Part 1 — THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING

With Special Praises for Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery

Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves first of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich examples of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less distinguished to take up painting along with the other accomplishments, you will find that the much tabooed antimacassar period produced a species of painting that was as indicative of personal style and research as it was fresh in its elemental approach. The perfect instance in modern art of this sort of original painting raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one can have seen a picture of this most talented douanier without being convinced that technique for purely private personal needs has been beautified to an extraordinary degree.

Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem like the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction, and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.

As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject, you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above, where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.

I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty and they have become aware of it through their own intensely personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period, and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know, the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of expression.

Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak here.

Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find, therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the passion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery, despite their remoteness of surrounding—for she always places her graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene—bring up to the senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of the oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air, like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of other soft remembrances.

Mrs. Cowdery might have taken to needlework, and sat like many another young woman of that time by the window with the sunlight streaming in upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might perhaps more strictly have taken to miniature painting, the quality of which style is so much in evidence in these pleasant pictures of hers. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to reflect with gravity upon the size of the universe, but they dwell entirely upon the intimate charm of it, the charm that rises out of breeding and cultivation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body and sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is essentially a breather and a bringer of peace. There is no purpose in these gracious and entertaining pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.

The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs. Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration, barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.

Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling for the harmony of hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her simple and engaging conversation.

Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be remembered, from the era of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, though of course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period, however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour of human life.

We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.

I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs. Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive.

Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of praise and congratulations.

Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists who are long since jaded with repetition and success, and there are many of them, to refresh their eyes and their senses with the work of these outwardly unassuming but thoroughly convincing amateurs, like Henri Rousseau, Mrs. Cowdery and the many others whose names do not appear on their handsome works of art. There is such freshness of vision and true art experience contained in them. They rely upon the imagination entirely for their revelations, and there is always present in these unprofessional works of art acute observation of fact and fine gifts for true fancy. These amateurs are never troubled with the "how" of mediocre painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles of the outer world. They remain always charming painters of personal visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for interpretation.