the Rosey (1944)

According to Powell, “Johnson’s was a blackness that refused to proselytize for its inclusion in high society; that wasn’t about to apologize for its coarse honesty and intrusive, antithetical visibility; that stood, or tumbled, in its rightful universality alongside other races and ethnicities…” (95). In William H. Johnson: An American Modern, the “rightful universality” of Johnson’s work is celebrated as it is examined in the context of other modern painters of “other races and ethnicities.” The essays in this collection explore the ways in which Johnson marshaled the ideas and techniques of European modernism to create a highly personal visual language and capture authentically and respectfully the American story with which he was most familiar—that of the African American community. Powell eloquently articulates the evolution of Johnson’s singular style and the continuity of his philosophical vision from his early days as a bohemian Expressionist in Europe to his final paintings which offer a haunting and insightful commentary on rural Southern African American life. This new book brings to life Johnson’s conscious combination of formal training, international influences, and personal experiences to pare his style down to the very simplest, starkest terms. He achieves this without sacrificing the strength of his message or the profound emotional quality he could instill in his works, forever marking him as a truly American modern. 

By Robin Meyer, Contributing Writer 

William H. Johnson: An American Modern, by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Morgan State University, published by University of Washington Press. Includes essays from Richard J. Powell, Leslie King-Hammond, David Driskell and Lowery Stokes Sims. The exhibition of the same name began a national tour September 10, 2011at the Gari Melchers Home and Studio in Fredericksburg, VA., and will tour the country through 2014. Visit www.sites.si.edu for a detailed itinerary.

Charles Harold Davis, Landscape in France (n/d), pencil on paper. American practitioner in Barbizon style. Collection of Lyman Allyn Museum

 Italy had long been the most popular destination for Americans prior to the Civil War, but by the 1870’s, France had become the country of choice. For it then seemed that every young American artist yearned to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe and study in Paris. In fact, approximately twenty-two hundred were documented there during the post-Civil War period. Many were drawn to the city of light by the prestigious government-sponsored Ecole des Beaux Arts, or by the more accessible private academies, including the acclaimed Academie Julian. American artists also discovered, Grez-sur-Loing, Barbizon, and the adjacent Forest of Fontainebleau, where they worked alongside French painters. Their interest in Barbizon was partially in response to the radically modern changes effected by the Second Empire’s urban planner and architect, Baron Hausmann. Many Parisian neighborhoods were razed to allow for the erection of the larger buildings and wider boulevards needed to accommodate the rapidly growing population. The rural life at Barbizon exemplified the antithesis of the industrialization of Paris.          

J. Alden Weir, The Tow Girl (1879-80), o/c, painted on Hudson River in the syle of Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts. Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum

 

 The French academies provided American artists with traditional training that emphasized figure drawing.  J. Alden Weir arrived in Paris in 1873 and attended Jean Leon Gerome’s atelier for four years.  There, according to Doreen Bolger Burke, Weir spent his mornings “drawing and painting from life and his afternoons drawing from casts after antique statues.  These studies were intended to prepare him for the concours des places … a series of examinations that all students had to pass before being officially matriculated into the Ecole.”  By 1875, Weir was awarded a second-class medal for his work in Gerome’s studio, a great accomplishment for an American student.  The very basic academic principles of his French education can be discerned in the artist’s portrait of The Tow Girl (1879-80), painted after his return to America.  His loose brushwork may depart from his earlier, carefully-delineated style of Gerome’s studio, but Weir’s work retains a primacy of figure and solidity of form that reflect his academic training.     

 Gerome’s Beaux Arts studio was very popular with American students owing in part, according to Barbara Weinberg, to his historical narratives with American collectors and the related practical consideration of patronage.  American students had to “learn how to emulate French painters whose works attracted post-bellum American collectors in order to secure commissions at home.  Like Weir, Abbot Handerson Thayer studied with Gerome at the Ecole.  He had sailed for Europe in 1875 to enroll, however, the waiting list prevented his entry until the following spring.  At the Market Place, Paris (1875) was painted soon after Thayer’s arrival, while he studied in the studio of Henri Lehmann.  Once at the Ecole, Thayer’s classes focused on life drawing and Classical statuary; an emphasis on the figural tradition encouraged the young artist, who began his career as an animalier, to include the human figure in his work.  As such, At the Market Place, Paris is a pivotal work in Thayer’s career.     

