A History of American Tonalism:
The Tonalist Movement, Lost and Found

A wonderful book about the American Tonalism movement is "A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920 " by David A. Cleveland.  Sadly, the book is currently out of print. It begins with this introduction:

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems on the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air was also so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1812

In the four decades from 1880 to 1920 the Tonalist movement of intimate landscape painting flourished in America. Soulful, deeply expressive landscapes by artists such as George Inness, Alexander Wyant, J. Francis Murphy, Dwight Tryon, and Charles Warren Eaton—with Whistler’s low-toned decorative nocturnes an ever-tantalizing presence—limn the nostalgic uncertainties of fin-de-siècle America. With a deceptively modest yet modernist flair, the finest Tonalist painters touch on a prelapsarian innocence, tinctured with the insularity, idealism, and yearning for the bygone values of an agrarian world disappearing in the face of rapid industrialization and urban growth. The moody, often melancholy evocations summoned by Tonalist landscapes, in which autumnal, sunset, and nocturnal themes predominate, followed from the horrors of the Civil War, while the failures of Reconstruction, the anxieties of a boom-and-bust economy, and Darwinian doubts only added to the undertone of vague displacement that haunts these precincts of embodied memory. The Tonalist style—poetic, suggestive, spiritual, and deeply personal—was so ubiquitous in its day, and maintained its hold on the collective imagination with such beguiling power, that it may well be regarded as the defining aesthetic for turn-of-the-century America. Tonalism, a term coined around 1900 in contradistinction to Impressionism, was so pervasive that a modernist critic like Sadakichi Hartmann could write in 1910: “Tone is the ideal of the modern painter. It is his highest ambition. It is the powerful subduer of all the incongruities of modern art.” In a period variously described as the “Gilded Age,” the “Brown Decades,” or the “American Renaissance,” when the Aesthetic movement and the Arts and Crafts movement infused the decorative arts, Tonalist landscapes dominated the exhibitions and filled the homes of upper middle-class collectors. Tonalist subjects, the near-to-home rural pastures and woodlots beloved by artists and their patrons, were enshrined on parlor walls across America, an art as democratic as it was enchanting. As the contemporary critic Ralcy Husted Bell wrote in 1916: “Better than the votaries of any other school known to me, the Tonalist catches the laughter of shimmering light, and transmutes it into pictorial joy; he speaks admirably the old mother-tongue of cloud, tree, pool, and stone; he interprets the spring; he is summer’s scribe, page to the majesty of autumn, and priest to the whole round year. With a simple palette, and as if by magic, he expresses breadth, teasing transparency, mysterious distances, the illusion of luminosity—in a word, the drama of air, light, and colour. Taken all in all, his pictures challenge, please, and convince. As a last refinement, he permeates them with his own individuality, and thus may he be called a creator.”

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, hundreds of European- trained American artists arrived home fresh from art study in Paris, Munich, London, and the American art colonies in Brittany. In league with their indigenous counterparts—the self-taught or New York trained artists, they quickly broke the monopoly of the established Hudson River School, known for its precisely detailed wilderness panoramas and evocations of patriotic glory and God’s bounty. The raw skepticism produced by the Civil War’s death toll blunted the enthusiasm for such effusions of national pride. The “new men,” as they were known in newspapers and art periodicals, took pride in their hard-won skills; they were determined to revolutionize what they considered a moribund American art scene. The Tonalists came to prominence in the decade of the 1880s, reaching a critical mass of popularity by 1900, and remained one of the most vital and influential movements in American art right up to World War I and the decade beyond. Tonalism’s resilience and longevity was the result of not only its delicate somber beauty and evocation of values dear to the post–Civil War generation—the first to experience the full onslaught of modern war and industrial civilization—but also its radical and innovative nature and inherent capacity to encompass both traditional and modernist impulses. Tonalism’s modernity, its transcendentalist and Whistlerian embodiments, was seen by critics as epitomizing America’s progress in the arts, and expressing the individual and homegrown genius of its finest exponents. It was a landscape art embraced by a tolerant and liberal Protestantism along with Emerson and Thoreau—and even Darwin. In the eyes of its patrons and creators, Tonalism was the first truly American art, combining European sophistication with a genuine American spirituality: the “real right thing.” Tonalism, very much a manifestation of a young melting-pot culture, drew upon a range of abstract formal values, both historical and contemporary, including the rediscovery of Velasquez’s envelope of atmosphere, especially the Spanish artist’s variegated low tones and pictorial synthesis; the broadly brushed soft-edged forms of the English painter John Constable and the abstraction of Turner; the realism of the French Barbizon school; and Whistler’s non-anecdotal, suggestive and refined arrangements of subtle color and form—the essence of his harmonies. To this mix, homegrown talents like George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Ralph Blakelock added an element of mystic romanticism—often described by modernist historians as “visionary.”

