Rustic Rembrandt
The first major U.S. genre (everyday-life) painter was last week just 100 years in the past. Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum paid William Sidney Mount a fitting tribute with a show of oils, watercolors, sketches and memorabilia.
The fashion of William Mount's time (1807-1868) was for grandiose historical paintings, like the great John Trumbull's Revolutionary War murals. But Mount, an innkeeper's son who first learned the technique of oil painting from a sign painter, reacted against the fashion: he painted the things he knew and loved in his native Suffolk County, N.Y.--warm, simple scenes of farm and village life, farmhands, ragged schoolboys, Negro slaves.
Mount's forte was pictorial storytelling. One of the best examples in the Met's show is The Breakdown, a jovial boys-in-the-back-room scene, which provoked an arch rebuke from the New York Mirror, a weekly, of June 13, 1835: "We might be disposed to wish that such superior talents and skill as are here displayed had been exercised on a subject of a higher grade in the social scale. . . ." Another characteristic Mount is Bargaining for a Horse, showing two farmers, standing near a sleek saddle horse tethered to a barnyard fence, and busily engaged in whittling their way through a deal. A third favorite in the show: Farmers Nooning, a sunny, almost odorous scene of farmhands sprawled at rest in a hayfield; the central figure is a huge, blissful Negro, sound asleep, with a small boy tickling his ear.
"Follow the bent of your own mind--do not paint to order," wrote Mount in one of his notebooks. In his comfortable village, surrounded by well-off relatives with whom he lived, he could well afford to follow his bent. He was an accomplished fiddler and he was also fond of conviviality ("I must visit the ladies more frequently--go to apple peelings and quiltings"). Hangovers occasionally interrupted his work.
No studio painter, Mount toured the countryside in a horse-drawn contraption of his own invention. It was a studio on wheels, equipped with a glass window, stove, ventilator and skylight. In beard and broadcloth, the magnificently free occupant of this vehicle roamed the lanes of Suffolk County proving to his own satisfaction that a pig was more paintable than a princess.
Toward the end of his pleasant life, Artist Mount flirted with spiritualism. Several of his supramundane gambits made copy for newsmen of the 1860s. The New York Evening Post once gravely reported: "We met him one day in Broadway, and he ... took from his hat a roll of papers filled with etchings by Rembrandt, who had the previous night appeared to him. . . . These . . . were probably Mr. Mount's own work, but produced under some spiritualistic hallucination."* The old painter's preoccupation with Rembrandt was deeper than the Post knew. A few years before his death from pneumonia in 1868, William Sidney Mount sat down and wrote himself a letter:
"My dear Friend!
"On a former occasion I had the pleasure of addressing myself to you. . . . I now . . . develop my thoughts through the kindness of the Spirit Bactha. . . . It may appear very strange . . . when I state that I never felt any interest whatever for the works of Raffaelo, or Di Vinci. [They] appeared to my eyes as an attempted refinement upon Nature. . . . I, therefore, determined to depend upon my own judgment. . . . This resolution . . . induced me to form a style in which I might represent Nature untrammeled. . . . On some future occasion I will commune further with you. In the interim, receive the best wishes for your spiritual & artistic progress from
REMBRANDT"
* There is little evidence to indicate that Mount suffered hallucinations or that the keenness of his mind was much dulled even in his last years, wrote Mount biographers Bartlett Cowdrey and Hermann Warner Williams Jr., whose William Sidney Mount (Columbia University Press; $5) was published in conjunction with the Metropolitan's exhibition.
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