The Ecole’s popularity with Americans was rivaled by that of the Academie Julian, the largest private art school in Paris (pictured here, Blvd des Capucines, Paris, 1880s). Though the former was tuition-free, it required that foreign artists pass a difficult entrance exam. The Academie, however, charged tuition without an exam and therefore readily admitted foreigners. Americans studying at the Julian included Charles Ebert, Charles H. Davis, William S. Robinson, Louis Michael Eilshemius, and Martha Walter.         

Many of the professors at the Academie were conservative artists. Some of the Julian’s teachers later taught at the Ecole, suggesting that both institutions’ academic principles were similar. However, the Academie Julian’s main goal was to prepare students for entry to the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Salon. The government-sponsored Paris Salon was the city’s annual juried art exhibition and gaining acceptance was critical for artists to attain recognition and secure commissions. Equally as important, however, the Salon allowed an artist to measure his work against international competition, within the larger context of European art.          

Abbott Handerson Thayer, At the Market Place, Paris (1875). Collection Lyman Allyn Museum

 

 American artists occasionally left behind the pressures of Paris for the tranquility of Barbizon and the French countryside. While studying at the Paris Salon, Ecole student William Morris Hunt was so inspired by Jean-François Millet’s, The Sower (1850) that he moved out to Barbizon, remaining there from 1853-1855. Though he did not formally become a student of Millet, they worked together and discussed their approaches and attitudes toward landscape. Barbizon painting became widely popular with American audiences and collectors after the Civil War. Its landscapes were characteristically intimate and frequently featured unassuming bits of nature as inspirational subject matter.         

As Robert Herbert noted in his study Barbizon Revisited (1962), the French painters, “began to restrict their slice of nature to what the eye can see without moving back and forth in place of the traditional panorama.”  Composition was subordinated to the mood of the landscape and artists worked directly from nature in oil using the vigorous brushstrokes characteristic of the Barbizon School. The most basic precept of Barbizon painting was self-expression through direct confrontation with nature. In response to the Europeans’ influence, American landscape painters began to work en plein air, hiking through the forest with brushes, palettes, and canvases in tow. One American artist related: “Sometimes we would hide our painting things under a rock for the night, sure to find them untouched the next morning.”  J. Alden Weir visited Barbizon during his years in France (1873-1877), as did Edward Potthast, between 1889 and 1890.        

left: William Morris Hunt [attrib], Boy with a Violin (pre-1879). Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum         

In 1882, when Charles H. Davis moved to Fleury, just outside Barbizon, masters Rousseau and Millet were no longer living. Nevertheless, Barbizon and its surrounding villages retained their appeal, inspiring many American landscapists. Davis focused on landscape painting and earned his reputation as one of America’s leading practitioners of the Barbizon style, having returned to the U.S. in 1891.          

The very year that Davis had moved to the Barbizon area, Bruce Crane was making his third trip abroad, passing the summer in nearby Grez-sur-Loing. Grez was popular with European and American artists alike and it was there that Crane met French painter Jean Charles Cazin (1846-1901). Cazin’s method inspired Crane to forsake his own traditional painting style. Following Cazin’s lead, he began to experiment using limited tonal ranges. This muted color palette is clearly visible in his painting, The White Mantle (1919). Like Crane, Edward Potthast also spent time in Grez, where the countryside inspired him to forsake portraiture in the characteristic brown-based tonal range of the Munich School and switch to creating landscapes instead. Potthast credited his friend, the American Impressionist Robert Vonnoh, with introducing him to French Impressionism during his stay there.          

The French Impressionists characteristically worked en plein air, for outdoors, they were able to render objects in a natural light influenced by prevailing weather conditions, impossible to achieve in the studio. Their paintings are noted for their sketchy, rapidly-executed brushwork and high key palettes. In contrast to the French academic paintings, Impressionist works looked–to the nineteenth-century eye–unfinished, rough, and unschooled. They were a far cry from the carefully-rendered history and genre paintings for which the professors at the Ecole des Beaux Arts were known. Academic painters developed their finished pieces from drawings and completed their work in the studio. In general, their paintings were meticulously executed, with special care taken to hide their brushstrokes, and to achieve a solidity of form, both characteristic of the Tonalist style.       

below right: [Robert] Bruce Crane, The White Mantle, 1919, in the Tonalist style. Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum         

Ironically, the young Americans who became Impressionists late in the nineteenth century had studied alongside the French Academic painters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and at Academie Julian. Moreover, those American students were initially appalled by the Impressionist style seen in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s. Bruce Crane initially objected to their coarse handling and glaring colors, while J. Alden Weir declared the 1877 exhibition of the French Impressionists, “worse than the Chamber of Horrors. I was there about a quarter of an hour and left with a head ache.”  Nonetheless, within a decade of their return to the U.S., many of the American students had begun to adopt the Impressionist idiom, which ironically became their dominant aesthetic.          

