William Bliss Baker (1859-1886)

If William Bliss Baker had not died at age 27 from a skating injury, he might have gone on to be a bright star in the firmament of American landscape painting.

His "Fallen Monarchs," above, shows the influence of one of his teachers, Albert Bierstadt, with a keen awareness of light and atmosphere, and a close observation of forest detail.

More about Baker on Wikipedia and Fine Arts Trader.
Thanks, Chris!

Church and the Mirror

I had supper last night with the great-granddaughter of Frederic Church at her home less than a mile from Olana. She said she found one of Church’s journals from his Near East expedition as she was exploring the attic a year or two ago.

“The reason I liked him,” she said, “is he seemed to have no fear.”


During his 1868 expedition to the lost city of Petra, she told me that Church was in mortal danger from the local Bedouin tribes, who had killed an artist in the region not long before. It was considered blasphemy to make graven images. But Church “hired a bunch of people to guide him. He payed them a great deal of money so they didn’t want to kill him.”

At one point the locals blocked his way and threatened his life. Church then asked to borrow a mirror, because “he realized a mirror was a sacred thing.” He took the mirror, and, while the Bedouins weren’t looking, he painted a crack on it. He then showed the cracked mirror to the angry men.

Then, announcing he would restore the mirror to its original condition, “he went behind the tent and erased the crack.” The men believed him to have divine powers, and they alllowed him to pass safely.

Hudson River Fellowship

A juried group of landscape painters with an unusual mission will be working in the Catskill Mountains this summer for the third year in a row. If you want to join them, you've got a little over a month to apply.

The group, called the Hudson River Fellowship, is dedicated to the principle of close and prolonged observation of nature, patterned after the practices of pre-impressionist painters like Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church.

Artist Tom Kegler of Buffalo, New York completed this forest floor study last summer, when I paid a visit to the school.

The artists selected to attend the fellowship will enjoy a month-long residency with full-tuition scholarship for all members and free housing. There’s a spirit of comraderie at the periodic exhibits of work in progress and at the group suppers.

The teachers include founder Jacob Collins of the Grand Central Academy, Edward Minoff, Travis Schlaht, and Nicholas Hiltner.

The curriculum includes lectures by guest speakers and a series of assignments, beginning with field studies in pencil, tonal renderings, and plein air observations. These studies aren’t done merely as an end in themselves.

The ultimate goal is to use these preliminaries to develop a large composition, what Bierstadt used to call a “Great Picture,” back in the studio after the fellowship is over.

Acceptance into the program requires a portfolio review and an application. The deadline for applying for this summer’s fellowship is May 1, 2009.
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Thomas Kegler (artist of the study above), link.
Home page of the Hudson River Fellowship, link.
Previous GJ Post, link.

The Falls Remain the Same

Fernando Emmanuel Laverde Bohórquez of Columbia has traveled to some of the same places that Frederic Church painted, including Tequendama Falls, 1854. In spite of the human damage (and natural erosion), he has discovered that the landscape is almost the same as it was. Thanks, Fernando.

Filling In

“Filling in” is a 19th century art term that refers to the process of association that a picture induces in a spectator. A picture was said to be capable of filling in when it suggested layers of meaning or awakened long dormant feelings.


A good example of this process comes from the writing of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) in his "Letters on Landscape Painting," 1855. In a passage where he described the joys of picture-gazing, he wrote that the viewer

“becomes absorbed in the picture—a gentle breeze fans his forehead, and he hears a distant rumbling [from] far away in the haunts of his boyhood—and that soft wind is chasing the trout stream down the woody glen, beyond which gleams the ‘deep and silent lake,’ where the wild deer seeks a fatal refuge.”

This sense of art’s power to charm the soul risks sounding sentimental to our modern ears, accustomed as we are to a very different aesthetic culture. And perhaps it did so even to Durand himself in 1855, when he said, “I need scarcely apologize for the seeming sentimentalism of this letter. In this day the sentiment of Art is so overrun by the the technique, that it can scarcely be insisted upon too strongly.”
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Image is by Arthur Parton (1842-1914), "Summer Afternoon on the Delaware," 1879.

