Text c. The Naturalistic Tradition and Cosmopolitanism,

1870-1900

In the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the continuing cultural tug-of-war between the powerful allure of Europe and a fierce American chauvinism is evident in both literature and painting. Not all artists were committed to the cosmopolitan form of art, for a pro-American sentiment was actually very strong. Some Americans chose to mock European art and ways of life rather than to admire and follow them. Mark Twain in his book Innocents Abroad seldom takes seriously the sights of Europe meant to impress him, and frequently draws humorous comparisons between the New and Old Worlds – the American example usually being found superior.

Realism became a potent force in American art. Realistic style and nationalistic subject matter blend with unpretentiousness and naturalistic vision to create something wholly American, and totally independent of European traditions.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), a famous American naturalist painter, is often considered, along with Thomas Eakins, one of the greatest American 19th-century artists.

Born February 24, 1836, in Boston, Homer was almost entirely self-taught as a painter. In 1857 he sought work as a magazine illustrator, becoming a regular contributor to the popular Harper's Weekly. His illustrations, primarily engravings, were characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrasts of light and dark, and lively groupings of figures. These qualities were to remain important characteristics of his art throughout his career.

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Homer made several trips to the Virginia front, where he painted his first important oil, Prisoners from the Front (1866, Metropolitan Museum, New York City), a work notable for its cool objectivity and vigorous realism.

In 1856 he spent a year in France, but although his interest in the painterly possibilities of natural light ran parallel to that of the early impressionists, he was not directly influenced by impressionism or French art. In 1873 he began working in watercolor, a medium that became as important to him as oil. His subject matter of the 1870s was primarily rural or idyllic – scenes of farm life, usually children at play or work; and resort scenes peopled with fashionable women; one of the best known of the former type is Snap the Whip (1872, Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio) and of the latter is Long Branch, New Jersey (1869, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

A stay in England from 1881 to 1882, during which Homer lived in a fishing village, led to a permanent change in his subject matter. Thereafter he concentrated on large-scale scenes of nature, particularly scenes of the sea, of its fishermen, and of their families. Taking up solitary residence on the Maine coast at Prout's Neck, he produced such masterpieces of realism as Eight Bells (1886, Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts); in it the drama of the sea scene is imbued with an epic, heroic quality that symbolizes the dominant theme of his maturity: human struggle with the forces of nature.

After 1884, Homer spent many of his winters in Florida, in the Bahamas, and in Cuba. His many scenes of the Tropics were painted mostly in watercolor, and his technique was the most advanced of its day – loose, fresh, spontaneous, almost impressionistic, although it never lost its basic grounding in naturalism. In 1899 he painted one of his most powerful works, the frightening Gulf Stream (Metropolitan Museum), which depicts a solitary black sailor in a small, disabled boat, beset by sharks and alone on a billowing sea.

Homer moved out of New York in 1884, and settled permanently in Prout's Neck on the rocky, sea-bashed coast of Maine. The basic elements of nature fascinated him, and he painted a splendid series of pictures of the eternal confrontation of sea and rock – the unending pounding, crashing, and roaring, the silent resistance, and the ever present drenching spray – which seemed to him a heroic struggle of primeval forces of nature. Human presence was not needed, or was dwarfed and overwhelmed if included. Water, air, and rock remain tangible, physical substances in those works – as one would expect of Homer.

In the grandeur of his themes and the strength of his designs he became a dominant influence on the American realist style of painting. Homer died in Prout's Neck on September 29, 1910.

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), an American realist painter, is one of the foremost of the 19th century. Working independently of contemporary European styles, he was the first major artist after the American Civil War to produce a profound and powerful body of work drawn directly from the experience of American life.

Born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1844, Eakins studied drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1861 to 1866. His concurrent study of anatomy at Jefferson Medical College led to a lifelong interest in scientific realism. Eakins spent three years in Paris from 1866 to 1869, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was strongly influenced by 17th-century masters, particularly the Dutch artist Rembrandt and the Spanish painters Josepe de Ribera and Diego Velázquez. These masters impressed him with their realism and psychological penetration. He returned to Philadelphia in 1870 and lived there the rest of his life.

Eakins's paintings depict scenes and people observed in the life around him in Philadelphia, particularly domestic scenes of his family and friends. He exercised his scientific inclination in paintings of sailing, rowing, and hunting, where he delineated the anatomy of the human body in motion. He painted several large and powerful hospital scenes, most notably The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia), which combined sharp realism – a depiction of an operation in progress – with psychological acuity in the portrayal of the surgeon, Doctor Gross.

As director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins introduced an innovative curriculum, including thorough study of anatomy and dissection as well as scientific perspective, which revolutionized the teaching of art in America. His insistence on study from the nude scandalized the school's authorities, however, and he was forced to resign in 1886.

During the later part of his career, Eakins's scientific interests were overshadowed by his preoccupation with psychology and personality, and in his art he concentrated principally on portraiture – studies of friends, scientists, musicians, artists, and clergymen. In addition to their masterly evocation of personality, these portraits are characterized by uncompromising realism and by a sculptural sense of form, which is evident in the strong modeling of the sitters' heads, bodies, and hands. Typical of his full-length portraits is The Pathetic Song (1881, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), with the standing figure of a singer in a rich silk gown silhouetted against a dimly lighted music room.

Although none of his paintings brought him financial or popular success, Eakins had a profound influence, both as a painter and as a teacher, on the course of American naturalism. His realistic approach to painting was ahead of his time. He died in Philadelphia on June 25, 1916.

