Spanierman Gallery | An American Art Blog

My recent blog on Emile Gruppé’s Vermont scenes (coupled with a pleasant drive upstate), has prompted some further musings on autumn landscapes by American painters. However, this time, I’m going slightly back in time to peruse some Tonalist and Impressionist pictures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Charles Warren Eaton
November, Montclair, ca. 1890sThe writer George Eliot described autumn as a “delicious” time of year and rightly so, in view of its colorful foliage and golden atmosphere, which appealed to artists with a love of nature and an intuitive approach to painting. This was certainly true of J. Francis Murphy (1853-1921), Charles Warren Eaton (1857-1937) and Bruce Crane (1857-1937) , who were associated with Tonalism, a very suggestive mode of painting that became fashionable during the 1880s. Preoccupied with conveying mood, Tonalists liked autumn because it was a transitional time of year––a much more poetic season than summer. Painted at contemplative times of day such as dawn and dusk and in varying types of weather, their fall landscapes typically feature isolated rural locales which they depicted with a limited palette of harmonious colors and with expressive brushwork that made forms blurry and indistinct––an approach that imbued their work with a gentle lyricism and a feeling of relaxation. I’m not at all surprised that Tonalist landscapes found their way into the parlors and dining rooms of contemporary collectors such as William T. Evans and George Hearn, providing them with a welcome visual refuge from their harried lives in the New York business world. Read the rest of this entry »