JOHN H. TWACHTMAN JOHN COURNOS F it were really possible for the soul of the dead to inhabit I' a new body, then we could say with some degree of assur ance that the spirit of one of the painter-priests of Zen, the initiators of the Japanese Renaissance of the fifteenth century, had taken possession of John Twachtman, a painter who carried American landscape to the highest state of perfection. that it has so far reached. "In the art inspired by Zen thought," says Mr. Laurence Binyon, "material is dissolved into idea to an extreme that no other art in the world has reached. The typical Zen picture is a landscape; and before a typical Zen landscape one is scarcely conscious of the means employed by the artist; the idea of the artist's mind seems almost disembodied and immaterial, something eluding language." This description of Zen art might be applied without exaggeration to a fine example of Twachtman's art. He conceived American landscape in the same lofty mood as the masters of the Kano School Japanese landscape, or as the painters of the Sung dynasty Chinese landscape. These last had attained, in the twelfth century, to such absolute synthetical beauty and spontaneity of impression that Mr. Binyon has declared their art to be "as modern as that of Corot or Whistler." There are things in which the ancients had forestalled modernity. Twachtman is a thorough modern. He resembles, however, these Eastern artists in his contemplative attitude toward nature, in the almost ethereal character of his technique, in the purity and simplicity of his emotion, and in the imperceptible merging of his spirituality in its technical expression. Twachtman has been called an Impressionist. The assertion needs considerable qualification. For it is curious that while the effects of color and of the vibration of light, based on the ideas of Chevreuil, are in evidence, the means whereby these are obtained are far from being apparent. We are not conscious for a single moment of science, of "broken color," of routine Impressionism. We are aware only of the breath of life in the picture, of a mood imprisoned in a frame, of the exalted feeling which has prompted such sonorous expression. Twachtman is kin to Whistler rather than to Monet. Both have delicacy, reserve, the selective faculty, the sensitive vision, the power of suggestion; both have a perfect if limited instrument, possessed of the nature of a violin, for the utterance of a poetic or musical mood; an instrument, clear and resonant, capable of evoking the equivalent of sound in color, of awakening evanescent tones which vibrate and die away and become lost in infinity. And finally, both make us think, however remotely, of the votaries of Zen. Twachtman painted day as Whistler painted night. He saw nature as through a delicate gossamer. He peopled the air with his brooding thoughts and confided his spiritual experience to mists and snows and falling water. His soul loitered over the pools of autumn and the freshets of spring, and his eye conceived Niagara as a great poetic vision. We do not know that summer was among his seasons. The thaws of winter undoubtedly had a fascination for him. He always painted winter with great tenderness. He did not attempt to paint it as a harsh and wrathful visitant, but as a tranquil guest, who, as manifestation of the world's visible beauty, lent serenity to the soul. His house at Greenwich, Connecticut, often appears a dream among snows, his own humble Fuji Yama, not less sacred than the Japanese mountain, and sometimes seen through the naked branches of trees that appear outlined like glorious patterns of frost against the cold haze of rose and purple. Each detail in his best paintings makes a picture, each is a perception of infinity; and the whole picture might be a detail of a still larger picture. The scenes he has painted never end with the frame. When he shows a boat in a mist the whole thing might be a single quivering atom, no larger than a drop of water, which strives eagerly to join other affined atoms no less quivering and alive. He seldom employs a figure, but no artist has peopled his solitudes more worthily, or made the spectator more the companion of his reflections. A landscape by Twachtman, seen but once, comes back with all the poignant reality of a face seen in a dream. One remembers a little picture of a morning in spring for its keen sense of freshness, for the tender, dewy quality of its grass, for the feeling of sappiness in the young slender birches; but above all for the mood of solitude, which the artist must have felt intensely: it permeates the scene as delicately as the breath of newly-awakened earth. The process by which he expressed mood seems as effortless as it is elusive. Never does the artist betray the slightest suggestion of fatigue or of a loss in interest. Never, as one critic has said, does one find in his work an opaque shadow, a harsh edge, the pressure of a heavy hand. "Ethereal color and form seem to have been blown into the canvas." His art is a victory of the creator over his materials. The victory is two-fold. It must be borne in mind that the art of painting is externally the portrayal of concrete objects by concrete means. A painter's problem is to impart the abstract to the concrete; ideas, moods or musical sensations to visible forms. To put an extreme aspect on the matter, he must strive to make the visible invisible, and the invisible visible. It is like a problem in metaphysics. Paint is a concrete thing. A brush-stroke by itself signifies less than a word or a musical scale. Twachtman has spiritualized the objects he painted and at the same time he has spiritualized his paint. No reproduction can give even an inkling of the delicate quality of his art, which, at its best, is so subtle as to resist all efforts of the camera to reproduce it. Here is a description of one of his characteristic pictures, Horseneck Falls, Winter, by an American critic: ". . . The snow, faintly blue, fringes the cold, motionless water, and lies sprinkled on the slopes, over the dead vegetation of which seems to hover the spent breath of its winter coloring in faintest suggestion of tawny yellow, rose, and violet. In the dry, white, misty atmosphere the slender tree-stems stand, as if silent and desolate. Fecundity is checked; Nature is inert; and the soul of Nature is still in the grip of winter. The whole scene is an emanation of Nature's spirit, interpreted through the spiritual emotion of the artist." Had Monet painted the same scene he no doubt would have made us feel the power of his orchestration. But Twachtman had captured the soul. Therein lies his superiority. A man's technique is his ego, and in Twachtman this ego is supreme not by its self-assertion, but by its self-abnegation. His technique, less "professional" than Monet's, makes itself imperceptible, loses itself in the soul of things, passes in its perfection into another state, a kind of artistic Nirvana, wherein the spirit becomes free of matter. Flaubert must have meant such a state when he said: "A perfect being would no longer be egotistical." We know very little of Twachtman's life. He was born in Cincinnati in 1853. At the age of 26 he went to Munich, where he studied for two years under Laefftz. Afterwards he went to Venice with Duveneck. Later he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris under Boulanger and Lefebvre. He survived his influences. He died in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1902. He died "all too young-the inevitable consequence," we are told, “of his intense life, which must have consumed his nervous forces and drawn upon his emotional reserve with an extravagance that far exceeded nature's power to reconstruct.” D' SONNETS OF A PORTRAIT-PAINTER A Sequence ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE I EAR fellow-actor of this little stage, We play the hackneyed parts right merrily,Trifle with words drawn from the poet's page, And match our skill with cool and conscious eye. All gracious gestures of each shining rôle Have been the garments of our summer sport. But now, when ominous thunders shake my soul, My reason gives of us no high report. I could not mimic Romeo had I lain By Juliet's bier in bitter dizzy truth. Henceforth my mouthings, choked, inept, and vain, II It needs no maxims drawn from Socrates To tell me this is madness in my blood. Nor does what wisdom I have learned from these Serve to abate my most unreasoned mood. What would I of you? What gift could you bring, That to await you in the common street Sets all my secret ecstasy a-wing Into wild regions of sublime retreat? And if you come, you will speak common words, And I, poor fool, shall thrill with ghostly chords, And yet, being mad, I am not mad alone: That folly dwarfs my own. |