With such an abundance of American artists working in France, pressure mounted on them to paint subjects native to the U.S. Henry James noted in 1887, “that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.”  And in 1900, American critics were still skeptical of the state of American art. Ellis T. Clarke, a writer for, Brush and Pencil, art magazine, complained that American art had become, “French art with American trimmings: American artists go to Europe, and especially Paris, to complete their education, and are apparently not strong enough to resist the dominating influence of their masters in after-work. … But if American artists go abroad for instruction, why need they renounce individuality and forswear national aims and aspirations? … Expatriation is a mistake, both as regards the future of the individual artist and as regards the future of American art.”          

Edward Henry Potthast, Ocean Breezes (c.1910), o/c, showing solidity of form or 'weightiness' of European-trained American Impressionist School of the period. Coll. Lyman Allyn Museum.

 

Yet Clarke needn’t have worried. Despite the vast number of Americans studying in France, the work they produced remained distinctly American. American Impressionist paintings stand apart from those of the French in spite of the academic training received there.  As a result, Barbara Weinberg noted that, “their allegiance [to Impressionism] was often cautious and intermittent. In general, the Americans created a variant of the French style that was indebted more to Impressionist surfaces than to Impressionist principles … In painting both figures and landscapes, the Americans often appeared to be [more] ‘impressionizers’ than Impressionists, by applying chromatic veneers of broken strokes to solid forms that depended on preliminary studies and some studio retouching.”          

The persistence of the underlying solidity in the American style can be traced back to eighteenth-century American portrait painting.  Barbara Novak has observed that Colonial American painting was distinct from European painting because the American union of object and idea resulted in a ‘weightiness.’  That American ‘weight’ can also be detected in late nineteenth-century American painting. Those artists preferred to keep the objects they painted intact and were not as able, or willing, to break up the integrity of an object as Europeans were. Novak writes: “In this [twentieth] century too, though nineteenth-century moral and religious considerations have been virtually obliterated, Americans are still uniquely aware of things. For the need to grasp reality, to ascertain the physical thereness of things seems to be a necessary component of the American experience.”  That these distinctively American qualities emerged regardless of how long an artist remained an expatriate–despite the level of inspiration drawn from European art and culture– may ultimately result from the fact that, “The American pilgrim, it seems, rarely left his American consciousness behind him.”          

by Nancy Stula, Ph.D., Contributing Editor    

Part I in the Series, 19th Century American Painters on the Grand Tour, can ba found in the ARTES January archive         

                                                                         ____________________________________________________________________________          

Bibliography:          

H. Babara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers, New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.        

Doreen Bolger Burke, J. Alden Weir: An American Impressionist, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.          

H. Barbara Weinberg, “Americans in Paris, 1850-1910,” American Art Review XV, 2003.             

Robert Herbert, Barbizon Revisited, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1962.          

Christopher Cranch, “Reminiscences of Fontainebleau Forest, By a Landscape Painter,” Appleton‘s Journal 10, (26 July 1873).         

Ellis T. Clarke, “Alien Element in American Art,” Brush and Pencil  (October 1900).           

      

Charles Ebert, Church in Venice, circ. 1913, oil/canvas

Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:      

“It would give me inexpressible pleasure to make a trip to Europe where I should see those fair examples of art that have stood so long the admiration of all the world. … I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to guess the stile that You, Mr. Reynolds, and the other Artists practice.”      

Yet Copley was more fortunate than most Colonial artists. He had access to the first art gallery to open in America. English-trained artist John Smibert (1688-1751) brought an art collection to Boston consisting of prints, copies of Old Master paintings, and casts after antique sculpture. Beginning in the 1730s, Bostonians could view oil on canvas copies of some of the best-known European paintings in his gallery-cum-studio. With few exceptions, colonists living outside Boston had to content themselves solely with mezzotints—mainly Baroque-style portraits of aristocracy—to learn about European art.      

John Cooper (1695-1754), Ceres with an Attendant, oil/canvas. Based on European print sources, sitters were endowed with fashionable clothing and jewelry to elevate their apparent social status.

