Masterpieces of the Sea/Chapter 3
III.
What was there in the sea pictures of Mr. Richards that picked them out from all others for remembrance; that made it easy for the most critical layman to say with conviction: "That's a Richards"?
In the first place they were frankly true. He painted what he saw. He made no effort to put into the picture what was not in nature.
No sensational composition; no strained effects of light and shade; no affected accent of any sort were in his mind. He wanted the observer to see what he had seen and he set it down with the sense of proportion and the eye to justness which were his central traits of character.
Perhaps it was this recognition of simplicity as the touchstone of the artist that gave Mr. Richards his bias for Wordsworth. Those who know Wordsworth's epochal preface to the "Lyrical Ballads" will understand the affinity. The great English poet and seer laid down the law that for over two generations has governed English poetry. There was to be no more artificiality, no more theatrical appeal, no more rhetoric and antithesis and unnatural posing. The mellow English speech was to return to the nursery and it was to tell tales of plain life, unvarnished nature, simple reality.
This was the preference of Mr. Richards as an artist. He looked out at nature in a reverent spirit. He had instincts to copy and to interpret. He never felt the need to add adornments of his own or to force his personality into the transcript. His was not the fame at stake, but nature's. He never thought of himself. He was not a high priest in theatric robes; but an humble worshipper. Why should he be supplying additions or trimmings to a sight already so overpowering in its beauty and mystery? If he could get the facts stated in a language every eye could recognize—that was a great thing, that was the duty nature was fulfilling through him. He was to see justly and report accurately and the soul within him would make pictures if he only kept his head level and his eye alert and bent to his task.
Without a soul to respond to something larger in nature than the detail, this faithful copying would, of course, result only in an accurate photograph. There would be a transcript, with the spirit omitted, as in the case with so much that is called art—a semblance of form without its moving principle.
But it was Mr. Richards' high merit as a man and as an artist that he brought to this task, so devotedly and lovingly performed, a soul that infused life into the work; that he lent it his own devout and tender love of beauty and his veneration of nature's living impulse. He copied what he saw with minute fidelity; he was led to copy because he loved what he saw and recognized the divine light shining through its surfaces; but if he had not also brought to the worship of nature the _DjVu_pg_79a.jpg)
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soul which stood for him, and him alone—his penetrating individuality—he would not have made works which all his contemporaries acknowledge as embodiments of truth and beauty when they say: "That is a Richards."
And this suffusion of his art into himself was shown as well in his color. He was not at the beginning a rich or great colorist. If he had shortcomings in his talent, color was the principal of them. He had individuality and personal traits in his color as he had in all he did. This was another manifestation of the spirit's influence which made a unit of his work. All that he did stood for something distinctly emanating from himself. But color was not his strong point, as were fidelity and drawing and composition and selection. He was nearly always unerring in these, but in color he was sometimes perfect in detail, as often with that difficult under-side of a wave curving to a fall where the sudzy white mingles with the ineffable green; and again he would fail to give the freshness and floating depth to a sky full of clouds, or the silvery gray of a long vista of New Jersey beach. He knew nature so well, was so much in her secrets, that he was alive to all her myriad beauties of tint and changing hue; but his paint did not always take on the magic of his model, tho' in pictures like that memorable one of the bare tracery of the trees against a winter's sunset his brush was dipped into tones that were not far from nature's own.
It was, indeed, characteristic that Mr. Richards should restrain himself in the use of color. His whole life was one of salutary restraint. He was half-Quaker in his treatment of the alternatives which life presented to him. He liked simple clothes, and plain surroundings; why should he not see nature in her simpler colors; or, when confronted with a choice, cleave to the subdued and quiet and unsensational? He had his own wise ways and he followed them whether they led from convention or not. He would no doubt have admired Lumenaise or Ryder for glorious and precious color; no doubt he enjoyed the varied fashions in dress of France and Italy; but he did not adopt the one nor covet the other—he went, like the single-hearted gentleman he was, after his own leading and independently interpreted his own mind.
We are told that sometimes in speaking of his earlier work, he would call it monochromatic, and this was, in the main, a just criticism from a self-analysing spirit; but those also who have seen many of his last canvases must recognize a veritable "sea-change" in his variety and richness of color—not constant but occasional, and indeed sometimes implying that he too, like Thomas Hovenden and Alexander Harrison, had instinctively taken what was best, by compromise and adaptation, from the Impressionists. Indeed, he was glad to express his obligation to this modern school for help when he felt that he could well accept it; although he abhorred the prevalent neglect of careful drawing and inattention to form and modelling. His always progressive mind was thus alert for what could add to his equipment even when he had passed into the sixties.
It was in drawing that Mr. Richards was a master. From the first this seems to have been implanted in him. I do not mean that it came instinctively; no such trait ever comes without work and thought. But the germ of correct vision and apt manual dexterity must have been born with him; and luckily he was gifted with a mind and a bodily diligence which brought that germ out and developed it to its limit. His patience and his diligence were, of course, essential to the full flowering of this faculty. He could not have drawn so masterfully if he had not studied unceasingly; but this is only saying that Mr. Richards was a marked man from the start, and if I make this clear in a loving attempt to do him justice I shall have done all I sought to do.
