Synopsis
Book by CohenSolal Annie
Extrait
Chapter One
One
"O, That We Had Cathedrals in America"
Around 1867, American painters rose slowly from a silent past. Their status in the United States had hardly begun to change, and indifference had for many years been their daily bread. Their careers, like that of Thomas Worthington Whittredge, had until then developed within the narrow world that was America. Born in 1820 into a farm family, near Springfield, Ohio, Worthington Whittredge was a gifted child, clever at drawing. To avoid the wrath of his father, who considered all artists "lost souls," he chose to learn the craft of lettering and poster design. He produced for local artisans and tradesmen signs on doors and storefronts that read "Smith Carpenter" or "Thompson Grocery Store."
This very limited trade soon bored him. In Indianapolis, a photographer introduced him to the technique of daguerreotype, in which he naturally progressed to portraiture. A few months later, benefiting from the dynamism of Cincinnati and its blossoming art school, Whittredge took some classes before opening his own portrait studio in Charleston, Virginia. Thanks to quick mastery of the technique, he made a decent living. But before long he began to paint; he produced landscapes, showing three works at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts and about ten others at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1849, honored with commissions and letters of credit from Joseph Longworth and William Scarborough, two Cincinnati patrons who had secured work for him, he was drawn into a current that would carry most painters of his time and struck out for Europe.
With the help of fellow Americans already abroad, Whittredge toured the main European academies. In the autumn of 1849, he spent a few days in the Barbizon artist colony, in the Fontainebleau forest near Paris. He was remembered by local painters as being "on his way to Dusseldorf." His memoirs note that while at Barbizon in the company of Jean-Francois Millet, he met a group of French artists who impressed him as genuine iconoclasts. Although he appreciated their spirit, their painting left him cold. With Emanuel Leutze, he spent five years in and around the Dusseldorf Academy, made friends with the painter Karl Friedrich Lessing,and worked studiously on his landscape technique. After that, he traveled to Italy, where-with his friends Buchanan, Haseltine, Gifford, and Bierstadt-he sketched innumerable landscapes around Naples before repairing to Paris, Brussels, and London.
In 1859, back in the United States after ten years in Europe, Whittredge settled with other landscape artists in New York City, at 15 West Tenth Street, a magic address in the history of American art; this handsome building of studios was to become the center of the New York art world in the coming years. Suddenly feeling himself at the heart of everything, the boy from Springfield, Ohio, had trouble getting his bearings. "This was the most crucial period of my life," he wrote. "It was impossible for me to shut out from my eyes the works of the great landscape painters which I had so recently seen in Europe, while I knew well enough that if I was to succeed, I must produce something new and which might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings. I was in agony."
His European experience had been a culture shock, a total upheaval, a bout of vertigo. He needed five full working years to get back on his feet. Then, supported by the fraternity of John W. Casilear, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford R. Gifford, and Jervis McEntee, he traveled as much as he could, absorbing his own country, from the Mississippi River to the deserts of New Mexico, from the Catskills to the Rocky Mountains, from the Rio Grande to the Shawangunks. Managing at last to "shut out from his eyes" his memories of his master, the painter Claude Lorrain, he was able to develop a very personal sensitivity to the American landscape. In 1864 came his first post-European success, The Old Hunting Grounds. The painting depicted a stand of somber birch trees, with a splash of light at its center; in front, a riverbank and an abandoned old Indian canoe. This canvas, shown at the National Academy of Design, was promptly acquired by the collector James W. Pinchot and, three years later, was exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle. American critics wrote that by including the Indian canoe, the painter had made an important political and historical comment. For many years, they considered this work an icon.
In 1860, Worthington Whittredge was elected to the National Academy of Design. At age forty, this tall, striking man appeared strangely grave, an eccentric with a colossal forehead, a gigantic black beard, and somber, protruding eyes under immense eyebrows. In fact, his face tempted many a portraitist, such as his friend Leutze, who dressed him in an old uniform as the father of the American nation for Washington Crossing the Delaware, his most famous canvas. Whittredge was well-liked, generous, hard-working, studious, and considerate toward his peers; in 1875 they elected him president of the National Academy of Design, a position he held until 1877.
