Whale Tale

We know almost nothing about the early life of Albert Pinkham Ryder except that he was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on March 19, 1847, when the whaling industry immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick still dominated the local economy. The same dark mystery of the sea and its largest inhabitants that enthralled Melville clearly also left an impression on Ryder’s imagination. Ryder’s Jonah (above, from 1885) clearly takes the Bible story as a launching point, but adds a roiling sea and a sense of dreadful hopelessness that is all his own. Just as Melville’s novel examines the existential dread of the discovery of man’s tiny place in a vast universe, Ryder’s painting depicts the prophet as tiny and small in the grand scheme of things, literally swallowed up by forces larger than himself. Ryder stood alone on the very shoreline of modern art in America, born too early to ride the wave of modernism that would arrive with knowledge of the Impressionists just years later.

Impressionism was already in full bloom in France by the time Ryder had become a full-fledged artist. Artist-friends of Ryder, such as J. Alden Weir, were already translating Impressionism for an American audience. Ryder, however, had already formed a style unique unto himself and could not be swayed. There’s a great sense of Romanticism and narrative drama in Ryder’s art, even at its most mysterious. Like Melville and Walt Whitman, Ryder found inspiration in European opera. The Flying Dutchman (above, from 1887) takes its subject matter from Richard Wagner’s opera of the same name. In today’s post-classical music America, it’s hard to conceive the powerful hold that opera, especially Wagner’s all-consuming works, had on the American imagination. Ryder marries his New Bedford roots with the Old Europe mythology in The Flying Dutchman to create another seascape of human frustration. Just as Wagner seemed to heap up musical motifs one upon another to generate a wall of sound full of meaning, Ryder layered paint upon paint to arrive at the effects he pictured in his mind. (Unfortunately, many of Ryder’s paintings now suffer the consequences of this piling on as the subcutaneous paint often failed to dry properly, thus leaving many of Ryder’s works horrible cracked messes that gravity itself literally pulls off of the canvas.)

One of Ryder’s closest friends and the executor of Ryder’s estate after his death was Charles Melville Dewey. Whether Dewey was related to Herman Melville, I do not know and can’t seem to find out. Contemporary accounts of Dewey don’t mention his famous possible relation because the Herman Melville we know today doesn’t become famous until the 1920s, when he’s rediscovered decades after his death. Similarly, a generation of artists right after the turn of the century “rediscovered” Ryder during their search for home-grown modernists to stand up against the invasion of European modernism at the 1913 Armory Show. Although in decline, Ryder lived long enough to enjoy this honor. In works such as Moonlight (above, from 1887), Ryder continues to haunt American art history as a strange branch in the family tree, which eventually bore fruit in influencing artists as diverse as Marsden Hartley and Jackson Pollock. In his paintings of lonely souls borne upon dark and troubled seas, Ryder threw a lifeline to contemporaries seeking their own paths and continues to buoy experimentalists even today.

Lessons Learned

Whenever I see the name Jean-Leon Gerome I immediately think of his greatest student and one of my favorite artists, Thomas Eakins. Born May 11, 1824, Gerome taught many great artists in addition to Eakins (including Abbott Handerson Thayer, J. Alden Weir, Mary Cassatt, and Theodore Robinson, just to name prominent Americans), but he was a remarkable artist in his own right, albeit a bit of an anachronism stylistically as Impressionism raged all around him and he continued to paint neo-classically. The more I look at Gerome’s work, the more I search for keys to Eakins’ development. When I look at Gerome’s Phryne before the Areopagus (above, from 1861), I imagine Eakins having it in mind while painting The Agnew Clinic, in which another woman appears revealed before a semicircle of men, but in an operating theater rather than an ancient judicial chamber. Gerome’s Phryne before the Areopagus brought him condemnation for what many saw as a gratuitous excuse for painting a nude woman, yet he continued to paint classically inspired nudes for the rest of his life. Years later, when Eakins faced similar approbation for unashamedly studying the human body (and encouraging his own students to do the same), Eakins may have drawn strength from his old teacher’s example.