In retrospect, with the perspective of more than a century’s distance, the American Tonalists, after nearly seven decades of neglect, can reclaim their rightful place as the avant-garde of the 1880s and the modernist pioneers of 1900. In the best of Inness, Whistler, Ryder, Tryon, Murphy, Twachtman, and many others, the formal values of the modernist canon were first employed with conviction: abstract patterning, exquisite surface textures, gestural and expressive pigment use, and symbolic form embodying a vital spiritualizing energy. As an insurgent school or movement, the Tonalists broke with prevailing establishment orthodoxy, pioneered new non-narrative forms of expression, and touted subjective individualism as the spearhead of artistic innovation: all hallmarks of turn-of-the-century modernism. It evolved in the 1880s from a quietest Whistlerian abstraction, what might be called “Aesthetic Tonalism,” to a more expressive and simplified art of deep symbolic power by 1900, which can be viewed as “Expressive Tonalism.” (I have adopted these two terms throughout this book as useful general categories to describe and differentiate the look of Tonalist works, respectively, from the 1880s and 1890s and those from around 1900 and after.) Increasingly shorn of overt literary or narrative context—and, for the most part, absent the human figure, Tonalism invoked the silence and solitude and the secret yearnings of the private imagination, and sentiments touching on man’s sometimes perplexing relationships, both with nature and society. The killing fields of the Civil War, a brutal capitalist economy, mass immigration, and Darwin’s unsettling notions changed everything. Tonalism’s cool serenity is deceptive; it was an art for uncertain times. It is this uncertainty and ambiguity that places Tonalism at the fountainhead of American modernism. As will be seen, the radicals of the late 1870s like J. Frank Currier and John Twachtman, following in the footsteps of Whistler, La Farge, and Inness, changed the way Americans imagined their homeland—and themselves, until by 1900 a radical and distinctly American visionary art had taken hold. In turn, the artists in the Stieglitz circle—John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe—were weaned on the Tonalist aesthetic as it evolved after 1900. Tonalist artists like Albert Pinkham Ryder, J. Francis Murphy, and Dwight Tryon directly influenced Milton Avery; and from Avery followed Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, and postmodern Tonalists like Wolf Kahn. The Tonalist aesthetic may well be the most fundamentally ingrained impulse of the American imagination.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Tonalism has been its vanishing act. How could a movement that dominated American art for almost four decades become so lost to American art history and the art-going public for almost seventy years—from the 1930s to the turn of the twenty-first century? How could close to fifty of America’s best artists fall into near total obscurity? From the Depression to the Millennium, Tonalism barely figures in art history texts and exhibition catalogues. When it does—often vaguely and in passing or buried in footnotes, it is mostly dismissed as a retardataire post-Barbizon style, a backward-looking effusion of the Gilded Age, or a leftover of the dowdy taste of our Victorian forebears. Although artists like George Inness, Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Albert Blakelock, Thomas Dewing, William Merritt Chase, and Dwight Tryon remained important to scholars and connoisseurs through the twentieth century, the majority of Tonalist artists, many with well-earned reputations in their day, were forgotten, their paintings relegated to the storerooms of museums, which had once avidly purchased the artists’ prize-winning efforts. Many Tonalist paintings were deaccessioned from art institutions after 1950, turning up in auctions for a fraction of the price at which they had originally sold. The neglect of the period, the mischaracterization of Tonalism and its vital modernity, much less the stellar achievements of its best artists, were the result of market forces, changing tastes, and the vagaries of scholarship, which resulted in a misreading of Tonalism’s crucial role in the history of American art. As will be argued, Tonalism encompasses all the complexities of its era and sounds the depths of the late-Victorian American psyche—depths of which contemporary critics and scholars, such as Ralcy Husted Bell, were only to well aware. Bell noted in 1916 that the Tonalists’ “dramatic landscapes arouse an emotional intensity fed by the tragic associations of human experience; and there are others which thrill, as it were, with the epic faith of man in his own splendid destiny. In the aspect of some may be found heroism, toil, and suffering almost to savage joy; and in still others there is something which arouses the supreme rapture as it corresponds to life’s aspirations just before their inevitable, periodic recoil—which in art is one phase of rhythm.”

The inroads of European modernism from the 1913 Armory Show onward did much to challenge the reputations of the core Tonalist generation born between 1840 and 1865. By 1913 the Tonalist establishment, the radicals of the late 1870s and 1880s, were old men. The enthusiasm for brighter palettes, academic impressionism, and jazzy fauvist facture, and the more cosmopolitan subject matter and vigorous brushwork employed by the likes of George Bellows, made the cohorts of Whistlerian aestheticism seem down on their heels and slightly passé. Tonalist canvases became increasingly lumped in with the “dark pictures” of the art trade and so increasingly difficult to sell as the twenties turned into the thirties. The Great Depression was the coup de grâce to both the American art market in general and the reputations of the old guard Tonalist painters in particular. Growing Marxist sympathies on the one hand and isolationism on the other during the 1930s saw tastes gravitate to competing styles of Social Realism and renditions of the American scene (Regionalism), making the refined and ethereal canvases of the Tonalist masters seem even more out of touch and irrelevant to the struggles of the moment. By the rise of postwar Abstract Expressionism, Tonalism was largely forgotten even as its DNA was deeply embedded in the formal concerns of Milton Avery, who passed his updated Tonalist style on to his friends Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and William Baziotes, and later Wolf Kahn. In turn, Color Field painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski took the minimalist abstract essence of Tonalism and imbued it with sensual gestural expression, while often hinting at references to the natural world. Today, the contemporary art scene is filled with Tonalist painters, many—including Kahn, Russell Chatham, and April Gornik—who pay direct homage to the progenitors of the tradition. Through it all, the American landscape remained an unavoidable and indispensable birthright, luring generation after generation of American artists to make it the focus of their creative explorations.

Scholarship and the gallery and museum world were slow to regain sight of this lost generation of American Tonalists, or to recognize their remarkable significance and contributions to the history of American art. Partly this had to do with taste and timing; the marketplace also played a role. The first postwar generation of scholars—who cut their academic teeth in the 1950s and wrote their seminal works in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, prominent among them Theodore Stebbins and John Wilmerding—concentrated on the heroic generation of the Hudson River School, an artistic generation equally lost to memory and scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s as the Tonalists were in the 1980s and 1990s. It took decades of scholarship for Hudson River artists like Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, Sanford Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane, and John Kensett, along with a host of others, to find their way out of the attic of foundered reputations. Finally, by the century’s end, numerous museum and gallery exhibitions restored these pioneering artists to their position as the founding generation of the American landscape tradition. The tremendous rise in prices for Hudson River School paintings is another indication of the success of this reappraisal. American art historians in the 1970s and later, led by John Wilmerding, developed the concept of “Luminism” to describe the preoccupation of many Hudson River School artists with a certain quality of spacious and spiritualized light: cool, planar, and radiant. During the postwar years the tradition of American realism, too, especially as exemplified in the careers of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent, received a thorough reappraisal in scholarly and museum circles, as did American Impressionists like Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson.