American Artist has an excerpt of "Letters on Landscape Painting" here.
Linda Ferber's recent book "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape" has the full text printed in an appendix.

Outer Limits of the Pencil

One of the 19 works in the exhibition William Trost Richards: Land and Sea is a landscape drawing that pushes the limit of what’s possible with a pencil.

Executed in the 1860s, early in his career, the work reflects Trost Richards' allegiance to a philosophy of meticulous observation. According to the “New Path,” a statement of the Society of the Advancement of Truth in Art,

“The artist is a telescope…and the best artist is he who has the clearest lens, and so makes you forget that you are looking through him.”

The exhibit spans WTR’s career and includes plein air studies, watercolor and oil seascapes, and some larger oils that showcase his mastery of moisture-rich illuminated atmosphere.

Acting director of the museum Crista A. Detweiler told us that for most visitors Trost Richards is “an eye-opener. ‘How come I’ve never heard of him?’”

The exhibition has been extended through February 22.

Next up at the Arnold Art Gallery is an exhibit exploring academic art training, “Academic Allure: Art and Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Paris," It will be comprised of work borrowed from the Dahesh collection.

From the press release:

The academic exhibition will be on view from March 13 – April 19, 2009. An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 13 from 5-7 p.m. All events are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Wednesday 5-8 p.m., Thursday and Friday 1 – 4:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. and by appointment for groups. Schools and other groups are encouraged to contact the Gallery at 717-867-6445 for a guided tour.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Dr. Barbara Anderman, curator of the exhibition, will present a lecture entitled “Politics, Practice, Discipline, Display: The Art of Academic Survival in Nineteenth-Century Paris” on Monday, April 6 at 7 p.m. in Zimmerman Recital Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Trost Richards pencil drawing is courtesy William Varieka Fine Arts, who graciously loaned several works to the exhibition.

Other gallery lenders include Godel and Co. and Questroyal Fine Art in New York City.

Capriccio in Art

In painting, a capriccio is an architectural fantasy that combines various buildings, ruins, or landscape elements into an extravagant juxtaposition.



The word is Italian. It means a caprice, a whim, a playful gesture. One of the masters of capriccios was Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1765).


Capriccios were often decorative exercises to go over a door in a palace to lend a spirit of worldliness and erudition. Canaletto did his share of them. Many of the masters of the genre were also theatrical set painters.


Thomas Cole (1801-1848) tried his hand at a few capriccios, like The Course of Empire: Consummation (1834-36), and this one, The Architect’s Dream (1840). He throws together Egyptian, Roman, and Gothic styles into his architectural milkshake. But these exercises never really caught on in America, where at the time people were looking west toward the wilderness rather than east toward Europe.

Rearranging Art Books

Today I rearranged the art books in my home library.



Before this, I had the monographs segregated in separate sections, the way they do in bookstores and libraries. There was one section for illustrators and another for 19th Century European artists and another old masters and another for children’s book artists.

But I had a feeling that all of my artist heroes would have enjoyed each other’s company if they were sitting together in the same pub. So why not put the books together under one alphabetical listing? They're also much easier to find this way.

Now Hals is rubbing shoulders with Homer, Rockwell is sitting next to Sargent, and Shepard is consorting with Sorolla. I wish I could hear what they’re talking to each other about.

Trost Richards Exhibition in PA

William Trost Richards was a 19th Century American realist landscape painter that we've looked at in various previous posts (Called Away, Trost Richards Watercolor,



The Arnold Art Gallery at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania will be featuring a new exhibition called "William Trost Richards: Land and Sea," from January 9 to February 15, 2009.

The artist was a native of Philadelphia who continued his studies in Florence, Rome and Paris. In the 1850s, he befriended Frederic Church and Thomas Cole and became a member of the Hudson River School. By the 1870s, the artist became interested in the American landscape movement known as luminism, which explored, among other concerns, the immensity of the sea and the untapped frontiers of America. The show, titled William Trost Richards: Land and Sea, will feature oil paintings, small studies in watercolor, and pencil on loan from private collections, New York City galleries and several regional institutions.

The Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery is open at no charge on Wednesdays from 5 to 8 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays from 1 to 4:30 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment for tour groups. For more information, please call 717-867-6445.

Arnold Art Gallery Website, link. (Note: I don't know what images are in the show; the picture on this post is just a representative example of his work.)
Metropolitan Museum collection of Trost Richards, link.
Large Trost Richards image database, link.

Trost Richards Watercolor

Blog reader (1833-1905) Daroo asked to see more gouache paintings by William Trost Richards. This 9x14 inch gem, called Lake Squam from Red Hill (1874) is from the Metropolitan Museum's collection, link.

Trost Richards combined the luminous grandeur of Turner with an American PreRaphaelite sense of carefully observed detail. He often worked semi-opaque watercolor over a gray-green tone paper.

Here's a plein air seascape that captures the full range of big waves, ripples, foam, and recoil. WTR is best known for his seascapes and his Adirondack mountainscapes.

You can see a variety of WTR works for sale at William Varieka Fine Arts, link.
Another good website is "William Trost Richards, The Complete Works," link.

Paint-Out Tomorrow

If you're in the New York State area tomorrow, please stop by the village of Rhinebeck in the Hudson Valley for the 7th Annual Plein-Air Paint-Out and Auction.

A paint-out is an event where professional artists gather on-site in the morning to create a painting, which is framed and auctioned in the afternoon. It's the closest thing to tightrope walking or improv theater in the painting business.

The autumn color is at peak and the weather promises to be sunny. Over fifty artists will be attending, including Jim Adair, Gary Fifer, Tarryl Gabel, Keith Gunderson, Betsy Jacaruso, Hae Suk Kim, Seth A. Nadel, Robert Schneider, and me.
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For more information, and the complete list of artists, link.
For a listing of other plein air events, and a great site for the on-site painting information, visit OutdoorPainting.com

Art or Nature?

In 1822, John Constable warned:

“Should there be a National Gallery (which is talked of), there will be an end of the art in poor old England. The reason is plain: the manufacturers of pictures are then made the criterions of perfection instead of Nature.”

Constable's complaint seems foolish, but it contains a grain of truth. There is a risk in loving art so much that we forget to look at Nature. Art based only on other art ends up being mannered and derivative. The great breakthroughs in art have come from the intense study of the real world through the artist’s own eyes.

Constable’s argument, however, should be taken as a caution, not a curriculum. The study of unfiltered Nature is a bewildering experience. Nature cannot in itself provide the artist with any “criterions of perfection.” Even the artist who paints every day from Nature may find himself fitted with blinders if he lacks a foundation in technique and tradition.

How do we begin to interpret the infinity of impressions that Nature provides? We need a compass, a guide, a map. Other artists who have gone before us can offer that guidance. Their work can blaze a pathway of possibility.

Artists should go to Nature, but they should check in to the art museum from time to time to sift through the harvest of the great souls of yore.

But one should never let the treasures of the museum pull harder at the heart than the living truth of the world around us. As Longfellow argued in his famous sonnet "Art and Nature," (translated from Francisco de Medrano), the “works of human artifice” are like a mere garden, tiresome in comparison to the eternal and infinite grandeur—the “free and wild magnificence”—of the river and the meadow.

We should not hesitate to quit the cloisters of tradition and to revel in the direct experience of Nature face-to-face. Perhaps we might discover something that has never been discovered before.
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The photo is of Henry Ward Ranger. The painting is by Giuseppe Gabrielle, of Room 32 of the National Gallery in London.

Called Away

It’s tough to be called away in the middle of a plein air sketch.

Sometimes a rainstorm does it. The raindrops at the top of this watercolor study by William Trost Richards testify to what happened. A storm moved in, and he had to stop working.

Here’s another Trost Richards seascape. Why is the bluff on the left only just laid in? Maybe someone called him to dinner, or his ride was leaving. We make art at the mercy of the stomach and the weather.

Thanks to William Vareika Fine Arts, link.