Scenic Impressions
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Scenic Impressions

Southern Interpretations from The Johnson Collection

Estill Curtis Pennington, Martha R. Severens

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eBook - ePub

Scenic Impressions

Southern Interpretations from The Johnson Collection

Estill Curtis Pennington, Martha R. Severens

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About This Book

The radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny emphasized the subtle textures of nature through warm color and broken brush stroke. Artists' subject matter tended to represent a prosperous middle class at play, with the subtle suggestion that painting was indeed art for art's sake and not an evocation of the heroic manner. Many painters in the South took up the stylistics of Tonalism, Impressionism, and naturalism to create works of a very evocative nature, works which celebrated the Southern scene as an exotic other, a locale offering refuge from an increasingly mechanized urban environment.

Scenic Impressions offers an insight into a particular period of American art history as borne out in seminal paintings from the holdings of the Johnson Collection of Spartanburg, South Carolina. By consolidating academic information on a disparate group of objects under a common theme and important global artistic umbrella, Scenic Impressions will underscore the Johnsons' commitment to illuminating the rich cultural history of the American South and advancing scholarship in the field, specifically examining some forty paintings created between 1880 and 1940, including landscapes and genre scenes. A foreword, written by Kevin Sharp, director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, introduces the topic. Two lead essays, written by noted art historians Estill Curtis Pennington and Martha R. Severens, discuss the history and import of the Impressionist movement—abroad and domestically—and specifically address the school's influence on art created in and about the American South. The featured works of art are presented in full color plates and delineated in complementary entries written by Pennington and Severens. Also included are detailed artist biographies illustrated by photographs of the artists, extensive documentation, and indices.

Featured artists include Wayman Adams, Colin Campbell Cooper, Elliott Daingerfield, G. Ruger Donoho, Harvey Joiner, John Ross Key, Blondelle Malone, Lawrence Mazzanovich, Paul Plaschke, Hattie Saussy, Alice Ravenel, Huger Smith, Anthony Thieme, and Helen Turner.

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Information

Publisher
University of South Carolina Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9781611177176
Topic
Arte
Subtopic
Storia dell'arte moderna
Works of Art

WAYMAN ELBRIDGE ADAMS (1883–1959)

The Three Graces
Oil on wood panel, 10 x 7 inches
Drawn to the South by the exotic flavor of the New Orleans French Quarter, Wayman Adams was born in Indiana, where his early artistic achievements earned him the sobriquet of “the boy artist of Muncie.” The author and critic Wilbur Peat has noted that Adams’ “technical development was rapid and his remarkable facility in handling brushes and paint was admired by his fellow students and instructors.”1 His early formation as an artist was guided by several important members of the Hoosier Group—a loose collective of Impressionist artists associated with Indiana. After enrolling in the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis in 1904, Adams soon sought out instructors of national note while undertaking the time-honored journey to Europe.
On his study trips to the continent, Adams worked with two seminal, though disparate, figures in the American art world: William Merritt Chase in 1910 and Robert Henri in 1912. While Chase’s flamboyant personal style may have personified Gilded Age American artistic pretense, he was a distinct talent and a nurturing mentor. Whether abroad or at his Shinnecock summer school, Chase encouraged his followers to paint en plein air. Chase’s Long Island scenes captured the brilliance of light on the sand dunes through seemingly spontaneous brushwork applied to an entrancingly clear color. “To Chase, modern painting was both a depiction of modern life—a record of contemporary manners, mores, and dress—and an art, freed from literature and imaginative invention, that stressed, as the strategy for its liberation, the purely visual as well as the means and methods of painting itself.”2
Adams’ affinity with Chase can be seen in his small but masterful oil sketch, The Three Graces. While the subject matter—three little girls elaborately garbed in billowing dresses and fanciful bows—may seem a tad precious, the brushwork and color highlights are at one with the Impressionist avant-garde. The cascading glimpses of pink and mauve, set against a dark background, create a punctuating rhythm made slightly elusive by the faintly evanescent brushwork. A contemporary observer of Adams at work noted that in his “early stages the color was kept exceedingly simple and the tones quite flat, but so true in hue and value that the final painting appeared to be a matter of relatively slight modifications.”3
Adams also worked with Robert Henri, accompanying that artist on a study tour to Spain in 1912. Although both Chase and Henri were leading lights of the American Impressionist style, Henri’s affiliation with the Ashcan School set him apart. While Chase’s paintings often deployed the wonders of natural light, Henri cast his work in darker, oft times more somber and gritty tones. Henri articulated his theories in a series of lectures and comments to his classes at the Art Students League. Advocating a more emotive response to subject matter, he urged his pupils to “start with a deep impression, the best, the most interesting, the deepest you can have of the model; to preserve this vision throughout the work; to see nothing else; to admit of no digression from it.” Henri felt himself to be “looking at each individual with the eager hope of finding there something of the dignity of life, the humor, the humanity, the kindness” essential to “all genius, all true progress, all significant beauty.”4 Adams’ exposure to these ideas is crucial to an understanding of his gaze, especially the way in which he beheld the earthy subjects he found on travels to the Deep South. Exhibition records and extant dated work indicates that Adams often wintered in New Orleans between 1916 and 1928. During those years, the cheap rent and easy living in the French Quarter attracted various artists and writers whose antics make up the legends and lore of what has been called a “Dixie Bohemia.” In this setting, Adams found plentiful subject matter, creating paintings which echo Henri’s lessons in an earnest, and heartfelt, realism.
ECP
Images