 These prints effectively transmitted English style and aristocratic imagery to the colonists. According to Wayne Craven in, Colonial American Portraiture, ‘Mezzotints were the school for both patron and artist; from them, otherwise untrained would-be portrait painters could learn to draw the figure, drapery, and landscapes as well as about perspective, light, and shade, the representation of textures, and the proper image in which to cast their subjects.’ For most Colonial artists, these portraits not only served as a form of art education, but they were the models upon which colonial artists consequently based their own portrait paintings.      

Several colonial artists were not content to remain in America, traveling abroad to gain exposure to European art and to pursue an art education. Benjamin West began his career as a portrait painter in Philadelphia. In 1760 he left to make the Grand Tour of Europe, permanently settling in London three years later. There, West met with remarkable success: in 1772 he was named Historical Painter to King George III and in 1792 he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy. Understandably, West’s story became mythic in the Colonies and his London studio became a mecca of sorts for Colonial American artists.      

The long, narrow format of West’s, Chryseis, oil sketch is informed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy in London, who created historically-themed paintings in the Grand Manner. Reynolds’s lectures to the Royal Academy, published in his Discourses, were extremely influential on this generation of American artists and, through his writings, Americans learned the Neo-Classical method, which involved developing a painting from numerous sketches and studies.      

Benjamin West, Chryseis Returning to her Father. West's preparatory oil sketch for a larger, ambitious painting (unlocated) depicts a Greek myth

Colonial American artists ascertained from imported treatises on art—Reynolds’ Discourses among them—that the most important and ambitious form of painting was history painting. These were narrative scenes from history, literature, mythology, and the Bible offering a moral, didactic component. History painting topped the hierarchy of genres, while portraiture fell somewhere near the bottom. Additionally, history painting required an artist to be able to paint a range of figures, landscape, drapery, architecture, and still life. The problem was that history painting did not find an audience in the Colonies: Americans wanted portraits. Perhaps Americans were not as familiar with Greek mythology and Classical literature as their European counterparts and were unable to appreciate this genre. Nevertheless, John Singleton Copley grew frustrated with the lack of appreciation for history painting and he wrote to West, circa 1767:      

“A taste of painting is too much Wanting to afford any kind of helps; and was it not for preserving the resemble[n]ce of particular persons, painting would not be known in the plac[e]. The people generally regard it no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor, or shoemaker, not as one of the most noble Arts in the World. Which is not a little Mortifying to me.”     

Like West, Copley tired of painting only portraits and yearned to paint history. In 1774 he set sail for Europe in order to pursue his career as a history painter.      

This Copley study was intended for a first version of this painting, which was never executed.

 Copley arrived in London in July, of that year and before departing on his Grand Tour of Europe, met Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Copley would settle permanently in England and work as an artist producing portraits and history paintings. In 1778 he painted, Watson and the Shark, hailed as one of the first Romantic paintings (with its emphasis on human instincts, emotions and instincts). Copley’s success as an artist won him the commission in 1783 from the Court of the Common Council to execute an enormous canvas depicting the Siege of Gibraltar. This history painting was to depict a critical battle in the seige by the Spanish and French armies of British-held Gibraltar. In traditional Grand Manner, Copley developed his painting from numerous compositional sketches and individual figure studies from models and props in his studio. On the final figure studies, Copley drew a grid to aid in transferring image to canvas.      

The Nineteenth Century

After the second decade of the nineteenth century, American artists turned increasingly to landscape as their preferred subject matter. They saw nature as linked to religion and the landscape as a visible manifestation of God. However, the pristine American wilderness lacked human associations. In Europe, particularly in Italy, they found in the landscape a repository of history and culture.      

American artists traveled in greater numbers than ever before to make the European Grand Tour, beginning in England, continuing through France, Switzerland, Italy and often, Germany and the Low Countries. By mid-century, however, a concentration of American artists settled in Italy, some for a few months, others permanently. For these “travelers in Arcadia,” Italy was much more than a vacation spot.      

Americans found Italy compelling because of its age. America offered primeval forests and ancient rocks, but its history was, after all, a natural history. American audiences desired the cultivated, civilized antiquity that Europe could offer. In Italy, the storied past was everywhere. American artist Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) was constantly aware of history during his stay in Rome, exclaiming, “I walk out and wherever I go I tread upon earth consecrated by the footsteps of the great of other days”[1].  The Italian landscape itself was history.  But, as Barbara Novak observed in, Nature and Culture (1980), ‘Italy was, in fact, so replete with the wisdom of the ages that it was removed from time.’      