Not until the 1980s and 1990s was the groundwork laid in exhibitions and catalogues for a revival of attention to the Tonalists. Monographs and shows on George Inness, Whistler, Thomas Dewing, Henry Ward Ranger, Charles Warren Eaton, and others have produced a critical mass of scholarship, allowing a full reappraisal of the Tonalist heritage. Just as the Hudson River School went into a precipitous decline in the late 1870s and had to wait nearly one hundred years to regain its luster, so the Tonalists endured a similar decline in the years after 1920 and have needed the perspective of a century to reassess their importance the history of American art. This was especially true of the early Tonalist work, which was scattered and has only come to light in piecemeal fashion, unlike the later work, which tended to be bought by moneyed collectors and then moved seamlessly to museum collections.

Even with this reappraisal, the suave refinement of Tonalism has largely been overshadowed by the contemporaneous work of American Impressionism (spurred by adulation for its French counterpart), both in the marketplace and in terms of scholarship devoted to the movement. This has distorted both the historical and artistic reality. In the decades surrounding 1900, Tonalism was the dominant style in American art and fundamentally absorbed and eclipsed the inroads of French Impressionism in the work of its American exponents, which reached a height as an innovative force approximately between 1890 and 1895. By 1900, Impressionism in America and Europe was dated, replaced by Post-Impressionist movements, including Whistler’s dematerialized Expressive Tonalism, an art suggestive, mysterious, evasive—often pared to iconic essentials, which influenced late Monet, Degas, and the Symbolists. As will be explored, in chapter 8, it is Tonalism, an essentially indigenous style—not European-derived Impressionism, that entered most fully into the gene pool of American modernism.

The ultimate success and staying power of American Tonalism had much to do with its peculiar American heritage, especially its quasi-religious power and rootedness in the transcendentalist tradition of spiritual reverie. The American Tonalists were avid readers of the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, and not only in their original writings, but in the writings of their heirs, John Burroughs and John Muir, along with multitudes of writers and poets found in the pages of mass-circulation publications like Scribner’s and The Century Magazine, as well as fellow artist William Morris Hunt, whose influential Art Talks of 1878 is couched in Emersonian exhortations and metaphors. Darwin, too, played a largely creative and even dynamic role in opening the New England mind to the hidden splendors and underlying forces at play in nature: for the enchanting power of metamorphosis to produce change without change, for multiplicity within an essential unity, the kind of unseen motion a sensitive observer like Thoreau detected everywhere in the landscape. Tonalism, in its technical repertoire, the elucidation of vibration and refraction of like tones, actually provided a visual metaphor of metamorphosis, of the feeling of change that, in moments of reverie, seems changeless. Unlike American Impressionism, with it focus on the quasi-scientific recording of fleeting light, Tonalism was shaped in the crucible of an indigenous sensibility that sought the enduring in the momentary: a very American reverence for the concrete and visible while striving to elucidate an underlying spiritual presence. Paradoxically, while attempting to capture the enduring—the underlying spirit of place, much as Proust had sought for the permanent in the multi-layered palimpsest of memory, Tonalism brokered a compromise between the materialist and spiritualist camps of American philosophical and theological discourse. In a bookish post-bellum age, a skeptical age, in some ways even more secular than our own, Tonalist landscapes provided a haven for the weary mind: a tonic and quasi-mystic aura of near religious intensity, what contemporary critic Sadakichi Hartmann called a: “science for the soul…that may mystify us and lift us above the prose of every-day existence.” This hybrid strain of spiritual-romantic sensibility grafted onto a practical respect for the everyday reality was very much in keeping with the culture of the age. The resultant Tonalist version of Emersonian uplift, not unlike America itself, combined seemingly disparate elements of European polish with native predispositions (including the critical influence of Japanese art) to form an inimitable and paradoxical style: expressive of deep sentiment but not sentimental, representational but essentially abstract, at once real and ideal. Paraphrasing George Inness, it was an art that above all things awakens an emotion. In its expressive character, Tonalism was a mirror to the hard-edged anxieties and joys of its age.

In exploring the history of Tonalism, a central issue that has preoccupied American artists, critics, and scholars for more than two centuries is again raised. What is America’s distinct contribution to the history of art? Is there such a thing as a truly indigenous American style or sensibility? In the age of globalism, cultural diversity, and the internet, such preoccupations may seem almost beside the point. But the question tantalizes as does the habit of mind of our great-grandfathers. For our forefathers who came of age during the Civil War and its aftermath raised on the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, Whitman and Poe, including the core generation of Tonalists born between 1840 and 1865, the question of forging a distinct American identity was a burning generational issue—as crucial as the development of a distinct voice for the individual artist. The branding of a unique American art was central to the Tonalists’ sense of their ultimate worth. European training was seen as a mixed blessing—crucial for professional competence, but potentially damaging to the integrity of a homegrown American vision. The naïve often-awkward technique of a George Fuller or Albert Pinkham Ryder might be excused in sophisticated art circles precisely because these artists embodied some ethereal and wholesomely sanguine American truth, while the cosmopolitan Munich school bravura of William Merritt Chase might be condemned for being all glittering surface and lacking the profound sentiment necessary in a quintessentially American art. The struggle to define what constituted an American art and how to integrate European means with American ends preoccupied artists and critics in the last decades of the nineteenth century, not unlike the struggles for personal and American distinction pursued by the Abstract Expressionists at mid-century in the face of Picasso and Matisse. The issue was endlessly dissected: was it simply a matter of style, subject matter, or underlying sensibility—or some illusive combination?

