If you follow my id "newcolonist" on twitter.com, you'll know I headed out to the Newark Museum today. I can honestly say I haven't come upon such an unexpected delight since visiting the Toledo Museum in 2007.

It's also the second mansion built by beer I've been to, the first being the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee.

Walking through the Ballantine House, it wasn't Pabst that was most recalled, rather the Pittsburgh Mansion, "Clayton," redesigned for the Frick family in the 1890s. I think it was the layout, the general vivid distinction between male and female rooms and the general lingering presence of the figures who once roamed the halls.

The spring of 1891, nearly six years after the Ballantines moved in, is the time to which the period rooms are restored. This is the same year Frick rebuilt Clayton. By 1891, the family and the Fricks' social stature both had outgrown the home as it was, and architect Frederick J. Osterling was hired to transform Clayton into the 23-room chateau-style mansion seen today.

Like the Frick house, and unlike the Pabst house, many of the objects therein were owned by the family.

I had recently read the book Conquering Gotham in which it was mentioned that Pennsylvania Railroad President Alexander Cassatt had a townhouse on Rittenhouse Square which contained much antique furniture and modern paintings. I took special note that the Ballantine house was filled with what would then have been contemporary American Barbizon paintings.

The current situation of the Ballantine house is somewhat unique among American Museums. Instead of a collection of period rooms, an entire house is connected to a museum. It's a wonderful experience, and one that as far as I know is only repeated by a townhouse connected to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which is used as a decorative arts showcase, not to house period rooms.

The collection at the Newark Museum extends far beyond the Ballantine house. So many people come to New York and visit the Met and MOMA, yet there's so much to see at Newark and at the Brooklyn Museum, I'd venture that at least for persons with interests similar to my own, Moma, the Guggenheim and the Cloisters aren't worth a gander until you've been to Brooklyn and Newark.

Most Chinese of my generation have an inexplicable profound love of Monet and his impressionism fellows. When Internet was not available in most of China in the late early 1990’s, Western Art seldom reached the public outside the major art institutes. Among the few magazines for English language education, quite a few chose famous artworks for their covers and occasionally some biographical articles were published not for art purpose, but instead as general reading materials. That was unfortunately or in some way fortunately my first art education. I remember Rembrandt’s dramatic light, a few Flemish works, but most often there would be some Impressionism works.

For most of the Chinese students, Rembrandt is hard to appreciate. His brushworks can hardly be appreciated without standing in front of the real paintings; and his subjects mostly human beings in the context of religions or history necessitate a not-so-short introductory article which never existed in such magazines. Impressionism paintings, on the other hand, choose the landscape which always has a universal appeal regardles of regions or languages. What’s more, without any difficulty its bright and high contrast style always caught my eyes immediately even on a small print compared to the dim forehead/nose light from Rembrandt.

In the early 1980’s, China in the post-Culture-Revolution period, was in a cautious mood to catch up with the world with respect to art. On the one hand, there had been a void in Western Art appreciation (except Russian schools) for such a long time, anything that could fit in would do. On the other hand, the shadow of linking Western Art with reactional, degenerate and debauchery forms still lingered. Even though the young generation would love to embrace the current trend, their minds were not ready. For them, the unavoidable ideological wrap on top of futurism, abstract, or pop art had to wait another 10 years to disintegrate when the capitalism itself gradually rooted in the political and economic infrastructure.

Thus, Impressionism, the newest or the latest classical Western Art, naturally became the top choice or the safe bet. Impressionism has been around for more than a century, thus its archaic identity marks its irrelevant to the current capitalistic world. However impressionism, by and large, is still active in the Western world. The painterly looking was such a departure from the traditional art that it for sure shocked the eyes of young Chinese artists at that time. Most importantly, the way impressionists painted: plein-air, broken color, complimentary vivant color-theory, dry, chalk style brush stroke, and even the pointillism that are characteristics of Impressionism liberated people’s mind about what defines art. (I remember an article talked about artworks is not a snapshot of realism, but an emotional representation under a controlled mind of intellectual.)

