William Morris Hunt paintings, Tonalist

“In poetry and painting, facts do not amount to much…. Paint what you see and what you feel… If you’ve forgotten the poetry and the mystery, you can’t get it again. It’s the way you look at a thing that makes the picture!” – William Morris Hunt

By Christopher Volpe

American Tonalism had its beginnings in New England in the early 1870s, largely because of a rebellious rich kid named William Morris Hunt. The son of a Vermont Congressman, Hunt was expelled from Harvard University for practical joking (“too fond of amusement,” they said).

Perhaps to straighten him out, his mother took him to Europe in 1843, where Hunt studied art and drifted over the next 12 years toward the Bohemian life, renting a flat with his brother in Paris. There in a gallery window he discovered the work of the French landscape painters who would come to be known as the Barbizon School, so named after the rural town they descended upon during the 1830s and ‘40s to paint en plein air amid the Forest of Fontainebleau, some 35 miles south of Paris. (The Barbizon artists preceded the Impressionists by about 35 years, the first Impressionist exhibition being held in 1874.) In Paris in 1853, Hunt bought Jean-Francois Millet's painting The Sower, which had drawn widespread disdain from the Paris salon in 1850, for today's equivalent of $60.

When he returned to America, Hunt displayed The Sower, now one of the treasures of the Museum of Fine Arts, at the Allston Club, a short-lived venue he founded to raise money to bring more French paintings to America. The gritty paintings of the French “Naturalist” or Barbizon artists (e.g. Millet, Courbet, Diaz de la Pena, Rousseau, Corot, Charles Daubigny) boasted a disdain of ornamentation and a spontaneous, often rough handling of paint.

Hunt was a successful and well-liked teacher and portrait painter throughout the 1860s and '70s, preaching the gospel of expressive painting and urging his brightest pupils to make the trip to Munich and France. He co-founded the Museum of Fine Arts as an art school, and he taught the first serious painting classes accessible to women. Having married into Boston’s elite social circles, he encouraged well-to-do patrons (such as Martin Brimmer, later president of the Museum of Fine Arts) to invest in French art, which is a major reason the museum's holdings by French masters like Millet, Monet, and Renoir are as strong as they are.

Elaboration is not beauty, and sand-paper never finished a piece of bad work.”

— William Morris HuntHunt built his career on an academic, Millet-influenced figurative style until a devastating fire in 1872 destroyed his studio and much of his work (as well his “retirement” collection of Millets). After the fire, Hunt went full-on Barbizon and traveled New England in a sort of mobile studio, painting evocative atmospheric landscapes that downplayed detail in favor of poetry and feeling.

William Morris Hunt, View of The St. Johns River, 1874

Evidently, for Hunt the indeterminate forms and subtle half-tones of tonalistic landscape painting reflected philosophical uncertainties at the foundation of human experience. “Art teaches you the philosophy of life,” he wrote, “it shows you that there is no perfection. There is light and there is shadow… everything is in half-tint.” Hunt urged his students to “give up the idea of ‘color’ for a while” and to “consider masses, values, only…. One dark and one light place in every picture.” For Hunt, painting was all about values, not color. “Values are the basis,” he insisted. “If they are not, tell me what is the basis.”

Governor's-creek, florida. William Morris Hunt

In Hillside with Trees, painted during Hunt’s post-fire 1872-’78 period (now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago), Hunt has composed a “harmony” of gray, brown, and green. We are presented with an ordinary, almost desolate subject, a stand of nearly leafless trees on a New England hillside beneath a gray sky suggesting the waning days of autumn. While the emphasis is on the tonal harmonies (the arrangement of “color-tones,” for lack of a better term), Hunt subtly plays upon the viewer’s emotions; a church spire marking out a distant town is just visible through the aqueous tree trunks to the right, nearly eclipsed by the brown hill and a gulf of several miles; the low-toned arrangement implies a separation between the viewer and the rest of humanity. It is a quiet, almost lonely moment, intimate and solitary, inductive of the kind of quiet introspection and reflection often associated with the Romantic poetry and antebellum sentiments of the time.

Depressed, and fresh off a failed Albany state house commission, Hunt died on Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals, an apparent suicide, in 1879. Though a major pivotal figure in American art, Hunt is considered a lesser artist than the many he influenced, including the artist most likely to win the award for First American Tonalist, John La Farge. Critics have felt that Hunt remained largely academic and derivative, unable to sufficiently shake off the spell of Millet to synthesize the French style instead of simply adopting it. Still, his celebrated painting of Niagara Falls, one of two large versions painted the year before he died, ably stands its ground against one of several renderings by George Inness, who along with Hunt arguably did more than anyone else to establish the mystical-poetic dimension of American landscape painting we call Tonalism.