The Tonalist landscape evolved and flowered in the crucible of this controversy, as the old Hudson River men were shunted aside, and, in turn, the slick purveyors of European figurative genre were dealt with harshly by critics like the Times’ Charles de Kay, who despised the aping of European fashion. De Kay, a poet and novelist, deeply imbued with the transcendentalist aspirations of the New England mind, acts as a critical guide through much of this history of American Tonalism. His critical eye, his early championing of the likes of Albert Ryder and George Inness, has held up well over a century. As a member of the Gilder Circle (his brother-in-law was William Gilder, publisher of Scribner’s and the The Century Magazine), de Kay was at the epicenter of America’s artistic coming of age. An insider’s insider, de Kay extolled the Tonalist landscape, as opposed to figurative or genre painting, because of its inherent carrying power as a visual expression of a distinctly American spirituality, a power growing directly out of associations with and habits connected to home ground, and thus deeply felt and personal. In de Kay’s opinion, such expressions of idiosyncratic temperament were key to a vibrant national art. It was also de Kay’s profound belief that sophisticated foreign training, when harnessed to homespun predilections, could produce an American art expressive of a native value system—or as the cultural historian, Van Wyck Brooks put it: “the ethos of the race.” Such was the holy grail of turn-of-the-century American critics and writers. And certainly something the French were eager to discover in American art by 1900—and the Americans equally determined to expound and defend. In the hands of its best exponents, depicted both the quotidian love of the land and the deepest spiritual intuitions of the American character. In this, Tonalism—given the breadth and longevity of the movement—may indeed represent a fundamental American mode of expression, akin to Shaker style and other aspects of folk art in its underlying abstraction, symbolism, and creation of and allegiance to iconic forms. In 1900, European and American commentators and critics in the aftermath of the Paris Universal Exposition certainly believed the Tonalist landscape in the hands of its greatest exponents: Whistler, George Inness, Alexander Wyant, Homer Dodge Martin, and others like Winslow Homer and Ben Foster, constituted a national school and expressed an original native sensibility.

Tonalist artists, their critics and patrons, passionately aspired to as much; they were intent on bettering their European colleagues and forging an American identity—proud and convinced that they had done so. In 1904, the Tonalist art establishment in New York, centered on the Society of American Artists, the Lotus Club, and their associated artists, collectors, and critics, held a comparative exhibition of European and American art, matching up Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, Monet, Renoir, Boudin, Jongkind, and others with their American contemporaries like Inness, Martin, Wyant, Tryon, Kost, Murphy, Ranger, La Farge, and Charles H. Davis. The American art establishment and public were shocked to find that the Americans were not only as good, but in many cases better than the Europeans: more poetic, subtler in the use of tone and richness of vision. As Charles de Kay put it: “The fight has been too long one way; for Americans who have been overcome by the admirable things that meet them on a visit to Europe have been blind to what their own land produces, as fine as and in many cases finer than the products of European hands.”

The cohesiveness of the Tonalist school is a marvel. Never before or since has such a large generation of artists been as close-knit and maintained such a coherent style over so many decades. The core Tonalist generation born in the decades 1840 to 1865 shared studios in New York, belonged to the same professional societies: the Society of American Artists, the National Academy, the New York Water Color Club, the American Watercolor Society; socialized together at the Lotus Club, the Salmagundi Club, the Century Club, and Players Club, while sharing exhibition space in the most prominent galleries in New York and across the country. With the perspective of a century, we can now finally appreciate their singular achievement and crucial contribution to the living stream of American art.

Tonalism, the Style: A Definition and Overview

While the term “Tonalist” goes back at least to the 1880s, if not before, the term “Tonalism” seems to have acquired its present connotation between 1900 and 1910 (probably in contradistinction to the use of “Impressionism” and other isms of European coinage), and came into widespread usage in the teens and twenties. “Tonalism” was used by critics and scholars like Ralcy Hasted Bell and Sidney Allan (Sadakichi Hartmann) in reference to the Tonal School of painting and pictorialism in photography by 1914 and 1915. The “Tonal School” as a descriptive category of a peculiar brand of low-toned American painting appears to have its origins in the 1890s and certainly was widely employed after 1900. Tonalism as a name remained in scattered use in critical and scholarly circles right through the mid-twentieth century, and then gained wider scholarly currency from the 1970s on. By the 1880s, “Tonalist” was often used to describe a movement or school, types of painting, and the artists who emphasized tonal values in their work and the concomitant expression of poetic feeling or mood so invoked. Such terms as “tone” or “in tone,” or “tonal” or “tonalist” or “tonality” or “low-toned”—also “tonist”—were often and widely used interchangeably in a descriptive sense, or critical terminology, as in: “…to keep the parts of his picture in tone…,” “Tonal Men,” “a general harmoniousness as to tone,” “tonal landscape,” “justice of tone,” “warm in tone,” “Mr. Inness, classed in respect to his color powers, must be considered as a tonalist…,” “a golden tonality,” “the tones of this watercolor,” “it is fine in tone,” “the ‘tonal’ school,” “…all tonists,” or to differentiate a “colorist” from a “tonalist.” By 1900 the terms “Tonalist” or “tonal” were used in contradistinction to Impressionism (often referred to as Luminism) or plein-air painting with its high-keyed broken facture produced out of doors in bright sunlight. Technically speaking, tone in color theory refers to a tint produced by adding white to a pure color, or a shade resulting from adding black to a pure color: color has been “toned up” or “toned down.” This was the basis of the chiaroscuro style of painting invented by Leonardo da Vinci, taken up by the Renaissance masters, especially the Venetians, Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini, and Titian, and eventually Velásquez, the Spanish master so esteemed by La Farge, Inness, and Whistler, and any number of American Tonalists. Constable, Turner, Corot, and the Barbizon school are often cited by contemporary artists and critics as progenitors of the Tonalist school in America. In the broad tradition of Western art, the Tonalists come out of the colorist, or “colore,” tradition of Venetian art as opposed to the “designo,” the tradition of Florentine art, which emphasizes drawing or line.