History painting remained as enticing an art form for Thomas Cole (1801-48) as it had been for the generation of expatriate American artists before him. Responding to the ongoing American appetite for historical motifs, Cole created a painterly compromise by transferring the aims of history painting to the landscape genre. He retained the same large canvas size which had up until now been reserved for history painting; he developed his landscape paintings from numerous sketches and studies according to the tenets of the Royal Academy for Grand Manner painting; and he retained the narrative by substituting human figures with elements of the landscape. For Cole, the narrative always took precedence over formal elements in his work; linking Cole with Grand Manner history painting and predecessor, Sir Joshua Reynolds, writing in, Discourses, “Like the history painter, a painter of landscapes in this style and with this conduct, sends the imagination back into antiquity.”      

If Italy was history, it was also art. In Rome, according to one American, “there were open air pictures waiting to be painted everywhere around us”[2]. The coincidence of actual views with landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa—artists whom the Americans had greatly admired—joined art and nature in a way that was unknown in America.      

Thomas Cole, Mount Aetna from Taormina (1844)

 Cole was one of the first Hudson River School artists to travel to Europe. He set sail in June of 1829 and on his arrival in London, he studied drawings by Claude Lorrain in the British Museum. In 1831 Cole left London for Italy and the next year, he rented the “Tempietto”, Lorrain’s studio in Rome. Placing himself in that studio certainly reinforced his tendency to see the Italian landscape through Lorrain’s eyes. The Claudian construct, consisting of framing trees, a central body of water, and distant mountains bathed in a golden light, proved to be a convenient compositional formula for the depiction of the beautiful landscape. The Claudian construct played a role in the Italian landscapes painted by Cole, as well as by the other Hudson River School artists. The Italian experience was key in Thomas Cole’s work: six years after he left Italy he continued to draw on his Italian experience in painting.      

Cole’s second and last trip to Europe was in 1841. In 1842, he traveled to Sicily, where he responded to the ancient ruins of the theater at Taormina, juxtaposed against volcanic Mount Aetna, smoldering in the distance. The timeless qualities of nature underlined for Cole the temporality of the productions of man. This narrative serves to elevate Cole’s landscape and exemplifies his compromise blend of landscape and history.      

William Louis Sonntag, a self-trained Cincinnati artist, made his first trip to Italy in 1853 where, like Cole, he was captured by that country’s spell, later returned to spend a year in Florence (1855-56). His, Ruins, reveals his fascination with these remnants of ancient culture. However, he does not depict recognizable ruins or an identifiable locale. Perhaps he was unable to separate the antique from the contemporary, a problem noted by George Hillard in his guidebook Six Months in Italy (1854):      

“Many of the ruins in Rome are not happily placed for effect upon the eye and mind. They do not stand apart in solitary grandeur, forming a shrine for memory and thought, and envolving an atmosphere of their own. They are often in unfavorable positions and bear the shadow in disenchanting proximities … The trail of the present is every where over the past.”      

Ruins become the symbols of the perishability of art as nature takes its course. Sonntag may have chosen to depict these ruins out of his sense of Romanticism, allowing the melancholy ruins in the landscape to serve as a vehicle for conveying his emotions. Melancholy, loneliness, and silence as sensations evocative of Italy appealed very much to Americans who, like Nathaniel Hawthorne welcomed European “shadow” to contrast with its utter absence in America.      

In Italy—a country synonymous with art—painters like Cole and Sonntag could commit themselves completely to their craft. Italy offered a supportive and aesthetically-rich environment for American artists, whereas in America, artistic endeavor was still viewed with some degree of suspicion. Some American artists found the conditions in America debilitating. The American community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who settled in Italy at mid-century was quite large and the support system among them significant.      

American artists traveled abroad not only to live the life of an artist within a supportive community, but also to learn the artist’s craft. In the 1840s the National Academy of Design in New York offered students the most traditional form of art education in America. The Academy’s Antique School, for example, enabled students to copy casts after antique sculpture. However there were few art schools in America where students could draw from live models and few public art collections where artists could view paintings and sculpture. As a result, Americans at mid century flocked to Italy. But unlike eighteenth century artists, those of the nineteenth-century artists did not go specifically to study with a master or enroll in an Italian art academy.      

