File:Wyatt Eaton - Portrait of William Cullen Bryant.jpg

Identifier: americanpainters00sher (find matches)
Title: American painters of yesterday and today
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Sherman, Frederic Fairchild
Subjects: Painting, American Painters, American
Publisher: New York, Priv. print.
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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His Notes on theEarly Italian Masters, Reminiscences of Millet,and Recollections of American Poets are extremelyinteresting and suggestive reading. He was also asmuch of a master with pencil as with brush. Hisdrawings, of which a considerable number have beenpreserved, are accurate and illuminating in theirexposition of the persuasive beauty of the humanform, very sensitive in touch and very alluring inline. He made portrait drawings from life of Long-fellow, Whittier, Emerson, Holmes and Bryant, allof which were engraved by Timothy Cole and pub-lished in the Century Magazine. The portrait in oilof Bryant which now hangs in the Brooklyn Museumis perhaps the finest thing of the kind he produced,though he painted many portraits, not a few ofwhich probably would be famous if known to thepublic. The Bryant has a solidity that is convincingand a frankness that is enticing. The brush ishandled with great skill but with evident freedom,and a certain boldness that makes for bigness in the 40
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Wyatt Eaton: Portrait of William Cullen BryantMuseum of the Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N. T. best sense characterizes the technic of the painting.It is summary and yet restrained in handling, dig-nified and yet engaging as a portrait. Somehow heseems to me to have managed to incorporate in thelikeness of the man the portrait of the poet, for thepicture always suggests the author of the immortalthings like ^Thanatopsis which Bryant wrote. Mrs. Eaton in her brief sketch of her husbands lifesays that one of his most cherished desires was tobecome a painter of the nude, and it may be addedthat his later years were pretty much devoted to theeffort to realize this ambition. His works of the kindare few, but for purity and grace they are hardly tobe excelled In American painting. The Ariadne inthe Evans Collection at the National Gallery is tomy mind one of our three greatest paintings of thenude. Felicitous and natural in pose, rich and har-monious in color, sweet and pure In feeling, It

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