GEORGE CHARLES AID (1872–1938)

Hiver en ForĂȘt de Fontainebleau [Winter in the Forest of Fontainebleau]
Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches
Once a royal hunting ground, the legendary forest of Fontainebleau became a favored destination for tourists and artists alike during the early nineteenth century. Its name is distilled from the appellation fontaine belle eau—the fountain of beautiful water thought to spring from a source deep in the woods. Though its history was that of a restricted pleasure park for the ancient French regime, Fontainebleau became, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era, a cherished site for romantic retreats from the Parisian tumult. Located some thirty-five miles southeast of the city, the forest’s popularity was greatly enhanced when train service, established in 1849, provided a quick and easy link from Paris-Gare de Lyon terminal. Once there, “urban bohemians” could “escape the crushing monde of bourgeois Paris and rediscover their own nature and the world’s, amidst the peace and solitude of the forest.”1
Travel writers from the early nineteenth century extolled its untamed quality. “There does exist a forest for which we must admit an especial predilection—for within the limits of civilization . . . yet possessing features as wild and characteristic as [Salvator] Rosa might have deigned to paint . . . [is] the forest of Fontainebleau—still savage in its scenery.”2 The French painters Camille Roqueplan, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot responded to that wildness and were among the first generation of artists fascinated by Fontainebleau’s “multitude of picturesque effects. The variety and size of its trees constantly amazed visitors. Barbizon became especially famous for its giant oak trees, which seemed all the more massive next to the many elegant birches and elms.”3
However, it was not until 1849 when Jean-François Millet took up residence in the wood-cutter village of Barbizon that one of the seminal schools of Western art was born. Though the art of this school was often deemed vulgar by French critics fearful for the autonomy of the academy, the renderings of rustic terrain and humble peasantry toiling in the fields found an appreciative audience in America. “As apprehended by the American artist and patron,” art in the Barbizon mood “was a state of mind through which nature could enter the realm of art without ceasing to be nature.” It offered both practitioner and viewer a sensuous “tranquility remote from the grandeur of the Yellowstone” or the majesty of vast Hudson River depictions of blazing sunsets and towering precipices.4
George Aid was part of a second wave of expatriate artists who studied in France and created artwork in the Barbizon style then so fashionable with American collectors. He was a native of Illinois who arrived in Paris by way of Missouri, where he had studied with Halsey Ives, founder of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. Ives had established a foreign study scholarship fund, which in January 1899 was awarded, in part, to Aid. Upon his arrival in Paris that spring, Aid came under the guidance of the American Impressionist painter Lawton Parker, who gave him lodging and sponsored his admission to the AcadĂ©mie Julian. Aid and his compatriots established modest studios in Montparnasse, where they “lived cheaply . . . drank wine, and ate mostly beans, dry bread, and raw onions, like the French lower classes.”5 He also indulged in the wealth of artwork available for viewing throughout the city of lights, especially in the MusĂ©e de Luxembourg where works by the Barbizon painters were displayed as contemporary masterpieces. Aid’s painting, Hiver en ForĂȘt de Fontainebleau, most likely dates from the early days of his Parisian sojourn. In this work, he has certainly captured the atmospheric essence and tonal values of the rugged landscape whose massive rock formations rise up before the extended view of the distant towering hillside, shadowed in grey-green and mauve.
Writing of the artist and his work in 1934, one critic observed Aid’s abiding interest in his chosen subject matter, “be that a human being or a Chinese vase or a mountain. His outlook on life is kindly, so, it shows on his canvases. There is no attempt to force attention. It is gained by the dignity of the work. First, last, and all of the time he is natural and sincere, doing his work as seems fit and best for expressing his convictions regarding art.”6
ECP
Images

