American Painting and its Tradition
American Painting and Its Tradition, by John C. Van Dyke, is an essay collection tracing American painting from its transplanted colonial-portraiture beginnings through the self-taught Hudson River landscapists, into the European-trained generation of the Society of American Artists, and asks throughout whether art can flourish without an inherited tradition of craft. Van Dyke opens by arguing that American art suffered from repeated ruptures of continuity: Copley and Stuart worked without native predecessors under borrowed English formulas; Cole and Durand founded landscape painting untaught, from raw contact with nature; their pupils (Inness, Wyant, Martin, Church, Gifford) inherited a thin but real tradition. By the 1876 Centennial, this lineage had exhausted itself into incoherence, prompting a new generation to reject all domestic precedent and train in Munich and Paris, founding the Society of American Artists in 1877 to import Continental technique wholesale. Van Dyke contends this produced skilled but rootless cosmopolitans, lacking the "inherited patrimony of style" that only generations of continuous practice confer—contrasting even Whistler, for all his genius, as undisciplined precisely because he lacked sustained schooling. The book then proceeds through individual studies: **George Inness** — a mystical, restless temperament who absorbed Hudson River convention, then Italian and Barbizon influences (Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny), arriving at a mature style of massed color and atmospheric "impression" over topographical fact, prioritizing sentiment over detail. **Alexander Wyant** — a self-made Ohio painter mentored briefly by Inness, who moved from Düsseldorf-influenced grand-view landscape toward Constable-inflected intimacy, and, after a paralyzing illness ended use of his right hand, produced his finest lyrical, broadly brushed Catskill/Adirondack scenes with his left. **Homer Martin** — a poet-in-landscape whose early panoramic "views" gave way, after 1876 European exposure to Corot and the Barbizon painters, to spare, luminous, human-less mountain scenes emphasizing light, atmosphere, and nature's essential serenity. **Winslow Homer** — trained as a magazine illustrator, producing unremarkable genre and war illustration until his sixties, when isolation at Prout's Neck and exposure to English fisherfolk at Tynemouth yielded his powerful, harshly unadorned sea pictures—compelling reportorial truth rather than painterly charm. **John La Farge** — the exception proving Van Dyke's thesis: reared from childhood in cultivated, art-steeped Franco-American surroundings, deeply educated in philosophy and the old masters, he achieved landscape ("Paradise Valley"), mural decoration (the Trinity Church and "Ascension" works), stained glass, and criticism (*Considerations on Painting*) of a scope and authority no self-taught contemporary matched. **James McNeill Whistler** — treated as a case of brilliant but impatient talent, whose notorious wit and combative writings (*Ten O'Clock*, *The Gentle Art of Making Enemies*) obscured a genuinely serious, if uneven, art that fused Western realism with Japanese decorative flatness into nocturnes, arrangements, and harmonies—innovative but never fully representative of American life. **William Merritt Chase** — emblematic of the Society of American Artists generation: Munich- and Venice-trained, technically dazzling, a prodigious teacher (Art Students League, Shinnecock) and collector, but, in Van Dyke's view, a painter for whom method and surface facility substituted for deeper artistic seriousness. Running through all these portraits is Van Dyke's central argument, stated and restated: individual genius is insufficient without accumulated tradition, and America's recurring habit of discarding its predecessors' teaching—generation after generation—explains both the fitful brilliance and the persistent immaturity of its national school of painting.
By John C. Van Dyke · First published 1919 · Genre: Art History, Art Criticism and Aesthetics, Biography · 10 chapters · 67,135 words
First lines
During the Revolutionary Period, and immediately thereafter, art in America was something of sporadic growth, something not quite indigenous but rather transplanted from England. Painting was little more than portraiture, and the work was done after the English formula. America had no formula of its own. There was no native school of art, no tradition of the craft, no body of art knowledge handed down from one generation to another. West and Copley started out practically without predecessors. They were the beginners.
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American Painting and its Tradition is listed on Textopian as an essay by John C. Van Dyke, dated 1919 CE.
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- Work type: Essay
- Author: John C. Van Dyke
- Date: 1919 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Art History, Art Criticism and Aesthetics, Biography, Cultural and Intellectual History, Literary Essay
- Length: 67,135 words
- Structure: 10 chapters, 414 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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Genres
- Art History — The work provides a comprehensive chronological and thematic examination of American painting from the Revolutionary period through the early 20th century, tracing the development of schools, movements, and traditions in visual art.
- Art Criticism and Aesthetics — Van Dyke extensively analyzes artistic methods, technical approaches, color theory, composition, and debates about the nature of art itself, particularly regarding the tension between craft, tradition, and originality.
- Biography — The text devotes substantial sections to detailed biographical accounts of individual painters including Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer, La Farge, Whistler, Chase, Alexander, and Sargent, covering their lives, education, and artistic development.
- Cultural and Intellectual History — The work contextualizes American art within broader cultural and intellectual currents, examining the nation's relationship to European traditions and the development of an indigenous American artistic identity.
Tags
American painting · art history · artistic tradition · art criticism · aesthetics · American culture · cultural heritage · art movements · visual arts · national identity · 19th century art · artistic development
Contents
- The Art Tradition in America
- George Inness
- Alexander H. Wyant
- Homer Martin
- Winslow Homer
- John La Farge
- James Abbott Mcneill Whistler
- William Merritt Chase
- John W. Alexander
- John s. Sargent