Then one gradually became conscious of more sobriety, earnestness, and simplicity; in fact, of a more obvious conviction, in the American work
From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.
than in that of the French section as a whole. The Americans did not seem to be painting in obedience to some vogue, still less with the purpose of creating one; they were not thrashing around for motives which should electrify, by shock or thrill, and prove a brief sensation; nor, on the other hand, did they seem to be bent upon exhibiting the particular advantages of this or that method of technique. Their work for the most part was unassuming and straightforward, penetrated with realism and often tempered with poetic feeling; not less suggestive of the true painterlike way of conceiving the subject because it was executed with so little desire to exploit the mere painterlike facility of brush work, and yet showing a sound and advanced acquisition in technique. Indeed, it was in this particular that the American work showed superior to that of Norway, with the fresh, vigorous spirit of which it otherwise had so much in common. These qualities of earnest force, of directly independent vision and strong, straightforward treatment, so conspicuous in Homer’s pictures, drew the foreign critics to a conclusion that this virile personality might be really representative of American art.
And so it is in the sense that it embodies the qualities and point of view for which all our most individual painters are striving, though its power and depth place him above any direct comparison with other painters, unless it be with Homer Martin. Like the latter, his art has grown out of and into the circumstances of his environment, the most reasonable and fertile way of growth both in plant life and in the life of man. As a boy at Cambridge, Mass., he led the true boy’s life, interested in animals, fond of fishing, observant also of the character and forms of nature, early recording his impressions on paper in a long series of methodically careful drawings. So, from the start, he learned to feel things and to see things for himself, and to express them as they affected him. The accident of an advertisement in a local paper landed him in a lithographer’s workshop, where for two years his habits of methodical application were confirmed, leaving him at the end no less earnest and enthusiastic as a student, but determined that henceforth he would bow the neck to no one. After a brief sojourn in a Boston studio, during which he contributed drawings to Harper and Brothers, he came up to New York, refusing an offer to enter the art department of those publishers, but accepting an appointment at the outbreak of the war to represent them at the front. Meanwhile, he had been attending the night school of the National Academy, and taking lessons in painting from Frederic Rondel, a Frenchman, then in considerable repute as a painter.