The term “Tonalism” generally applies to landscape art, including painting, watercolor, pastel, and etching. Landscapes make up the vast majority of subjects painted in a tonal style, a style characterized by the use of a low-toned palette consisting mostly of cool colors—earthy greens, blues, mauve, violet, black, and a range of intervening grays, colors considered poetic and suggestive. The suggestiveness of the style was partly achieved by the laying in of similar tones side by side, producing a sensation of refraction of subtly different hues, and by applying cool tones over a ground of warm color, effecting a feeling of vibration in the eye. In 1916, Bell described the delightful result in terms of texture: “It endows his canvas lavishly with all sorts of riches; in one place there dreams the suggestion of a velvet emerald, in another that of a pigeon-blood ruby, and somewhere between the two nestles the mellowed translucency of mutton-fat jade; in seeming abandon, the souls of happy jewels are scattered with such consummate skill that is hard sometimes to believe that they are made of paint.” These and other techniques, including the use of colored glazes, which Bell compared to the rich properties of stained glass, impart an illusion of blurred movement, a visual equivalent of metamorphosis—and haunting reverie: this feeling of metamorphosis, of change and changelessness lies at the metaphysical heart of the style. The ambiguity and uncertainty of this soft-edged art form led directly to modernist preoccupations about the nature of reality. Though landscapes predominated, there were many painters who used a tonalist palette to paint figures, urban scenes, and still lifes. The greatest exponents of figurative tonalism, especially in the realm of portraiture, were James McNeil Whistler, Thomas Dewing, and William Merritt Chase, who followed Whistler’s lead by veiling their subjects in immaterial tone. Whistler, Birge Harrison, Robert Henri, Charles Warren Eaton, and many others painted tonal urban scenes. Whistler’s path-breaking nocturnes, transformed the fog-shrouded Thames into enchanting dreamlike visions, while his minimalist tonal pastels and exquisite etchings of Venice would mold the vision of two generations of artists who produced their own spectral versions of the lagoon city. Birge Harrison painted snowy scenes of Quebec and fog-bound nocturnes of New York, while Robert Henri and William Redfield did the same in Paris and later New York, and Eaton painted moonlight nocturnes of Bruges. Birge’s brother, Alexander Harrison, was an exponent of tonalist marine scenes of such breathtaking beauty and refinement that he was lionized in Paris and credited with inventing the mode (including the naturalistic nude painted in outdoor light). John La Farge, J. Alden Weir, William Merritt Chase, and Emil Carlsen produced extraordinary tonal still lifes. But in terms of quantity, quality, and ultimate significance to American art, it is the Tonalist landscape that forms the leitmotif of the style. The most talented painters of the era gravitated to landscape, not simply because of the raw emotion it engendered, or even the expanding market for landscapes, but because landscape offered the most scope for imagination, innovation, and artistic growth: a distinctly American idiom. The tonal landscape, especially in the late 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, when Whistler’s initial influence was greatest, when his pastels and etchings of Venice were first seen in Boston and New York, tends to be small in size, intimate in character, depicting a nearby bucolic corner of nature. This early phase of Aesthetic Tonalism with its emphasis on decorative values, charming pattern, quiet equilibrium, and graphic flattening of form drew on, in addition to Whistler, the influence of Japanese art, the Aesthetic movement, and American artists like Thomas Dewing who taught advanced compositional styles at the Art Students League in the early 1880s. The taste for intimacy and charm may have partly flowed from the tradition of small sketches executed by Hudson River School artists, and certainly had precedent in the small-scale studies from nature painted by French Barbizon artists. The great avatar of American Tonalism and the New England Transcendentalist tradition, William Morris Hunt, on his return from studying with Millet in 1855, instilled in sophisticated Boston art circles a taste for painterly values and broadly massed forms on an intimate scale characteristic of Barbizon landscapes. Both by example and in his teaching, Hunt stressed proportion, values (areas of light and dark), and simplicity of expression and parsimony of detail so as to give the composition visual impact: “Your work may be called monotonous; but one tone is better than many which do not harmonize,” as he noted in his enormously influential Talks on Art, a collection of Hunt’s exhortations to his students, which quickly become the Tonalist gospel after its publication in 1878. “We begin with the study of ‘values’ in order more readily to get the power of expressing the roundness and fullness of objects, the effect of light and shadow, and the mystery and distance of atmosphere.” It was Hunt’s most famous pupil, John La Farge, in his extraordinary small landscapes of the 1860s, who seemingly created the style full-blown with relatively little foreign training and only Hunt’s example to guide him. La Farge’s precocious and scintillating panels of activated tone set along Narragansett Bay and the family’s Long Island retreat are less about place and more about mood and ephemeral light. Most of La Farge’s landscape gems, displaying both a sensuous charm and precocious sensitivity to cool color, were sold into Boston collections in the 1870s and set the mode for Tonalism as a peculiarly New England style. Scenes of rural New England were favored by collectors, along with the depiction of the passing of dusk into night, subjects sophisticated in execution yet deceptively naïve and romantic—the poetry of the everyday invoked by the artist to express feeling in paint and stir an emotion in the viewer. Inness, too, maintained ties to Boston circles in the 1860s and 1870s where the post-Barbizon styles of American landscape found fertile ground, especially among those who had early appreciated the abstract and decorative qualities of Japanese art. In 1878, George Inness published his manifesto, which defined the quintessence of Tonalism for a generation: “A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion….and the true beauty of the work consists in the beauty of the sentiment or emotion which it inspires…the quality and the force of this emotion.”