CARL CHRISTIAN BRENNER (1838–1888)

Winter, 1884
Oil on canvas, 16⅛ x 21⅛ inches
Carl Brenner’s career as a painter of hauntingly dramatic and serenely alluring landscapes was shaped by two distinctly different developmental phases: his childhood and early education in Germany, and his coming of age during the years of the great industrial expositions held in Louisville, Kentucky, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Brenner was a native of Lauterecken, a medieval trading center poised at the base of a range of towering mountains in the Rhineland-Palatinate. As befits most artistic legends, he was deemed a prodigy, the favored pupil of a local drawing master. Though Brenner later recalled his first teacher with deep affection, it was his love of the Bavarian forest which lingered longest in his creative imagination. Louisville Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson, an intimate and patron of Brenner, reported that he “was fascinated when a boy by the beauties of the beech in his native German woods, and the love never left him.”1
The Germany of Brenner’s youth was an erratic collection of city-states in search of a unifying history. Had his ambitions of study at the Royal Academy in Munich been realized, he would have found himself in one of the cultural capitals of the German romantic movement. He instead became a member of the flourishing immigrant community that developed in Louisville, where Germans comprised thirty-five percent of the population at the time of the Brenners’ arrival there in 1854. George C. Doern, editor of the Louisville Anzeiger—one of several German language newspapers in the city—was one of Brenner’s earliest promoters; upon seeing the sketches Brenner had made on his upriver journey from New Orleans, he “at once advised Brenner to become a landscape painter.”2
However, Brenner’s father, a glazier by trade, discouraged this pursuit and took young Carl into his own business. By 1861, city directories list Carl Brenner as a house painter, though he soon moved on to more creative and lucrative work as a sign and ornamental painter. Little is known, or remains, of any paintings Brenner created prior to his first public exhibition at the Louisville Industrial Exposition in 1874. The annual exhibitions of European and American art staged in the galleries of that event, as well as the Louisville Southern Expositions held between 1883 and 1887, provided the local audience and fledgling artists an unparalleled opportunity. Old master paintings were shown alongside work by current artists of substantial reputation. Most importantly for Brenner, the realism and naturalism of the Barbizon and Hague Schools were well represented. These installations became so important in scope and so popular with the general public that by 1884, one of the most illustrious art impresarios in America, Charles M. Kurtz, served as chairman of the selection committee.
During his first years as a full-time artist, Brenner’s style moved beyond the dark tonal strains of the Munich School towards the rich golden glow of the Barbizon School, as exemplified in Winter. Here, he employs the use of vanishing point perspective to draw the viewer’s attention to a remote point—in this case a rustic cottage, miniscule on the far-flung horizon line. Over time, Brenner adopted the beech trees that lined Louisville’s waterways and parklands and the surrounding countryside as his favorite subject. In 1881, he sold Afternoon in Early June, A Kentucky Beech Grove (1880) to William Wilson Corcoran, securing his place on both the regional and national stages.
Though Brenner’s appropriation of the beech tree as his personal icon could result in formulaic work, he did hazard some avant-garde approaches to the subject. Family members recalled how much Brenner “loved these trees and was never happier than when he went out . . . to study them with their drooping boughs, their clinging leaves and great boles flecked with moss and lichens.”3 Subsequent critics have praised the stylistic evolution engendered by Brenner’s plein air painting expeditions, which culminated in a mature Tonalist aesthetic. “He now rendered his subjects in fresh colors which strike the observed as being the colors of nature truthfully observed,” a statement in keeping...

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