The educational experience pursued by Americans abroad was constructed in part from viewing and copying works by the Old Masters and, in an effort to educate their eye, these artists studied the vast public art collections.      

Italian Costume Studies supplied the costumed figure located just to the right of the center of the composition of Bierstadt’s large salon composition, The Arch of Octavius (The Roman Fish Market) (1858); collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

 In Rome, some attended the costume schools, or Public Schools as they were sometimes called, where they drew and painted from costumed models in the evenings. Costumes appealed to the American sensibility and descriptions of costumes frequently found their way into guidebooks to Italy. At the costume school, models dressed in colorful Italian regional clothing and posed for the artists. John Frederick Kensett attended such a school as did Christopher Cranch, Thomas Hicks and, very likely, Albert Bierstadt, as well.      

Bierstadt arrived in Rome in 1856 after studying in Germany. In oil on paper Bierstadt recorded three poses of a model dressed in an elaborate costume topped by a red cloak. These studies were intended for later use in the studio where they served as an artist’s repertory of costumes and poses which could be inserted into studio compositions. While human figures seemingly play a small role in Bierstadt’s oeuvre, even a single figure could, as John Falconer suggested to Cropsey, either mar or set the tone for an entire landscape.[3]      

Nature, of course, remained the primary inspiration for the landscape painters.      

Jasper Frances Cropsey, Sorrento, 1848, pencil and wash on paper

Hudson River School artists continued their practice of sketching expeditions during the summer months when they were abroad. In the summer of 1848, Jasper Cropsey and fellow-artists, Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) made an extended sketching tour into Southern Italy. They arrived in Sorrento in May and, the following month, Cropsey executed this pencil sketch, Sorrento (1848). He carefully depicted the crumbling arcaded bridge in pencil, and indicated highlights in white wash. The majority of Hudson River School painters executed careful pencil studies of this type during the summer months. These served as information and inspiration throughout the winter. Cropsey carried his pencil sketches from southern Italy back to his New York studio, where they provided specific details in his large landscape compositions. As such, Cropsey’s drawing exemplified the activities of many of the American landscape painters in Italy during the mid nineteenth century, whether they were working in Italy, France, Spain, or England.      

Sketching trips revolved around specific locations where artists gathered informally, often depicting the same views. The result was an outdoor classroom of sorts–an informal sharing of ideas and techniques–and a source of competition and encouragement. European artists had long-considered a sketching tour of Italy as part of their studies. And their American counterparts followed in their footsteps. Americans relied on English language guidebooks (Murray’s handbooks to Italy, George Hillard’s, Six Months in Italy (1854), and Piale’s, Guide to Naples and Sicily (1847) for itineraries that would lead them through the most picturesque parts of the Italian countryside. These indispensable guides were read at home in preparation for a trip, and then carried with the artist-tourists throughout Italy. Guidebooks not only suggested the most picturesque scenery, but detailed the must-see monuments on the Grand Tour. These views and the guidebook descriptions, taken together, function within the vedute tradition.      

“A ‘veduta’,” Peter Galassi explains, “is an exact visual counterpart to the guidebook,” and “parallel to the itinerary is the repertory of the vedute, a standard series of views each representing a famous place.” At every important Italian site, artists “gradually established the best vantage point from which the important monuments could be seen most clearly.” Guidebooks, such as George Hillard’s, Six Months in Italy and Murray’s, Handbook of Rome, clearly made contributions to the standardization of certain views. Galassi continues: ‘Through repetition, the favored viewpoint- and the corresponding pictorial design-achieved an iconic status. …The major views of the repertory crowded out alternatives so that each place and its history became identified with a single image….’[4]. Very often, guidebooks pointed out the most advantageous spots for viewing monuments and picturesque scenery and artists would sometimes match word for image. One guidebook described “the great torch of Vesuvius hanging over the Bay of Naples” adding that “A painter could no where find a better model from which to draw an ideal mountain…. in the Bay of Naples the meeting of the sea and the land is like the embrace of long-parted lovers.”      