Unlike the panoramic and detailed views of specific places favored by the Hudson River School, Inness, in his late work of the 1880s and 1890s, along with his followers, painted landscapes that were more constrained in field and generalized, often just a glimpse of a copse, a portion of a field or meadow, the edge of a wood or a tiny clearing, or patch of gentle hillside: here the bare remnants of an old road, there the tumbled fieldstone wall of a defunct farmyard, and on the near horizon a remaining stand of first growth white pine or an ancient oak. These are human landscapes, civilized landscapes, in Inness’ phrase—yet generally lacking figures (Inness, a first-generation Tonalist, never quite gave up on the figurative note in his landscapes), lest a narrative element interfere with the purity of solitude necessary for contemplation. This ostracizing of the figure is rooted in a Puritan iconoclasm found both in Emerson’s transcendentalist ideas and Whistler’s modernist non-narrative abstraction. Or as Thoreau put it as he gazed over a meadow at a November sunset, “…we were only motes in its beams.” Abandoned farms, rural outskirts of villages, or near-at-home places cheek-by-jowl with nature were the preferred subjects, where the unspoiled landscape—far from the madding crowd of urban life, can be enjoyed firsthand. These are places of escape and wonder first elucidated in the writings of Thoreau and dreamed about by city dwellers. Most of the near-iconic precincts of Tonalism lie within easy commuting distance of a major metropolitan area: the raw hillsides of the Catskills, the gentle farms of Long Island, old stone walls and haggard orchards around Greenwich or Old Lyme on the Connecticut coast, sea-misted cypresses in the Carmel/Monterey area north of San Francisco, or across the Hudson River from New York in Bloomfield, Montclair, and Nutley, New Jersey, where George Inness, Charles Warren Eaton, Arthur Hoeber—and Albert Blakelock in nearby East Orange—set up studios and savored a fading rural world of faltering farms and overgrown pastures. And of course, Whistler had his fog-shrouded Thames ever hovering beyond his Chelsea windows, even as his dematerialized scenes of Venice spread his minimalist vision throughout the art world.

The Tonalist feeling for subdued light evolved from a number of sources. The microclimate of the European painting grounds engendered among the American expatriate landscapists a preference for overcast light (the cloudy summers and pearl gray skies along the coast in Brittany and Holland), and for simplification as a mean to enhancing the expressive power of their art. Feeling-charged pigment of subtle tonality, whether delicately applied or with impetuous impasto, became the preferred mode. When they returned to America, the expatriates gravitated to similar scenes and lighting conditions, especially along the coast and the moist foggy atmosphere near the sea, where the muted harmonies of the landscape rang most true. Thus the Tonalist season is often fall or winter, the time is mostly dawn or sunset, especially the twilight gloaming, in the minutes when the sun has slipped the horizon, when the natural light has softened and local color is enhanced—paradoxically, when the various earth tones, especially the various greens, become more distinct and vibrant. In the half-light, detail melts away and only the larger forms and masses remain, the various half and quartertones describing a mysterious harmony—a fragile enchantment to challenge the artist and beguile the eye of his patron. From Hunt to Inness to Twachtman and J. Francis Murphy, value and form were stressed over line and detail. Tonalism became an art of omission and evasion, of the elimination of unwanted or distracting detail: revealing the essence of matter. Weeding out niggling detail, landforms are emphasized, trees and rocks and pools become actors in the mind’s eye. In turn, the viewer is tantalized by vibrating tones and indistinct silhouettes, not to mention the sinuous pigment itself. Amorphous soft-edged forms predominate: nothing is quite as it seems. Metamorphosis, the idea and reality, is translated from sources in Ovid and Darwin to become an active presence in the Tonalist picture, tantalizing both the eye and imagination. The resulting natural ensembles, such as silhouetted trees, indistinct patterns of rocky outcroppings, and the counterpoint of hard and soft forms create a peculiar, and often indescribable, symbolic energy. Tonalist landscapes reflect moments of memory regained and then lost; as such, they shift, elide, and transform before the eye and never find complete resolution. It is this added dimensions of memory that make the greatest Tonalist landscapes, not just haunting, but revealing of new insights upon repeated viewings. Memory, as emotion recalled in solitude and as a technical resource, is a key component in the rich suggestiveness of the Tonalist mode. As chapter 7 will show, the Tonalist landscape is memory incarnate.

In summary, the stylistic characteristics of Tonalism comprise eleven visual components or visual emotions: 1) use of subtle color tones comprised of various greens, purples, blues, and grays that are restful and easy on the eye; 2) a stress on symbolic form; 3) the depiction of atmosphere (the unseen air); 4) a sense of movement or metamorphosis in nature (the vibration and refraction of tones); 5) the use of expressive paint handling to embody emotion or mimic the felt-life of nature; 6) the employment of formal strategies of embedded patterns and the decorative deployment of natural and abstract forms; 7) the use of soft-edged forms to further the sense of ambiguity and mystery of place (known as lost-edge technique in the nineteenth century); 8) and an emphasis on the broad, graphic, ultimately abstract reading of major forms, producing an immediacy of emotional response to paintings, especially at a distance; 9) an emphasis on the elegiac poetry of landscape (reflecting the trauma of the Civil War); 10) the portrayal of a mystical organic relationship between perceiver and the preceived; and 11) an intimate landscape art of solitude and silence, and memroy that taps into innate and adaptive spiritual needs. In the 1880s Aesthetic Tonalism, with its emphasis on pattern, decoration, and balance, gradually gave way to a more Expressive Tonalism around 1900, which emphasized gestural facture, larger-size works, and a concentration on fewer and simpler symbolic forms so as to project greater emotional power and immediacy of visual impact.