I have seen that other master of drawing, William _DjVu_pg_85.jpg)
M. Chase, stand before a marine of Mr. Richards' and, lifting his stovepipe hat, with a low bow, say:
"I take my hat off to him. He's a master of drawing—I take off my hat"
And if any one wanted to test this faculty of Mr. Richards' artistic equipment, after such authoritative statement, he need only look at the black and white reproductions of the varied marines and landscapes and notice how much they resemble photographs direct from nature; how true they are to the form, and mass and relative distance and aerial perspective of the world about us. This is what is meant by drawing, and only a draughtsman of genius can draw with paint in that faultless and fearless manner.
The sister-sense to drawing—indeed, the elder sister—is, of course, observation. Without keen insight and the patience to watch the processes of nature that abound in beautiful profusion about us, there is no foundation for reproducing them enduringly with a brush. What you don't observe you cannot describe or depict. We have seen that this trait of unhurried and penetrating observation was one of those gifts on which Mr. Richards built his life. He meant to see nature close and see it whole, and he never faltered from the beginning in this principle of design and drawing. He needed to draw the movement and animation of breaking or surging waves, and he went to the best school in the universe, the surf itself. He found the picturing of the sea a tradition established by Claude and continued by Turner. Vague breadths and reaches of the shores and the ocean were suggested by color and form, and deep vistas of sunlight or cloud carried the eye away from fact into the unreality of visions—beautiful, inspiring and masterly as dreams; but more in the nature of "impressions" than those so-called of our time.
This rendition of the facts that Mr. Richards loved he could not accept. For him, nature was supremely beautiful only when it was true, and he resolved, with the spirit of his age upon him, to give up visions and seek the miraculous facts.
It is to illustrate this characteristic that I am going to quote a passage from one of the soundest critics of art we have had in this country, Dr. Alfred C. Lambdin, an old friend of Mr. Richards', whose deeply-based views never faltered in dealing with the artist's gifts.
"With that power of analysis which always distinguishes him he strove to ascertain the laws which govern the wave forms, and from that time for several years he devoted all his intelligence to the study of the sea. To him was given in reward that rare opportunity which comes to so few men, to do a new thing. No artist had ever before studied the wave motions in an exact and scientific manner, so as to understand the relations of one wave to another and of all to the undercurrents and the wind and the tide, and all those varied forces which make the water on one shore, or under one sky, so different from the water on another shore or under another sky. This study was an arduous one. The facts must all be stored in the memory and the effect worked out by a mental process. To do this and at the same time add to the result of an intellectual process the vigor and robustness which comes from work done directly in the presence of the thing depicted was an impossibility all at once, and the earlier attempts were marked by a thinness and smallness of style, which gave great offense to the learned art critics. But no one could deny that the facts were for the first time accurately stated, and the effect upon the other painters of the sea was immense. It worked a revelation in the minds of the younger men; and it will never again be possible to make the world accept the old-fashioned wave drawing for accurate representation."
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CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, D. C.
busy career. From the eighteen-fifties to nineteen hundred and five is a wide stretch—fifty-five years of ceaseless sowing makes a great harvest. But nobody could now trace all the work he did. We realize its extent by the examples known to each of us, prized dearly by their owners and held in many American cities publicly and privately.
If the many who own "A Richards" could be led to tell us of it, the record would roll up a great tribute to the genius and industry of one independent American man of thought and action in a day of apathy; and it would prove, some time, of value for the annals of a period in American art, rich in its formative influences toward a distinctive national school.
Of this movement, William T. Richards was a beginner and a leader. If we stand now for anything in art it is for the straightforward conveyance of facts. This is not the utmost limit of any art. There are ideals beyond facts and imaginative truths beyond ideals.
But no national art has ever begun at the top and grown backwards. Method must be learnt before the thing to be expressed and the thing expressed comes before imaginative excursions. Through these stages we have been going, and one of the surest and safest guides in method and expression was Mr. Richards. He had his own ideals, his own visions of grandeur in cliff and sea, he made his own adventurous way in the dizzy places of higher art, and he has left noble examples, poetic and uplifting. But his great merit was his painstaking application, his impeccable drawing, his humble and loving observation of nature, and his mastery of his art.
One of the lasting impressions of one's life is that scene at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, when it was in its glory and conferred on its old and honored pupil and Academician the highest award in its gift: the Gold Medal of Honor. At that dinner, where all the American artists of the time were grouped amongst their works, he was acclaimed by his peers for his merits, and his modest emotions are never to be forgotten, his pleasure and his deprecating, appealing acceptance of recognition, so generous and so just.
His had been a long patient journey, traversing many ways of deprivation and many upward and downward paths. There were honors enough—at the "Centennial," in 1876, in Paris, and in Philadelphia at an earlier day; but this was the culminating glory and it came fitly at the end: a golden crown for his silver locks.