The Nature Lovers

Soon after he settled in the U.S., British-born Francis Guy faced the fact that he would never get rich at his tailoring-and-dyeing business. To pad out his income, he tried an odd assortment of avocations--including verse writing, mixing toothache remedies and painting landscapes. None of these efforts made him rich, but his paint brush eventually attracted attention. Last week at Chicago's Art Institute, 125 years after his death, Francis Guy (1760-1820) was being referred to as a grandfather of U.S. landscape painting.

The semi-primitive work of Francis Guy and the smoother canvases of 163 other 19th-Century landscape painters are currently filling nine large galleries at Chicago's Art Institute. The show goes to show that U.S. landscape painting got off to a slow, painful start. Painter Guy was a determined, self-taught man, who began by tracing his first landscapes on a piece of gauze stretched across the window frame of a tent. But potential art buyers of his time were bored by landscapes: they liked only two kinds of art: portraits and historical paintings. Guy died several years before the romantic, nature-worshiping era set in. Then, slowly at first and with literary prodding from Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Emerson and James Fenimore Cooper, Americans began to look at their own landscape with pride and respect.

Visiting foreigners, awed by the grandeur of Niagara Falls, spurred the movement on. Painters swarmed through the entire Hudson River Valley, straying over into the Catskills, the White Mountains and New England to set up their easels. For the next half-century, they turned out careful, literal landscapes that were generally large, declamatory, vaguely religious, blatantly sentimental. All these earnest pioneers who blazed the trail for Inness, Homer and Eakins of the '70s were loosely lumped together and called the "Hudson River School." The Chicago show spotlighted the lives and works of a few of the school's Old Masters:

P: Asher Durand, once the nation's leading engraver, helped raise landscape painting to such esteem that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1858 ran an artists' excursion train, took Durand and a party of colleagues on a cross-country junket. The six-car train, equipped with piano, sofas, sleeping quarters and a photographic darkroom, stopped wherever an artist felt the urge to sketch. A popular success, Durand eventually became president of the National Academy of Design.

P: Thomas Cole was romantically inclined toward lofty crags, steaming valleys, hollow trees, architectural ruins, whopping canvases. He was a great friend of Poet William Cullen Bryant ("Go forth and list to Nature's teaching"). Intensely religious, Cole usually prayed before painting.

P: John Frederick Kensett, one of the most popular Hudson River painters of his time, was also the most restrained. He made money at his painting and when he died, in 1872, the contents of his studio brought $137,715 at auction.

P: George Catlin was a Pennsylvanian who studied law, became well-known as a portrait painter (among his subjects were Governor DeWitt Clinton and Dolly Madison), finally found his big fascination in the Wild West. He enthusiastically moved to Missouri, lived for eight years among the Indians, sentimentalized the "noble savage" and inspired a group of western landscape painters who are arbitrarily classed with the Hudson River School.

P: Frederick E. Church wound up the Hudson River School with a flourish. He was Cole's pupil and did his stint in the Catskill country. But he also became the most widely traveled artist in the world, trekking from Ecuador to Labrador, from Germany to the Near East. He, too, made money and ended his life in a fabulous semi-Moorish castle which still stands near Hudson, N.Y.

In getting together the largest collection of Hudson River School landscapes ever assembled (164 paintings and water colors), the Art Institute's Fred Sweet assumed that the U.S. has become artistically adult enough to view its own adolescence without snickering. He succeeded: a once laughably stuffy school of U.S. art had acquired dignity and its busy, nature-worshiping artists were figures in history.

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