As a style, Tonalism was embedded in the arts and culture of the day, along with Tiffany stained-glass windows and lamps. The act of composition and selection of tones was understood to be similar to the experience of musical harmony, the resulting counterpoint of color tones effecting emotions similar to that of music. Artists from Whistler on were well versed in the musical analogies and the underlying abstract appeal of both arts: Whistler used such musical terms as harmony, arrangement, and symphony as titles for his work. Whistler extolled the role of the artist in mastering Nature. It was the artist, not Nature, as Whistler liked to put it, who brought about the triumph of artistic perfection by redesigning the visual world for decorative and suggestive effect. “But the artist is born to pick, and chose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony.” Emerson and Thoreau in their own way were as assertive as Whistler in proclaiming man’s priority as the ultimate visualizer of Nature. This transcendentalist subjectivity—in which man’s mysterious experience of nature counts for more than the objective reality observed—so central to the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, is fully embodied in the Tonalist landscape. Creator and creation have become one. The misreading of Tonalism’s essentially avant-garde pedigree has much to do with the mistaken critique that it was derivative, a post-Barbizon style and thus old-fashioned. It would be almost impossible today to confuse a French Barbizon landscape with an American Tonalist landscape: perspective, style, and compositional modes are quite distinct. Whistler’s influence in the early 1880s, much less that of Japanese art and the Aesthetic Movement, resulted in stylization of the Tonalist landscape, employing embedded patterns, flattened forms, cropped perspectives, and, for the most part, the elimination of figures or narrative detail. By the end of the 1880s, the Tonalist landscape by its best exponents had an unmistakably American look. This Whistlerian or decorative aspect of American Tonalism was duly noted by Bell, who wrote of the Tonalists’ “sensuous swing and play of broken colours, which are wedded to such delightful designs and pleasing patterns that they neither seem like designs nor yet suggest patterns. So agreeably are all the parts connected that they are seen only together; fused in a nice relation to the whole…the deft methods of harmony, so cunningly wrought that the production is as free from the moans of labour, as the gently swaying boughs of a tree or the happy waters of a lazy brook.” The Americans tended to work in the studio from memory, adjusting their compositions along synthetic lines to gain subtle harmonies of design and a breathless equilibrium. The men of 1830, with the exception of Corot, tended to use darker grounds (many of which have deteriorated) and thus lack the atmospheric vibration and refraction of adjacent tones, and the mysterious blurred edges found in so many Tonalist works. Expressive Tonalism, from the 1890s on, is even more distinct, with an expressive gestural handling of paint and emphasis on nocturnes and symbolic content rarely found in Barbizon painting. The American expatriates assiduously ransacked the technical resources of their old world bloodline but only occasionally—certainly not the great talents—copied out of whole cloth.

When the Americans did borrow, the influence tended to be short-lived and quickly merged with a broader stylistic synthesis back on American shores. The rediscovery of Velásquez by such expatriates as Whistler, Chase, and Currier is a perfect example. The vogue for Velásquez—often described as a Tonalist in period scholarship—directed the Americans to low-toned compositions in which slight variations of tone were meticulously noted to produce both a sense of real light and vibration: a palpable atmospheric envelope. This was a technique Whistler exploited to the full, especially in his figurative work. Of more recent vintage, the English painter, John Constable, was, according to Tonalist, Birge Harrison, the first to record the pearly-gray out-of-doors light in a faithful manner, exploiting the full gamut of grays, mauves, and lilacs in broadly painted masses. Constable’s example had a profound influence on French Barbizon painters who recognized the Englishman’s truth-to-nature observations, and the purity and simplicity of his style freed from traditional formulas of academic representation. It was this style of handling, the sketchy more generalized effects of paint application handed down from Constable to Barbizon artists Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daugbigny, Narcisse Diaz, and Theodore Rousseau, which Americans like Inness, William Morris Hunt, and John La Farge developed in their early work, and then moved on. Perhaps even more important in the early development of Tonalism was the meteoric rise and fall of the French artist Jules-Bastien Lepage. Lepage’s naturalism had enormous influence on Americans working in France, especially Brittany—probably more than the academic art taught in the Parisian schools in the late 1870s. Lepage’s naturalist style, sometimes close to photographic realism, especially in the depth of cool crystalline atmosphere and high horizons of his compositions, found resonance with the Harrison brothers and J. Alden Weir, and was a strong presence in the early years of the Society of American Artists in the 1880s.

Another profound influence was the painterly style of the Munich School. Munich’s most important American acolytes, J. Frank Currier, Frank Duveneck, John Twachtman, Henry Muhrman, William Gedney Bunce, and William Merritt Chase, introduced the expressive brushstroke and a new freedom of form into the Tonalist movement at a crucial juncture in its development during the late 1870s and early 1880s. Munich-style expressive facture, which had been derived from old master sources in Velásquez and Hals, faded in the 1880s—merging with the wider stylistic stream of American painting—only to make a comeback by 1900 with painters like Henri, Redfield, and Bellows and their vigorous use of pigment. It cannot be emphasized enough that the greatest of the Tonalist painters were those who largely eschewed French academic modes, or who were able to take just enough of their academic training—Dwight Tryon, John Twachtman, and Birge Harrison are prominent examples—to impart a useful technical competence, but no more. Ironically, more influential in the development of Tonalist style was the expatriate’s exposure to the soft atmospheric weather and landscapes of the American art colonies in Brittany, much less the beneficial cross-fertilization that took place within the American expatriate communities. The experience of plein-air painting under cloudy European skies, especially on the coast of Brittany and along the waterways of Holland probably contributed more to the look and feel of Tonalism than all the years of studious academic work in the Parisian ateliers. This subdued natural light found in their European haunts, especially the scintillating effects of reflected sunlight off water passing through misty atmosphere, seems to have imprinted itself like an afterglow in the work of the expatriates long after their return home. In the 1880s and into the 1890s, Americans like John Twachtman, Charles Platt, Arthur Hoeber, Hugh Bolton Jones, Birge Harrison, and Leonard Ochtman continued to fill their landscapes with a silvery-white simmering tonality, a lingering and persistent memory of student days in Brittany and elsewhere.