Gerome is known primarily as an Orientalist painter, traveling throughout Africa and the Middle East in search of material he translated into works such as Public Prayer in the Mosque of Amr Cairo (above, from 1870). It’s truly heartening to view the dignity with which Gerome depicts different cultures in works such as A Japanese Imploring a Divinity (1880), The Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau (1864), The Wailing Wall, and Recreation in a Russian Camp, Souvenir of Moldavia (1855). Sure, paintings of slave markets and harems can be found in Gerome’s oeuvre, but a single painting such as A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer (1879) outweighs all the cheesecake nudes painted for a buying (male) audience. Eakins rarely travelled, but it’s easy to see the same inquisitive nature that led Gerome to explore the world at large in Eakins’ paintings of the scientists, physicians, and clergy found mostly around his native Philadelphia.

The fact that both Gerome and Eakins struggled with public perception of their painted nudes took a similar toll on both artists. In 1895, Gerome painted himself sculpting a young nude woman in his studio, calling it The Artist's Model (above). From the positioning of the woman and the title of the work, Gerome clearly wanted to emphasize the importance of the human figure to his work. Gerome’s 1849 painting Michelangelo (aka, In His Studio) similarly placed the master beside the Belvedere Torso, just one of the classical nude statues that influenced Michelangelo’s works. I don’t know what paintings of Gerome’s Eakins may have seen, but in 1877 Eakins painted William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, showing his American predecessor William Rush working from a live, nude model just as Gerome looked back at Michelangelo’s example. In 1908, four years after Gerome’s death and just 8 years before his own, Eakins returned to the subject in William Rush and his Model. Although the title says Rush’s name, the artist shown is clearly a self-portrait of Eakins, who helps his nude model step down from the podium, allowing the human form itself to take center stage, just as in Gerome’s painting. I’ve never seen anything written about whether Eakins knew that late painting by Gerome. It would be even more remarkable if Eakins didn’t know it, as it would illustrate just how attuned these two artists—student and teacher—truly were, irrespective of time and place. Great minds, at least in this case, thought alike.

Patron Saint of American Modernism

When European Modernism landed on American shores with the 1913 Armory Show, planners such as Walt Kuhn and Arthur Davies searched for an American artist to include with the likes of Cezanne and Matisse. Reaching back into the past, they pulled forward Albert Pinkham Ryder as the standard-bearer of proto-Modernism in American painting. Born March 19, 1847, Ryder had become by 1913 a sickly, eccentric, reclusive old man holed up in his filthy Greenwich Village home, nearly forgotten by the art world except for the informed insiders. The Ryder who painted works such as Roadside Meeting (above, from the 1880s) and befriended artists such as John La Farge and J. Alden Weir and authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson now appeared as a ghost of artistry long past and simultaneously a harbinger of things to come.

Ryder’s penchant for simplifying shapes and colors in works such as Moonlight Marine (above, from 1908) easily fits in with the reduction of the subject into basic shapes that marks much of modern art. Ryder’s love for imaginative literature, from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe to the tales of the Ring Cycle that Richard Wagner mined for his operas, fired his visual imagination. Moonlight Marine shows a mysterious seascape that suggests more than it presents, coyly drawing you into the darkness of the work itself. It is easy to take this mystery of Ryder’s paintings and apply them to the man himself, especially when considering his change in behavior in later years. However, Ryder did help found the Society of American Artists in 1878, the closest thing American art has had to a secessionist movement, in response to the exclusionary actions of the National Academy of Design. Like his paintings, Ryder himself was multi-layered; unlike his paintings, however, the façade of the myth of the lonely genius has yet to crack.





