Among all the paintings representing American Barbizon and Tonalism paintings in the ongoing "Path to Impressionism" exhibition at Newark Art Museum, Bruce Crane's "A November Scene" is the one which speaks to me the most.

Everything in the picture is subdued: color, form and subject. The scene is not beautiful itself, but evocative, with a smell of decaying leaves over the chilled water. It is a scene of the last days of New England autumn, which although I have never experienced, I feel associated with the spare air in the Western Pennsylvania where I had been living for the past 6 years.

It was not barbaric as some depicted by Enneking, since there are human traces such as wood piles, deserted and almost ineligible, in the middle ground or a stone wall, which visually and possibly physically blend into the brownish yellowish surrounding. Nature, once gain, took over where once habituated by early New England settlers.

The hushed scenery is less idyllic than what it looks like on the surface. The painting was painted in 1895, at the height of the Gilded Age. Between 1865 to 1905, while the population in rural area increased little, the population in metro areas increased 20 times. In particular, New England was proved to be too rugged to be farmed and thus became uninhabited in its rural area. In fact, New England, for a while, became the factory for clothing and shoes manufacturing. Gone with the rural habitation was the simple and self-reliant Protestant life style and moral virtues.

Ironically, if Bruce Crane intended to use the solitude of the nature itself to prove it was the industrialization that deprived human to get embraced by the natural beauty, the robber Barons, who praised and advocated his works, didn't think so. Among them, George Hearn made a fortune from dry good retails. William Evans was the president for the Mills & Gibb firm. while Henry Chapman was the prominent banker and stockbroker from Brooklyn. For them, the economic brushwork by Crane recalls repose and tranquility that they would associated before industrialization. The suggestive mood and ethereal atmosphere were perfect for recollection and recount of the past.

A close examination shows that Crane used impasto and glazing to great extent. Crane first placed a thin layer of paint for the background (the remote trees are almost formless). Then he built up the painting by brushed or dotted thick layers of paints within limited range and hues. The surface of the canvas at the foreground is as rugged as the landscape itself. The brown glazing, seemingly randomly disposed, gives a harmonious yet subtle veil to the scenery. It is true that not painting from the plein-air but from the memory gave Crane freedom to manipulate the painting based on his will, but it is his determination and imaginative power that gave a could-be-depressive scene romantic and poetic rendering.

I stood there long and felt I was dissolved in the field. The soil is infertile, the field rocky, the weather freezing. Yet the sentimental pastoral beauty arouse strong heartbeats for those who had lived it and lost it. Almost, I think, everyone has it in his heart: somber yet bitter-sweet, a spiritual New England forgone.

The past weekend, Freeman's auctioneered around 170 paintings in its Fine American and European Paintings auction. The number of unsold items is close to 70, which exceeds one third of the total lots. Even worse, quite a few sold items were below the low estimates.

European portraiture didn't sell or didn't sell that much, neither French Barbizon paintings. Adolphe Monticelli's "Figures in an interior" was my favorite. Montecelli is painters' painter. I didn't get to know him until recently when I did some research on the Barbizon school. His paintings may lack the first-sight charm, but his genius is shone through his highly individual artistic style: His brilliant dashed brush strokes have dazzling effects that can only be rivaled by some post-impressionism works. Yet his colors are of the same vein of French Barbizon paintings like Diaz or Rousseau: rich, warm and highly glazed. The subject of the painting offered by Freeman's featured a group of figures dressed elegantly in the rural settings, a reminiscent of Antoine Watteau.

A few American paintings went high. The portrait of Milton by Eastman Johnson, although small and more toward sketchy side based on Eastman John's style, will be included in the forthcoming raisonne, went higher than expected. I just visited Morgan Library last Friday and visited their current exhibition "John Milton’s Paradise Lost". With his head leaning backward against red wall and half buried in darkness, the 17th century poet had a Victorian romantic appeal. The high price for the painting by John La Farge contrasted sharply with a deer study by Bierstadt which didn't reach the reserved price. This seem to confirm what I perceive of the current art and antiques market: buyers are more focused and only the best represented works can sell well.

It didn't surprise to see another pine trees in sunset painting by Charles Warren Eaton went high in the auction. Among all American tonalism painters, Eaton's market demand has increased so dramatically that the price has doubled or tripled during the past few years. I remember the first time I saw his painting was in Akron Art Museum, which has a great collection of American tonalism and Impressionism paintings. The pine trees, standing together against the darkening sky, thin-trunked yet thick capped, for the first time brought up the spiritual side of the nature into my mind.

Unlike other tonalism painters such as John Francis Murphy or Dwight Tryon (whose works can also be found in Akron Museum), Eaton was not totally obsessed with the decaying and deserted New England farms. Even in his sunset paintings, the pine trees, with their elongated upward gesture, are morally uplifting. Thus his paintings are more likely to fit in modern trendy setting.

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.