Concentrating on the panoramas of his homeland, he steadfastly pursued a career as a landscapist. Carrying his gun, stool, umbrella, and paint box, he set out on often dangerous expeditions to discover new subjects. He worked particularly hard on a canvas called Crossing the Ford, struggling especially with one obsessive detail: a stand of cottonwood trees. Determined to get it right, he consulted guides of the region, traveled back to Colorado, and, between Denver and Loveland Pass, searched for several months for a particular group of trees he had discovered four years earlier along the banks of the Cache la Poudre River. He finally found the place and worked desperately, producing sketch after sketch, to render an accurate version of this singular group of trees. Only after two years' effort could he assure himself that he had succeeded.
At the 1876 Centennial Philadelphia Exposition, a critic hailed Crossing the Ford as a "model of excellence." Two years later, another one described it as "the archetype of American landscapes." No wonder, therefore, that it was acquired by the greatest collector of Whittredge's work, Othniel C. March, a paleontologist at Yale and director of the university's Peabody Museum. As a scientist, March passionately admired Whittredge's work both for his topographical precision and his feeling for local atmosphere. In 1901, Whittredge received a silver medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, before showing one hundred and twenty-five landscapes at the Century Association in New York City.
A dedicated and hard-working craftsman, Whittredge won national acclaim and recognition-through numerous sales and honors-long before his death in 1910. His rise from a dutiful midwestern farm boy hinged on his success in merging the techniques he had acquired in Europe with the natural realities of his native land, producing abundant and popular works in which he developed a distinctive pictorial vision. In effect, his was the classic trajectory, flat and unadorned-the archetypal career for an American painter of his time.
With rare exceptions, those who came of age during America's colonial period could not hope for a career even remotely like Whittredge's. Their efforts were regarded as "no more valuable than any other useful trade . . . like that of the carpenter, tailor or shoemaker, not as one of the most noble arts in the world." Artists committed themselves above all to documenting reality, depicting a scene, a face, a place as accurately as their skills permitted. They mastered a technique, using it as a tool. "The democratic nations," Tocqueville wrote, "will cultivate those arts which are likely to render their life comfortable, rather than those whose aim will be to render it more beautiful; they give the edge to the useful over the beautiful and want the beautiful to be useful."
As early as 1766, the great American portrait painter John Singleton Copley was complaining about working "among people entirely destitute of all just Ideas of the Arts." "I think myself peculiarly unlucky in living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory," he wrote to his colleague Benjamin West. The nineteenth-century American critic John Neal described what he regarded as his own true moment of "artistic initiation," which occurred during a visit to the local shoemaker when he was a child living in a small town in Maine: "I saw pasted on the wall, over the shoemaker's bench, a pen-and-ink head, which delighted me beyond measure . . . this little affair, though unfinished, I looked upon as a marvel. I went up to the garret, and there, seating myself on an old leather trunk, near a little window, covered with dust and cobwebs, went to work and made copy after copy, some of which were traced . . . until I had every scratch of the pen daguerreotyped upon my memory. This, I believe, was the beginning of my experience in art."
Certainly, exceptional cases existed, such as Copley himself, who had great success attracting wealthy patrons; and Benjamin West, who, thanks to the support of his Philadelphia patron, traveled to Italy as early as 1760, before being appointed History Painter to the court of George III in England in 1772, and twenty years later, president of the British Royal Academy. As the first celebrated American expatriate artist, West welcomed generations of young American painters in London, eager to work on large historical canvases.
The American Revolution spurred history painting, then the most prestigious of all genres in the world. "I could not be happy unless I am pursuing the intellectual branch of the art," wrote Samuel Morse to his parents from London in May 1814. "...
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