When I came to US, I went to National Gallery of Art and Art Institute of Chicago where I spent most time in those impressionism galleries. They are hard to miss because these galleries are filled with Asian faces. The aesthetic pleasure from looking at the artworks far way to get a whole feeling and then speculating the creation procedure with close-by study had such a charm that it would be so boring afterwards to look at works by the 18^th century old masters. For visitors with no or little Western Art background, the ones that please the eyes win.

But as I returned at the second and third time in the National Gallery of Art at DC, I began to get tired of the vivid color pallets of the paintings. Artworks, for both the creators and the audience, are supposed to be liberating-- or at least inspirational; but were they painted by habit? Years later, I read the book by Wolf Kahn who said artists once grasped the new skills should move on otherwise their spontaneity would fall into the victims of their habit. I began to question myself whether it is a fallacy to rely purely on eyes whose pleasure tends to be superficial. After all, aren’t great artworks glorifies more at the second or third look?

At the same time, I was attracted by a beautiful autumn scene by Corot in the National Gallery of Art. It was low-key in tone, comparatively small in size and harmonious in color; but there was a profound nostalgia in the painting: a dirt road, rustling trees and a traveler on horse. It is something that I have not experienced before, but somehow I knew how Corot must have felt about it when he painted. That began my love to Barbizon school, which preferred poetic and personal expression of humble or mysterious landscape under unified dark tone.

Today, when I look back, it may seem a little bit absurd that I was not obsessed by Impressionism at that time, but I did appreciate that at least Monet brought me into the galleries and museums. The history of art is a long chain of different schools and styles, all of which contribute. A new style must have some sort of prototype before and serves as foundation to later ones. Interestingly, Henry Ward Ranger, the founder of Old Lyme School and the most important American Barbizon School painter left the art colony four years after he started the group, simply because Child Hassam brought a sharp change to the style in the artist colony. 

“It is too civilized”, Ranger said when he left. (But he kept good personal relationship with Hassam.) Later Ranger, in an interview, expressed what he thought about the impressionism:

They did not recognize that a “low-tone phase of nature painted too light is as false as a high-keyed phase painted too low.” In the end, this school, which began in defiance of convention, created rigid conventions of its own with only certain colors representing light. Purple was always shadow and nature was painted just as it was. Earlier artists painted in studios and the paintings were the refined result of long and ardent toil out-of-doors.

The ever-changing transient light, that is quintessential Impressionism, is not what defined the Northeast. In some way, the New England autumn scenes find their voice through Ranger by his fastidious application of yellow, brown glaze for an overall warm atmosphere. Even in Pittsburgh, I felt the autumn overwhelmingly breadth-taking, with nostalgia and sorrow. The depth, silence and smell would make a light pallet-execution unbearable for puritan ethics. True, there is color even in the shadow; but as Ranger put it there must be a fundamental law obeyed in the art that persists through all ages: a quality that is always sane and untouched by all passing fads.

In reading the book “American Art In the Barbizon Mood,” I am surprised to find out American Barbizon school is yet to be defined even though the exhibition was held in Washington DC more than 30 years ago. Tonalism is in general used to define the same school, although tonalism itself is such a very vague term that when Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco had the exhibition of American Tonalism paintings, the show featured the painters Whistler and Dewing along side with Tryon and Eaton.

It is not a surprise that such a term as American Barbizon is not firm since the school itself did not last very long. To some extent, it serves as a bridge between the Hudson River School style and American Impressionism. The early works of Inness bear strong influence from Cole and Durand. It was only after the American Civil War that Inness began to forgo the niggling detail that once dominated the large canvases. Later, when Henry Ward Ranger came to Old Lyme to build up his colony, he found out that although he could attract a group of like-minded painters, he could not stop the trend. The Old Lyme sees the rise of Impressionism from Willard Metcalf and Theodore Robinson, both of whom were Old Lyme painters.

