Chapter 2 - A History of Art in America
    by Chronicle writer John Bonner

 The visitor to the “Chronicle” Art Exhibition will naturally be tempted to cast a retrospective over the history of art in the United States. The period embraced is brief, for in the beginning the home of American art was London. Washington Allston, who was a master of color and whose paintings from Biblical themes won for him fortune in England, went to seed, and his genius dried up when he came home. Benjamin West, whose “Death on the Pale Horse” made him famous, declined to revisit his Pennsylvania home after he had made his mark. Copley always insisted on being called an American, and in his picture of “The Death of Lord Chatham” he showed where his heart lay, but he lived and died in London. Vanderlyn’s famous work, “Marius on the Ruins of Carthage,” won the gold medal at the Paris Exhibition, but the painter had to choke his fancy when he returned home.
 There was no feeling for art in this country. Puritan influences were not favorable, and in regions where they were not dominant, a people brought face to face with the elementary problems of existence, founding new forms of government and molding incongruous factors into one race and nation, was naturally indifferent to the graceful and poetic products of high civilization. The only branch by which an artist could make a happy living was portrait painting. To this pursuit Harding – a typical Westerner of the day, sturdy, frank, good-natured, earnest, and indomitable – devoted himself in Boston, and labored so industriously that in six months he painted a hundred likenesses at $25 a piece; while Inman, whose genius was all-round and who in another country would have won renown for his landscapes and historical pictures, followed the same calling in New York. Their success stimulated rivalry; good portraits were made by Charles Loring Elliott, Baker, Stuart, Hicks, Le Clear, Huntington, Page, Healy, Ames, Hunt, and Nagle.
 Among these Elliott, Stuart and Page were pre-eminent, Stuart was famous for his use and freshness of color; Page was also a master of color and produced astonishing results by a characteristic divination of unexpected effects of light; Elliott, like the old portrait painters of the renaissance, read the heart of the man he portrayed, and not only gave a faithful likeness of his outward features, but revealed his intellectual life and the temper of his soul.
 While they were handing down to posterity the lineaments of good Americans whose only present claim to be remembered is base on the fact that they were painted by the fathers of American art, an attempt at organizing the profession was made by conscientious disciplines. In 1801 the first Academy of Design was established in New York; like the wounded man in indictments, languishing it lived, and then it died. Fifteen years later an American Academy of Fine Arts was founded with John Trumbull as president. Mr. Trumbull had spent most of his life in England, where he made himself famous by his pictures of “The Battle of Bunker Hill” and the “Death of Montgomery Before Quebec;” the renown of these works procured for him an order for four pictures for the rotunda of the Capitol, for which he was paid $32,000. He believed that his organization would put American art on its legs; but he was premature.
 In 1828 the National Academy of Design was founded. A this time there were painters who could do something better than paint portraits. They were not all Raphaels, but they could draw, and some of them knew the uses of color. Henry Peters Gray added one more nudity to the long list of “Judgements of Paris.” Daniel Huntington gave the world a canvas of “Queen Mary Signing the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Gray.” Robert Weir produced a conscientious representation of the “Sailing of the Pilgrims,” and among landscape painters Durand, Cole, and Doughty won esteem. Of Cole it has been said that his vast mind sought feebly to utter great thoughts, and that the man was greater than his works. His father sold wallpaper, and the son spent his youth tinting it. The father’s failure threw the support of his family upon the son, and we can easily imagine that pinching poverty imparted gloom to such pictures as his “Desolation.” His paintings reveal a rapturous love of nature and the struggle of the mind to find higher expression than his artistic conceptions supplied; but he never rose to the high level of the pre-Raphaelites, nor could he emancipate himself from the influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa.
 Unlike our other early painters, Asher B. Durand owed little to foreign influence. He was an American all through. An engraver by profession, he did not begin to paint till he was 38; his works at once attracted attention by his massive handling, and free and vigorous treatment of trees. His landscapes are solemn and majestic. Each tree is individualized, and seems to have a story. Durand’s friend and coworker, Thomas Doughty, had been a leather dealer till he was 28; then he took to landscape painting, and his soft poetic touches, his tender, silvery tones, placed him near the top of his branch.
 His influence was felt by another landscapist, who excelled him in technique. This was John F. Kensett, who died some twenty years ago. His art was marked by a winning tenderness of tone, and a subtle poetic suggestiveness; it seems that it is not things, but feelings which he endeavors to render. He had a horror of sensationalism. He was most happy when he depicted quiet, dreamy, thought-compelling coast scenes in which the splash of the surf and the gentle murmur of the breeze through the trees fill the soul with tender memories of the past and hopeful visions of the future.
 The landscape painters who trod in the footsteps of Cole, Durand, Doughty, and Kensett found at Dusseldorf a new school which departed from the conventionalities of Paris and London and Rome, and the benefitted largely by the study of Leutze and Achenbach. We can trace the influence of these masters in the works of Whittredge, Casllear, Meeker, Hubbard and their rivals; the later works of Cropsey, who was remarkably successful in depicting autumnal scenery, with gorgeous October foliage, make one wish hat he had studied them more closely. The brothers Smilile, who began life as engravers, were more faithful pupils; their landscapes show vigor, freshness and fidelity. The works of Sanford Gifford are the next step in the evolution of an art which was top of the tree. His blazing sunsets, his glowing atmospheric effects, his trailing morning mist in dusky highlands by a silent lake, may be equaled, but not often surpassed.