I like to think of Ryder as the American visual arts’ equivalent of Herman Melville in terms of “rediscovery.” Melville was never “forgotten,” but in the 1920s and 1930s, when America rose to world prominence post-World War I, the call went out for a great American novel and Moby-Dick was nominated. When American art and culture first embraced European modernism in 1913, they needed a champion of their own to meet the European modernists on the playing field. Ten of Ryder’s works appeared in the show. I personally love works such as Ryder’s The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) (above, from 1895-1910) for their weirdness and strange beauty. He’s so unlike contemporaries such as Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent that it’s hard to believe they lived and painted at the same time. Ryder reportedly slept on a rolled-up carpet in his slovenly apartment near the end, having few visitors yet welcoming those who did seek him out. His poor technique of applying paints and varnishes, as well as the dirt that literally found its way from his studio into the paintings, has taken a toll on the works, with still-moist layers of paint beneath dry surfaces cracking and shifting to the point that helpless conservators need to exhibit some works flat. The unstable chemistry of the paintings has altered their appearance, most likely making them darker, leaving us only to guess at what caught the eye of earlier admirers. Jackson Pollock ranked Ryder as one of his influences, a prophet of sorts that served as the template for the isolated American genius painting in his own way and ignoring the popular trends. Sadly, we see Ryder as if through a glass darkly today, but the glimpses we do catch make him all the more fascinating.

Art Allies

Born on this date in 1859, Childe Hassam painted some of the finest Impressionist paintings ever done by an American artist. As much as he loved Paris and the countryside of the French Impressionists, Hassam loved even more his native country, especially the streets of New York City, his home for most of his life. During World War I, Hassam painted many scenes of the patriotic fervor surrounding the push for America to enter the war and the patriotic frenzy that broke out when it finally entered the fray. Allies Day, May 1917 (above) shows the flags of the United States of America, France, and England hanging from the buildings lining the day’s parade route. Without showing the throngs of people gathered, Hassam captures the spirit of the time in the bold colors of the flags, which drape rhythmically off into space. Throughout his career, Hassam himself forged alliances with other artists that helped further his own career as well as the school of Impressionism in America.

Hassam discontinued using his given first name, Frederick, in favor of his unique middle name Childe (pronounced “child”) to add to his artistic mystique. A high-school dropout, Hassam learned wood engraving before moving on to illustration and watercolor. While in London, he admired the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner. In Paris, he studied with Salon academics but felt drawn more to the outlaw style of the Impressionists exhibiting throughout the city. Hassam succeeds most when he brings that Impressionist style to bear on uniquely American scenes, such as Winter in Union Square (above, from 1889). He gilds “the Gilded Age” with the soft brushstrokes and atmospheric effects of Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir while still capturing the distinctly American architecture, free of the old styles of the big cities of Europe. The emergence of photography during this period allows us to see what the New York of this time looked like, but Hassam’s seasonal paintings of the city allow us to feel what it was like to live back then.

When the American art establishment, embodied by the Society of American Artists, resisted Impressionism in America, Hassam resigned and helped form the group known as The Ten with his friends and fellow Impressionists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman. Like Weir and Twachtman, Hassam also painted the rural scenery of New England, as in his Oyster Sloop, Cos Cob (above, from 1902). Again, Hassam paints a classic boating scene found often in French Impressionism but injects a new note with the distinctly New England feel. Sadly, Hassam and the American Impressionists faded from the limelight as America’s wartime alliances fostered an international interchange that introduced new modern art movements that pushed them to the margins of art history. Not until the 1960s did Hassam and the Impressionists find a new audience, hungry to find early examples of America’s entry into the world of European art.