Albert Pinkham, Mosque in the Desert (1883) reveals the artist’s fascination with the exoticism of his Near Eastern subject

 While most artists took the traditional Grand Tour, some artist-cum-explorers went farther afield, searching for ever-more exotic locations. Albert Pinkham Ryder spent five months traveling through Europe, even venturing into Tangiers in North Africa. Samuel Colman, a second-generation Hudson River School artist, traveled through Spain into Northern Africa on his Grand Tour. Ronda, Spain’s sublime location, along with its resident population of banditti who preyed on tourists, added an element of danger to Colman’s tour. The sublimity of the landscape was matched only by the treacherous journey undertaken by the artists who sketched there. Barbara Novak observed that “The artist became the hero of his own journey–which replaced the heroic themes of mythology–by vanquishing physical obstacles en route to a destination,” resulting in the “displacement of the heroic from the work of art to the persona of the artist ….”      

During the first half of the nineteenth century Venice also lay outside the typical Grand Tourist itinerary. Like Tangiers and Ronda, Venice held an exotic appeal for Americans.      

There were very few Americans in Venice before 1860 and the city had the reputation of being crime-ridden and immoral. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited in 1833 he called it “a city for beavers … a most disagreeable residence”[5]. Lord Byron, whose Romantic writings (e.g. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) so influenced Americans for three decades following his death in 1824, were instrumental in transforming Venice into “a fairy city of the heart” for American Grand Tourists. Additionally, John Ruskin’s, Stones of Venice (1851) was important in altering Americans’ opinion of Venice. Excerpts of his book were reprinted in the American art periodical, The Crayon, in 1855.      

After 1860, Americans’ perception of Venice changed dramatically. Between 1860 and 1920, they arrived in Venice in unprecedented numbers, with as many as ninety American artists recorded as having worked there. Margaretta Lovell observed in, Venice, The American View (1984), that, “Venice represented an exoticism of a distinct kind, not only was it physically remote and very beautiful, it was also clearly more than any other European or American urban center, non-industrial and technologically archaic.” That archaism was also a draw for Americans who viewed the city as a time capsule preserving an important part of the past.      

End- Part I      

Part II- ‘Americans in France’ (to be posted soon)      

This article includes excerpts from the original exhibition catalogue: American Artists Abroad and Their Inspiration: Selections from the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, in New London, Connecticut, in 2004. To receive a complete 64-page catalogue, with full-color illustrations for $18, plus 3.50, shipping, please contact info@artesmagazine.com

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Bibliography:   

[1] Cranch’s journal, quoted in Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch 1813-1892, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917, p. 122.  Much of this essay has been derived from my Ph.D. dissertation: Lured by the Muses: Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892), New York: Columbia University, 1997.   

[2]Cranch quoted in Scott, op. cit., p. 105.   

[3]Falconer to Cropsey, letter dated October 29, 1848, in the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.   

[4]Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy, Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 85.   

[5]Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Erica Hirschler, “Gondola Days,” in Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992 pp. 113-114.  In Emerson’s journal entry for “Venice 2 June 1833,” he commented “Under full moon, later in the evening St. Mark’s piazza showed like a world’s wonder, but I still pity the people who are not beavers, and yet are compelled to live here.” in Alfred R. Fergusen, ed., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1964, vol. 4, p. 74.   

Edward Hopper, Monhegan Houses, Maine, 1916 (Portland Museum of Art)*

June 25- October 12, 2009

Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT

October 24- January 31, 2010

 The Portland Museum of Art chronicles the development of impressionist Connecticut and early modernist Maine with 73 features works drawn from the collections of the Portland Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut. The Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England, is on exhibit through October 12, 2009 and subsequently can be seen at the Florence Griswold Art Museum, in Old Lyme, CT, from October 24-January 31, 2010.

For the new-comer, it is clear that Portland, Maine is a city by the sea.  Dozens of squalling seagulls perform acrobatics overhead, announcing the arrival of tourists by the droves.  Busy Commercial Street divides the harbor from the retail district– restaurants and souvenir shops by the dozens—which weave their way up the narrow, cobbled streets through the historic neighborhoods on the city’s ocean-facing hillside.  A warm sea breeze, redolent with the aroma of the fish processing plants on nearby Casco Bay, hangs on every street corner, reminding the visitor of the region’s sea-borne legacy and the city’s time-honored maritime traditions. This city-by-the-sea seems a fitting location for an exhibition of works by some of New England’s greatest painters of the early 20^th century, assembled, for a show celebrating their contribution to the region’s legendary scenery and people.

Ernest Lawson, Connecticut Landscape, 1902, o/c, Portland Mueaum of Art, H.E. Field Art Found. Collection, gift of Barn Gallery Assoc., Ogunquit, ME, 1979.13.31

The art colonies of New England played a key role in the creation of an American national identity in the early 20th century. Art colonies in Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Connecticut and Ogunquit and Monhegan, Maine were inspiration for nationally recognized artists including Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, and George Bellows, among others.