Tonalist landscape painter Birge Harrison, writing on the art of landscape in 1912, described what he considered the fundamental contribution of the Tonalist school to the history of landscape, and particularly the technical advances that distinguished Tonalism from earlier Barbizon methods and Impressionist broken facture. The true depiction of natural light, Harrison claimed, depended on two crucial technical innovations made by his generation: vibration—cool overtones applied over warm undertones, and refraction: complementary tones placed side by side on the canvas to give the effect of pulsing light and movement. This was also referred to as the “blurred-edge” technique, in which forms outside the central point of observation lose definition and detail. Harrison drew a distinction between the Tonalist method of describing natural light, in which sentiment and poetry is the object, and the Impressionist means, in which primary colors are laid in side by side on canvas, thus allowing the eye to blend the colors at distance, producing a quasi-scientific effect: the momentary dazzle of bright light. Harrison and many of his Tonalist colleagues found “classic” Impressionism as practiced by Monet and Renoir at Argenteuil in 1873–74 to be too scientific and mechanical for their tastes, but perhaps more to the point, they considered it a foreign import which went against the grain of American taste for an art spiritual in character and expressive of individual feeling.

Tonalism was never a static movement between 1880 and 1910, and its formal and abstract elements always endowed it with a dynamism that prompted its evolution, transforming the style in new and unexpected ways. Its methods and preoccupations would appear in various guises as fresh talents found inspiration in its rarified precincts. Broadly stated, the style evolved from the intimate, precious, small scale and charming landscapes of the 1880s—Aesthetic Tonalism, to more broadly painted and suggestive renditions of mood and atmosphere in the late 1890s—Expressive Tonalism, until by 1900 and the first decade of the century the Tonalists filled larger canvases, emphasizing both decorative patterning and the gestural brushstroke and nocturnal and symbolic subject matter, reflecting the influence of international fin-de-siècle styles such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Tonalism’s truest bloodline, however, remains the New England transcendentalist tradition—the subjective eye—as embodied in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. It is this interdependent relationship of man and nature, a relationship in which the artist interprets the visual world through the alembic of the imagination and memory, often eliciting spiritual insights, both personal and universal, that remains the enduring birthright of American Tonalism.

Notes

Henry David Thoreau, “Nature Essays”: Walking, in The Selected Works of Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975; Cambridge ed.), pp. 685–686.
Sadakichi Hartmann, The Whistler Book (Boston: L.C. Page & Co., 1910), pp. 94–95.
Ralcy Husted Bell, The Philosophy of Painting (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), chap. 28, “Tonalism and Tonalists,” p. 183. Bell had used the same language in his Art Talks with Ranger of 1914. Ibid., p. 184.
Hartmann, The Whistler Book, p. 92.
Charles de Kay, New York Times, November 20, 1904.
Bell used the term “Tonalism” in Art Talks with Ranger in 1914, and in The Philosophy of Painting, 1916, titling chapter 28 “Tonalism and Tonalists”; the critic, Sidney Allan, in The Photographic Journal of America, September 1915, p. 45, describes the work of an Italian photographer: “An individual temperament, no doubt, but strangely influenced by our tendency toward extreme tonalism.” Allan implies that the Italian has been influenced by a particularly American style, though more likely the influence was Whistler.
Ripley Hitchcock, in an 1884 catalogue essay, “George Inness, N.A.,” writes: “We know how tenderly he cares for the harmony of his subtle coloring, and we know that to keep the parts of his picture in tone is a matter of high importance to him.” Quoted in Rachael DeLue, George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 200. Contemporary exhibition reviews and announcements used the term: New York Mail and Express, February 2, 1902, review, “Lotus Club Shows Pictures by Thirty-nine of Its Members—Tonal Men and Others in Evidence.” Clipping Lotus Club Scrapbooks, quoted in “Championing Tonal Painting: The Lotus Club,” in Jack Becker, The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism, exh. cat. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2005). New York Times, February 11, 189?, review of William Sartain at Macbeth Galleries, “…the strength of a general harmoniousness as to tone.” New York Times, February 2, 1905, review of Leonard Ochtman: “Morning Symphony is a fine big tonal landscape….” New York Times, February 27, 1910, review of William Sartain: “Mr. Sartain’s habit of simplifying his masses and gaining justice of tone….” New York Times, December 12, 1908, review of William Sartain: “The Cloud by William Sartain, is a monochromatic picture warm in tone….” New York Times, December 12, 1908, review. “Mr. Inness’s Paintings,” New York Evening Post, April 15, 1884: “Mr. Inness, classed in respect to his color powers, must be considered as a tonalist, and whenever he attempts to leave this quality and venture into the higher power of colors he fails,” quoted in DeLue, p. 201. Review of exhibition at the Union League Club: “…Blakelock’s, with tawny rich glazes and a golden tonality….” New York Times, July 15, 1889, review: “The tones of this water color are magnificent…It is fine in tone and well painted throughout….” New York Times, April 2, 1911, review of painting by Arthur Hoeber at Katz Galleries: “Mr. Hoeber’s earlier work was delicate in color, simple in theme, and allied to what we call in the slang of criticism the ‘tonal’ school.” New York Times, review of William Macbeth (Macbeth Galleries) exhibition, February 2, 1893: “There are twenty-four landscapes by George Inness, A.H.Wyant, Robert C. Minor, H.W. Ranger, and J. Francis Murphy, all tonists, and each a painter with an individual style.” George Inness, Jr., in his Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness (New York: Kennedy Galleries and Da Capo Press, 1969), p. 133, uses the term: “My father was not over-enthusiastic about Corot, but thought he was a poet and a tonist.”
Bell, The Philosophy of Painting, p. 179.
William Morris Hunt, On Painting and Drawing (New York: Dover Publications, 1976; repr. of 1896 and 1898 editions ; originally published in England as Talks on Art, 1878), p. 6.
Quoted in Helen M. Knowlton, Art-Life of William Morris Hunt (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1899), p. 145.
George Inness, “A Painter on Painting,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 56 (February 1878): pp. 458–461. Repr. in Nicolai Cikovsky, George Inness (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985), p. 205.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (New York: Dover Publications, 1967: originally published 1892, William Heinemann, London), p. 143.
Bell, The Philosophy of Painting, p. 178.

Text copyright © 2010 by David A. Cleveland. Images Copyright © 2003-2023 Chris Peters. All rights reserved.