Realism was not the only potent force in American painting in the late nineteenth century, for there were many artists who associated themselves with a variety of international, cosmopolitan art movements. Numerous foreign styles were introduced to the mainstream of American painting, mainly by American expatriate painters studying abroad. American artists contributed significantly to the international movements, and artists such as Whistler and Sargent were as well-known as any painter of their day. In their work – as well as that of the American Impressionists, the Tonalists, the Symbolists, and so forth – realism is of little concern.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), is a famous American painter and etcher, who assimilated Japanese art styles, made technical innovations, and championed modern art. Many regard him as preeminent among etchers.

Whistler was born on July 10, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts. By the age of nine, he was taken by his family to Russia, where his father worked as a railroad engineer. In 1849 he returned to the USA and entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851, did not do well in his studies, and left in 1854 to take a job as a draftsman with the U.S. Coast Survey. One year later he left the United States and went to Paris, where he became a pupil of the Swiss classicist painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre. Formal instruction influenced him less, however, than his acquaintance with the French realist painter Gustave Courbet, other leading contemporary artists, and his own study of the great masters and of Japanese styles.

In Paris, Whistler won recognition as an etcher when his first series of etchings, Twelve Etchings from Nature (commonly called The French Set), appeared in 1858. Later he moved to London, where his paintings, hitherto rejected repeatedly by the galleries of Paris, found acceptance. At the Piano was shown by the Royal Academy of London in 1860. In 1863 Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) won great acclaim in Paris. Thereafter exhibitions of his work aroused increasing international interest, as did his flamboyantly eccentric personality.

Three of Whistler's best-known portraits, Arrangement in Black and Grey No. 1: Whistler's Mother (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Thomas Carlyle (1872-1874, City Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), and Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (Tate Gallery, London) were painted around 1872. In 1877 he exhibited a number of landscapes done in the Japanese manner; these paintings, which he called “symphonies” and “nocturnes”, outraged conservative art opinion, which did not understand his avoidance of narrative detail, his fascination with abstract qualities, his layers of atmospheric color, and his belief in art for art’s sake. The English art critic John Ruskin wrote a caustically critical article, saying, for example, that Whistler had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Whistler, charging slander, sued Ruskin for damages. He won the case, one of the most celebrated of its kind, but the expense of the trial forced him into bankruptcy. Selling the contents of his studio, Whistler left England, worked intensively from 1879 to 1880 in Venice, then returned to England and resumed his attack on the academic art tradition.

In later years Whistler devoted himself increasingly to etching, dry point, lithography, and interior decoration. The Thames series (1860), the First Venice series (1880), and the Second Venice series (1881) heightened his standing as an etcher and won him success when they were exhibited in London in 1881 and 1883. The Peacock Room, which he painted for a private London residence (begun 1876 and moved in 1919 to the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), is the most noteworthy example of his interior decoration. Toward the end of his life, when he lived in Paris, Whistler came to be regarded as a major artist. He died in London on July 17, 1903.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), an American painter, is known for his glamorous portraits of eminent or socially prominent people of the period. He was born in Florence, Italy, of American parents. He studied art in Italy, France, and Germany, receiving his formal art education at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the Paris studio of the noted French portraitist Carolus-Duran. He spent most of his adult life in England, maintaining a studio there for more than 30 years and visiting America only on short trips.

Criticized for what some believed to be a superficial brilliance, Sargent's portraits fell into disfavor after his death. Since that time, however, these same canvases have been acknowledged for their naturalism and superb technical skill. About 1907 Sargent tired of portrait painting and accepted few commissions. He then worked chiefly on European scenes in watercolor, in a notably impressionistic style. Among his more famous works are El Jaleo (1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), Madame X (1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), The Wyndham Sisters (1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Boats at Anchor (1917, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts).

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), is a conspicuous American painter, who lived and worked in France as an important member of the impressionist group (painters who aimed to represent the effects of light on objects). Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. In 1861 she began to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but proclaimed her independence by leaving in 1866 to paint in France. By 1872, after studying in the major museums of Europe, her style began to mature, and she settled in Paris. There her work attracted the attention of the French painter Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with his fellow impressionists. One of the works she showed was The Cup of Tea (1879, Metropolitan Museum, New York City), a portrait of her sister Lydia in luminescent shades of pink.

Beginning in 1882 Cassatt's style took a new turn. Influenced, like Degas, by Japanese woodcuts, she began to emphasize line rather than form or mass and experimented with asymmetric composition – as in The Boating Party (1893, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.) – and informal, natural gestures and positions. Portrayals of mothers and children in intimate relationship and domestic settings, such as The Mirror (1900?, Brooklyn Museum, New York City), or The Bath (1891-92, Art Institute of Chicago) became her theme. Her portraits were not commissioned. Instead, she used members of her own family as subjects.

France awarded Cassatt the Legion of Honor in 1904. Although she had been instrumental in advising the first American collectors of impressionist works, recognition came more slowly in the United States. With the loss of her sight she was no longer able to paint after 1914. She died at her country home outside Paris.

Cassatt is a good example of the American painter who chose to live the expatriate life abroad and partake of the exciting new influences bursting upon the art world as it made its way toward modernism. Rejection of historic styles, a fascination with light and colour for their own decorative values, participation in new experiments, the discovery of new aesthetic heroes such as the Japanese print-makers Hiroshige or Hokusai – all of these signal the spirit of change that characterized her time. Other American artists chose to return to their native land, bringing the new styles with them.