In the Fields

American Impressionist Robert Vonnoh was born on September 17, 1858. Vonnoh remains one of the many forgotten figures of American Impressionism. While other American artists such as Theodore Robinson were learning Impressionism at Giverny at the feet of Claude Monet, Vonnoh studied in Grez-sur-Loing and Paris, more rural centers of art study. Vonnoh’s most well-known work doesn’t even carry the title he gave it—Coquelicots (i.e., Poppies). A later owner added the name of John McCrae’s World War I poem “In Flanders Fields—Where Soldiers Sleep and Poppies Grow,” incongruously covering over Vonnoh’s tranquil scene with the horror of war, perhaps to match the incongruousness of the original poem. This switch seems to be indicative of Vonnoh’s luck—always in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Vonnoh’s style emulates that of fellow American Impressionist J. Alden Weir in subjects such as his The Bridge at Grez (above) from 1907-1911. At other times, as in Poppies (top of post), he’s a colorist styled after Monet himself. This chameleon aspect of Vonnoh testifies to his great technical skills and versatility, but, again, makes it tough to pin him down as an artist. Vonnoh put those great technical skills to good use as a professor at several institutions, including the PAFA from 1891 through 1896.

Vonnoh’s married the diminutive sculptor Bessie Potter in 1899 and they remained together until his death in 1933. Bessie became one of the first American woman sculptors to rise to prominence. Vonnoh’s portrait of his wife (above) from 1907 shows her working and clearly demonstrates his pride in her skill. This portrait departs markedly from his Impressionist style, featuring instead the dark background and realistic approach of the school of Thomas Eakins, which Vonnoh may have absorbed during his tenure at the PAFA, along with some free brushwork in depicting the folds of her clothing. What Vonnoh could have achieved under the right circumstances we’ll never know.

First Impressions

J. Alden Weir, one of the first true American Impressionists and an important figure in the development and acceptance of Impressionism in America, was born on August 30, 1862. While studying in Paris under Jean-Leon Gerome, Weir first encountered the Impressionist style and brought it back with him to America and his native New England. Works such as Factory Village (above) from 1899 resemble French Impressionism in their soft focus on nature, but add the American element of industrial progress in the inclusion of a factory peeking through the flora. This realist touch may have come from Gerome, who also taught America’s preeminent realist of the late 19th century—Thomas Eakins.

In many ways, Weir acted as a bridge over which Impressionism could flourish in America. (His Red Bridge, from 1895, appears above.) When Duncan Phillips first began forming the collection known today as The Phillips Collection, Weir steered him towards collecting not only the prominent French Impressionists, such as Monet, but also towards appreciating American Impressionists such as his friend John Henry Twachtman. Phillips, of course, recognized Weir’s own talent and collected his works, too. Present-day appreciations of American Impressionism in the late 19th century owe much to Weir’s ground-breaking efforts at the time. Without his championing, who knows what works and artists could have been lost to the mists of time.

As Weir grew older, his works took on more and more of an atmospheric, almost Whistler-esque look, such as in his Moonlight (above) from 1905. Weir’s greatest talent, however, may have been in creating communities, such as the Impressionist community that grew up around him and Twachtman in New England. Weir’s connections throughout the art world were incredible (a funny picture of Weir with his friend John Singer Sargent and a portrait of Weir by Sargent are here). In 1912, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors elected Weir as their first president. Sadly, he resigned in 1913 after the Association helped sponsor the 1913 Armory Show in New York that ushered in the age of Modernism in America. After trying so hard to get Americans to embrace Impressionism, which seems hard to believe today, Weir couldn’t stand being upstaged by the new ways of seeing.

Sweet Harmony

Of all the American Impressionists that I love, John Henry Twachtman, born August 4, 1853, may be my favorite. Twachtman brings a beautifully delicate style to his Impressionism combined with a true sense of spirituality. His Winter Harmony (above) shows how masterfully he could create an entire world of whites and bring a winter scene to life in all it’s harmonious glory. He seems to have earned a reputation as being difficult during his lifetime, but I prefer to see that difficult streak as more demanding—of himself and of others pursuing a career in art.