Childe Hassam, The Ledges, October in Old Lyme, CT, 1907, Florence Griswold Museum, gift of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection & Ins. Co. 2002.1.69

The coast of New England has long attracted tourists and artists drawn to the primal drama of the ocean. The 19th century brought changes as coastal communities shifted from being an industrialized economic resource to a therapeutic shelter where the middle class enjoyed leisure time. Artists banded together for purposes of camaraderie, creativity, and commerce, and founded coastal art colonies from Connecticut to Maine.  Beginning in the early 1870s, the village of Cos Cob attracted artists from New York and became one of Connecticut’s major art colonies. These artists included impressionist J. Alden Weir, his father, painter Robert W. Weir, and John Henry Twachtman who all summered at the Holley House, the center of the community. Accomplished painters such as impressionist Theodore Robinson and Childe Hassam also painted in Cos Cob.

Henry Ward Ranger arrived in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1899, attracted by the tidal marches and ever-changing light conditions. While Twachtman saw the Connecticut coast as a place of isolation, Ranger viewed himself as the leader of a new school of American landscape painting. Ranger stayed in the boarding house of Florence Griswold and invited his artist friends to join him.  From this, an art colony was born. Miss Griswold’s home became the epicenter of the Old Lyme art colony. The arrival in 1903 of the dynamic Childe Hassam inspired Old Lyme painters to experiment with high-key color and greater impasto. Just as Ranger presided over the colony in its early years, Hassam set the tone for its later phase and in 1947, the location became a museum.

The Traditionalists: Clarence Chatterton, "Boating with Oliver, Ogunquit," 1929, o/c, Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Purchase with support from Roger and Katherine Woodman, 1996.28.

The Modernists: Yasuo Kuniyoshi, After the Bath, 1923, o/c, Portland Museum of Art, gift of Ellen Williams, 2000.43

In search of cooler temperatures, Old Lyme painters often made trips to Ogunquit and Monhegan Island, Maine. Ogunquit, a picturesque fishing village in southern Maine, played host to an ideological contrast between two artistic cultures in the early 20th century: the regionalist image of “old” New England by Boston painter Charles H. Woodbury and the modernist worldview of charismatic New York modernist Hamilton Easter Field. Field established an art school there in 1911; and in 1929 the Hamilton Easter Field Art Foundation was created by five former students. The differences between Field’s modernists and Woodbury’s more traditional set were manifest. The creative tension between artists remained in place until the mid-20th century. In 1979, the Portland Museum of Art was gifted the Hamilton Easter Field Art Foundation Collection of more than 50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that document the rise of American modernism in the early 20th century.

Charles Ebert, "Monhegan Headlands," 1909, o/c, Florence Griswold Museum. Gift of Miss Elisabeth Ebert, 1977.18.1

The remoteness and rugged landscape of Monhegan Island, Maine, also attracted artists in the 1890s.  Many Old Lyme artists also summered on Monhegan. The most influential artist who worked on the island was Robert Henri. As a member of the Ash Can School and a teacher at the New York School of Art, Henri encouraged his fellow artists to visit Monhegan to escape the grittiness of the city. Henri and impressionist painter Edward Willis Redfield worked side by side laying the foundation for an art colony which included Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Randall Davey, George Bellows, and Leon Kroll. Much later, Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew Wyeth, also took up residence on the island.

By the 1950s, Monhegan fell out of favor as communities in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Woodstock and Long Island, New York rose to prominence. Today, however, Monhegan continues to attract artists from around the country.

by Richard Friswell, Editor-in-Chief

A 128-page full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Thomas Denenberg, chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art, Susan Danly, curator of graphics, photography, and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art, and Amy Kurtz Lansing, curator at the Florence Griswold Museum. The catalogue is available in the Museum Store for $29.95. Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England will be on view at the Florence Griswold Museum October 24, 2009 through January 31, 2010.

*Opening image: Edward Hopper, Monhegan Houses, Maine, 1916, Purchase with support from the Bernstein Acquisition Fund; Board designated Acquisition Funds; Directors and Curators Acquisition Fund; Friends of the Collection; Homburger Acquisition Fund, Osher Acquisition Fund and an anonymous gift in memory of the Bears, 2007.1