But most of all, it is the American Barbizon itself that somewhat distorted, if not betrayed the group of painters that it represented. True, some of them may have seen the silvery grayness of Corot or solemnity of Millet even though it was very rare to see these works within US before the civil war. Some of the painters such as Inness and Robert Crannell Minor even went to Europe for study, however most of these painters grew by themselves and may develop their artistic styles in their own course. To say they are the followers of Corot was more a critic’s idea and dealers’ promotion than their own intention.

And what a difference it makes when the so-called Barbizon school crossed the Atlantic! For Millet, the rural life bears the same amount of the sentimentality and elegance as the perfect male and female bodies in the hands of David and Ingres. But for Americans painters, there was no such passion found from mundane peasantry life. How could they, right after the civil war, when farming was still associated with the south and black labor. Thus in William Morris Hunt, there was a broader subject matters that associated with the general pastoral life without giving out the hint of laborious farming.

Barbara Novak, in her book about Hudson River School paintings, said that the grand scaled, untainted landscape is god’s gift to Americans and thus the vistas with magic light show the audience the new continent in the way God perceives it. If so, such notion began to shake in the minds of American who had gone through civil war and Darwinism. The rapid industrialization in post-civil war period saw fast change in Northeast landscape. God’s garden was no long viewed as American’s superiority against the European’s old civilization; instead it gave in for railroad, farming and bourgeoisification. Thus, it was natural that a group of artists began to view the landscape in a more nostalgic mood. Instead of looking down at the grandeur with a dominating control of details and free of any trace of human brush touch, they began to walk into the woods and experience them as human beings. The cool objective mind softened to the stirred emotions that had been constantly worried about the erosion of the landscape from industrialization. Visible strokes were implemented to enhance the live experience as if the landscape breathed its texture into the canvas.

When John Francis Murphy was praised as American Corot in the late 1870’s, he quietly saved those reviews about him but said little. He may have seen some paintings by French Barbizon painters, but the Mecca of Barbizon paintings in US at that time was not in New York but in Boston where Vose Gallery fervently promoted the school. But Murphy didn’t have to speak out for the inspiration of his style: He just lived with it. He took the occasion to visit Walden Pond and transplanted pine seedlings from Thoreau’s cabin to his Arkville Studio.

There, right by the pond, Thoreau already dictated what would be painted after his death by the painters of the next generation:

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. … a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation.

I have known the name of the painter John Francis Murphy since I began to study American paintings. He was associated with the American Barbizon and Tonalism schools without geographically joining the Old Lyme Colony.

Thus when a painting of Murphy offered by John Moran Auction’s showed up, it immediately caught my eye.

The painting was dated in 1876 which was a crucial year for Murphy. In 1874, Murphy spent the late summer and early autumn in Keene Valley, a trip that cost him almost all his finished work. The trip was a turning point for the 31 year old painter, it was both a success and a failure. He was photographed in the company of Winslow Homer and enjoyed a sense of professional acceptance from fellow painters like Wyant, Tryon; but when he tried his best at a fashionably large canvas in the manner of Church and Bierstadt, he couldn’t transform lakes and mountains into miracles of light and air. Therefore, there were no further attempts in his career to pursue grandeur or sublimity, in his own words: he could add nothing to a genre already mastered by his “seniors”. In 1875, he left Chicago to live in New York. He lived on 205 East 32^nd Street. His career had a slow start. In fact, the first six months of 1876 brought him only $76 income. But it was this period that he began to mature into his style: the fondness of vapor, shadow, and mystery, all painted in a soft mood.

It is not a surprise that Murphy’s most admired writer was Thoreau. It was the intimate nature, or habitable wildness that dominated his canvases. Interestingly, by the time Murphy was elected to become a full academician, the Hudson River School style gradually became obsolete and Americans grew to favor paintings that appealed to feelings first instead of the intellect or moral sense.

In this painting, I see neither eternity nor serenity. The wind blows, the clouds fleet, the tree whistle. Somber mood comes through the low land bushes that are combed by brooks. Nothing is decisive, or final. But the transient moment has a sheer beauty that can hold eyes long enough as if the beauty lies within the uncertainty. Isn’t it true that sometimes the best sceneries happen at the most unexpected places or moments? Murphy knew it and registered the transient beauty into something lasting ever.