Despite his capacity for curmudgeonry, Twachtman established many close friendships with fellow artists. J. Alden Weir and Childe Hassam, two other great American Impressionists, remained close to Twachtman up to his early death at the age of 49 from a brain aneurysm. Weir introduced the young Duncan Phillips to the art of Twachtman after Twachtman’s death. Phillips began adding Twachtman’s work to what would become the Phillips Collection obsessively, regretting that he never got to meet the man himself. Works such as The White Bridge (above) show Twachtman’s ability not only to capture the American landscape in all its delicacy and wonder but also to infuse it with the spirituality he himself felt deeply. Twachtman’s commitment to his artistic ideals led him to help form the separatist group “The Ten” after he felt that the establishment Society of American Artists had turned too conservative.

The Twachtman painting that haunts me the most is his Sailing in the Mist (above). When I saw this painting at a PAFA retrospective of Twachtman’s work years ago, it etched itself on my imagination. After the death of one of his children, Twachtman searched for a way of expressing his grief and arrived at the image of a small boat drifting off into the mist. I’ve always seen Twachtman in a different light since encountering that painting, and believe that it might be the best imaginative voyage into “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” ever done by an American. Sadly, Twachtman himself took that final voyage much too early, leaving us only a glimpse of what he could have produced.

An American Vision

Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Spring Night, Harlem River, 1913; Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 25 1/8 x 30 1/8 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1920

Holding up the works of American Impressionists to the best France had to offer, Duncan Phillips, founder of The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC once said, “Monet was only an eye, whereas Twachtman, Weir, and Lawson are also temperaments.” The singular vision of Duncan Phillips once focused tightly on American Impressionists, which made up 87 of the 237 paintings displayed when The Phillips’ doors opened in 1921. The exhibit American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection tries to recapture that moment in art history when American Impressionism stood high in American art circles and Duncan Phillips was at the center of that ascendancy.

In the companion catalogue to the exhibit, American Impressionists: Painters of Light and the Modern Landscape, Susan Behrends Frank, Assistant Curator at The Phillips Collection, pays tribute to and chronicles the journey of Duncan Phillips as he struggled to become an art critic and then amassed his renowned collection. William H. Gedts, perhaps the foremost authority on American Impressionism, provides additional context to Frank’s essay with his own essay exploring the larger reception of Impressionism in America. At the heart of both essays lies the story of the struggles Phillips and the American Impressionists had first to overcome resistance to Impressionism and then to decide what “American” Impressionism truly meant. From the very beginning, Phillips boldly hung works such as Ernest Lawson’s Spring Night, Harlem River (above) next to works by Claude Monet, the quintessential Impressionist for most Americans at the time, intentionally inviting comparisons with a faith that the Americans could hold their own and that America deserved a place next to Europe in the world of art.

Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919), Afternoon by the Pond, Ca. 1908-1909; Oil on canvas, 25 1/8 x 30 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1921

After seeing the collections of the Corcoran Gallery and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Phillips forged “an intensely self-conscious focus on the evolution of his collection in comparison… in the late teens,” Frank explains. Augustus Vincent Tack, a student of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and William Merritt Chase, became an early mentor to Phillips as he developed his critical eye and fostered contacts within American Impressionist circles. Late, Weir himself befriended Phillips and challenged him to hang the works of Americans beside those of the great European Impressionists. Through Weir’s influence, Frank explains, Phillips sought “American artists who, he believed, expressed spiritual truth as well as visual truth” in the vein of early visionaries such as George Inness, in contrast to “the theatrical vision” of the Hudson River School. Weir himself fit this bill nicely, as can be seen in his Afternoon by the Pond (above), an intimate scene of nature full of the silent, contemplative spirituality Phillips came to favor.

John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), Summer, Late 1890s; Oil on canvas, 30 x 53 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1919

Another spiritual American Impressionist Phillips learned to love through Weir was Twachtman, whom Phillips always regretted never meeting himself. Works such as
Summer (above) inspired Phillips to say that in Twachtman “impressionism [had been] carried to the heights of spiritual expression.” “Few, if any, landscape painters were more sensitive or subtle,” Phillips wrote of Twachtman. Phillips passionately collected all the Twachtman paintings he could in the years before the opening of The Phillips Collection.

Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Washington Arch, Spring, Ca. 1893; Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 22 ½ in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1921

Sadly, Phillips relationship with Childe Hassam, the American Impressionist he ranked only behind Twachtman and Weir in greatness, was more stormy. Phillips continued to collect Hassam’s work, but never with the same enthusiasm as he brought to Twachtman and Weir’s art. In the late 1920s, Hassam and Phillips argued over the direction Phillips’ collection was taking, with Hassam denigrating Phillips' taste in art as “opinionated ignorance.” However, Phillips continued to value works such as Hassam’s Washington Arch, Spring (above), one of the highlights of The Phillips Collection and of all American Impressionism.

Allen Tucker (1866-1939), The Rise, Undated; Oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 36 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1927

With the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression in the United States, The Phillips Collection fell on hard times and the market for American Impressionism slumped. At the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, where the works of Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse first exploded on the American art scene, the conservative aspects of Impressionism made the movement seem a thing of the past. Phillips himself began to collect more modernist works. In retrospect, he realized that his collection of American Impressionists helped pave the way for these modern movements. Works such as The Rise (above) by Allen Tucker, once called “The American Van Gogh,” signaled a new period for Impressionism in America.

Today, American Impressionism has achieved a rebirth among art critics. After little interest during the 1940s and 1950s, several collections of solely American Impressionism rose in the 1960s. The long-overdue recognition of the achievement of Twachtman, Weir, and Hassam, as well as that of other American Impressionists such as Maurice Prendergast, Theodore Robinson, Edmund Tarbell, and many others, owes much to Duncan Phillips and his museum. The exhibit American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection recaptures a landmark moment in American art and allows us to live it once again.

[Many thanks to The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue and the images from the exhibit.]

Two Thumbs Up

Painter of grand history and exotic locales Jean-Leon Gerome was born on this date in 1824. Gerome, one of the most widely acclaimed international painters and sculptors of his time, also taught such masters as Thomas Eakins, Odilon Redon, and J. Alden Weir in his Paris atelier. A collection of 164 of Gerome’s works can be found here.

After even just a quick look at the list of paintings in Gerome’s oeuvre, two themes stand out: paintings recreating great moments in history and/or epic scenes of exotic places, quite often with a Middle Eastern flavor. Pollice Verso (Latin for “thumbs down”), at the top of this post, may have inspired all of the modern misconceptions of the gladiators of Ancient Rome, particularly whether the death sentence was signaled by thumbs up or down. Most experts believe death was approved by thumbs up, but Gerome’s misdirected thumbs have been embedded in the popular imagination since the 19th century. Another great history painting above shows the Roman senators (including “Et tu?” Brutus) closing in at The Death of Caesar.

Gerome’s travels to Turkey and Egypt provided material for scores of paintings, such as the beautiful The Pyramids, Sunrise above. Such exotic works captured the imagination of 19th century Europe. Unfortunately, with the rise of Impressionism, the taste for Gerome’s exotic brand of Romantic realism decreased and his international reputation suffered.

I know Gerome best as the teacher of Eakins. Eakins sent a watercolor version of one of his rowing pictures to Gerome years after leaving his atelier, still seeking his maestro’s approval. Seeing Gerome’s paintings at the Musee D’Orsay brought back to me all those memories of Eakins’ affection and respect. Eakins own success as a teacher may be tied to the example of Gerome.

I recall seeing a sculpture at the Musee D’Orsay called Les Gladiateurs, Monument a Gerome that was originally thought to be a copy of a sculpture by Gerome but with additions made by one of his followers as a tribute to Gerome. The original sculpture by Gerome was believed lost. It was only years later that experts realized that the original sculpture by Gerome was actually used by his student, who simply made some additions to the original and called it his own. I like to think of that sculpture as being emblematic of Gerome’s gifts as a teacher: his students were able to make their own art, but at the heart of it always remained something that was Gerome’s.