 The canvases of the painter of “Niagara” and the Heart of the Andes” are, however, the highest expression of American landscape art. Frederick E. Church was born with the power to feel sympathy with nature and to reveal the vastness and glory of the continent, There is no aiming at theatrical effect. He lets nature mass her sublimity in all its simple grandeur. He who contemplates his “Niagara” can hear the cataract roar as it pours its mighty waters into the appalling abyss that is wreathed with mist rising from the vortex below; he can understand eternity when he reflects that the great torrent has been flowing, endless, remorseless and irresistible over those tremendous cliffs from the time when man was not.
 Within the past quarter of a century acres of canvas have been covered with American historical paintings. Few of them are destined to immortality; the great bulk cannot even claim a respectable place among the pictures of genre. Our greatest historical painter thus far has been the German, Leutze, the author of “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Emanuel Leutze was born in Germany, came to Philadelphia as a child, revisited Dusseldorf at 27, but returned to this country to spend his old age and to die. His art is marked by the vast conceptions and monstrous plans which characterize the Bavarian school. He always wanted a forty-acre lot for his canvas. He would have liked to make all his men fifteen feet high. His idea of the true Godiva was a woman as tall as a steeple and as broad as a church door. But he possessed a fervid fancy and an epic grandeur; his inspiration was inexhaustible: the rush of his thoughts was like Victor Hugo’s. His pictures of Washington at various stages of his career demonstrated that American historical painting need not be ridiculous, as the visitor to the Capitol at Washington is led to suppose.
 When art has lately been cultivated by Elihu Vedder and John Lafarge, who deal with problems of destiny and attempt to reproduce on canvass the workings of the human heart. Their works have been described as weird attempts t psychology in color, The faces are full of vague, mystic, far-off searching after the infinite, for reasons to account for human existence. Vedder’s “Death of Abel” is magnificent in its desolate grandeur. Lafarge’s pictures do not tell their story on the surface – every line has a hidden meaning for the soul.
 Church’s supremacy in landscape was challenged thirty odd years ago by Albert Bierstadt, a native of Dusseldorf, who settled in this country about the time of the war. Bierstadt made his reputation by his pictures of the Western side of the continent – notably by a fine idealization of “The Rocky Mountains,” which was compared to Church’s “Heart of the Andes.” He also pained “The Yosemite” and other scenes in California, and it is not to be denied that his works manifest genius. Posterity has hardly confirmed the judgement which was pronounced
upon them when they were first produced, but they are undoubtedly works of merit and established their author’s right to be considered an artist of ability and striking versatility. Mr. Bierstadt opened a studio in Paris thirty years ago and devoted himself to the practical side of art. He was a connoisseur of sure taste; he became a large picture dealer and accumulated a fortune.
 The vein he had opened was exploited by Thomas Hill, who began life as a coach painter at Taunton, Mass. Mr. Hill is a fine colorist and a careful student of nature. He identified himself long ago with the magnificent scenery of the Yosemite, and made himself the interpreter of the roar of the whirlwind and the thunder of the storm. Whenever the wonders of the Yosemite are mentioned the name Thomas Hill occurs to the mind. With William Keith, he represents oil painting in California, as Thomas Moran is recognized as the painter in ordinary to the Yellowstone and it marvels.
 These great men and their coworkers, A. H. Wyant, Homer Martin, Jarvis McEntee and others, have demonstrated the permanent vitality of American landscape art, and proved that it is not a mere reproduction of foreign work. They have had worthy peers in marine landscape. De Haas, who learned to paint in Holland before he came here, is a fit rival of Achenbach, and he found two worthy disciples in Norton and Petersen, who were both sailors, and whose works reveal a thorough knowledge of the sea and a perfect capacity to transfer its wonders to canvas.
 The war ought to have bred a school of military art, but it has not. We have no one to compare with Vernet, or Detaille, or Miss Thompson. Perhaps the future will supply the want. Meanwhile, Winslow Homer’s “Prisoners to the Front,” Julian Scott’s “Cornfield at Antietam,” and Wordsworth Thomson’s scenes of the late war are agreeable and graphic; Homer’s men are taken from life and so are Thomson’s horses. William Magrath has done some excellent genre work. Some of his characteristic figures remind the beholder of Millet.
 Water color painting may be said to have arisen in this country in 1865, when an exhibition of English work in water colors was held in New York. A society for the cultivation of that branch of art was founded by T. M. Falconer, Samuel Coleman and Swain Gifford, and the school flourished so that thirty years ago it was able to give an exhibition at the Academy of Design. Henry Farrar, the well-known landscapist, abandoned oils and devoted himself wholly to the production of pictures in water color. His works and those of his brother artists compare favorably in individuality and strength with the best works of the English water color artists.

Introduction

1. The Chronicle's Exhibition of Pictorial Art in Journalism, by staff
2. A History of Art in America, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
3. The Process of Reproducing Images, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
4. America's Greatest Newspapers, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
5. History of Illustration among America's Major Newspapers, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
6. Critics Preempt the Exhibition