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| Wordsworth Thompson in his studio. |
Description of Photograph: Wordsworth Thompson born 1840 and died 1896, American painter and illustrator. Wordsworth poses for the photograph in his studio.
The Following article published on January 1, 1880 from The Art Journal
"Wordsworth Thompson was born in Baltimore, in 1840. At the age of twenty-one he went to Paris and studied successively under Charles Gleyre, Lambinet, and Pasini. The latter master, by-the-way, has recently made extraordinary strides in professional repute, although for many years he has been recognized as to a high degree both painter and artist. To the Salon: of 1865 Mr. Thompson sent his "Moorlands of Au-Fargi," which was the first picture that he had ever publicly exhibited. He studied in the French capital four years without displaying his works outside the circle of his friends. In 1868 he returned to America, and opened a studio in New York. Five years afterwards he became an associate of the National Academy, and seven years afterwards an Academician. To the annual exhibitions of that institution he has been an important contributor. In addition to views of Mount Etna, Mentone, Lake George, the Potomac, and Long Island, he has painted several historical pictures, such as "Virginia in the Olden Time," owned by Mr. D. H. McAlpine; "Annapolis in 1776," in the Academy of Fine Arts at Buffalo; the "Review at Philadelphia, August 24, 1777" which was in the National Academy Exhibition of 1878; and "Leaving Home to join the Army of the North an Episode of Life in Virginia One Hundred Years ago," in the National Academy Exhibition of 1879. His latest large picture is "A May-Day in Fifth Avenue, New York," in the National Academy Exhibition of 1880. Soon after the American Art Association (afterwards the Society of American Artists) was organized, Mr. Thompson became a member.
The hanging committee justly gave to the "May-Day in Fifth Avenue" a conspicuous center on the line in the north gallery of the Academy Building, but the fact was noticed as especially commendable on their part because several years ago Mr. Thompson, when a member of a similar committee, had given no striking evidence of his appreciation of their productions. This little incident, though, of course, not suggesting impartiality, a trait unexpected in a hanging committee, is nevertheless not altogether unworthy of mention. The qualities which shone in that picture were in sympathy with the best qualities of Pasini's finest productions, without being in any sense the offspring of that artist. In no former painting of Mr. Thompson's was the touch so felicitously light and certain, or the tones so delicate and luminous, or the composition so compact and fruitful, or the shadows so transparent and true. The visitor with difficulty could have found in the exhibition an example of an Academician which showed growth so marked. It was as if the painter had said, "I will abandon for once my portfolios and historical books, my studies of Mediterranean coast-scenes with donkeys and fashionable women, my researches into ancient history, and will step into the street and take a look at life around me." Fifth Avenue near Madison Square has been represented on canvas before, but never, to our knowledge, so brilliantly as Mr. Thompson there pictured it. The Champs Elysees itself, at the height of the season, is scarcely more variously or radiantly animated than is this famous thoroughfare on a bright afternoon in May. The horses, the equipages, the pedestrians, the Worth Monument, the flower-girls on the pavement, the foliage of the square, the buildings themselves, slight as are their pretensions to architectural beauty, enter into a varied and luxuriant scenic display which Mr. Thompson has transcribed with remarkable fidelity and fervor.
It is, indeed, upon the " literary " interest of his subject that this artist is usually dependent. He is a landscape-painter, but into his landscapes he is wont to introduce figures. His aesthetic sympathies run into the department of anecdotes. No other American painter of equal ability in the representation of sky, atmosphere, trees, and fields, is so systematic and persistent in refusing to represent these alone. The modern artistic spirit which has so profound a sympathy for landscape pure and simple is not shared by Mr. Thompson, any more than it was by the old masters. And as for the work of a man like Diaz, who, according to M. Charles Blanc, was the first in any school to have the idea of representing a landscape without a sky, of painting a forest as a mysterious and everywhere closed interior, which received its light only through the interstices of the foliage and by the movement of the high branches, why, Mr. Thompson probably does not understand the intense pictorial charm of such denuded scenes. There is no reason to believe that Mr. Thompson's aesthetic sense is ever disturbed by the frequent sight of civilization despoiling a landscape, or that his aesthetic creed contains any article to the effect that civilization can despoil a landscape. On the contrary, the civilization in a landscape is likely to engage his affection. By the human element in landscape Art he is forcibly impressed; and the opinion, uttered by one of our painters, that "French Art scarcely rises to the dignity of landscape‚ a swamp and a tree constitute its sum total‚ it is more limited in range than the landscape Art of any other country" is probably not antipodal to the convictions of the accomplished painter of the "May-Day in Fifth Avenue." Yet, to those realities of light and air which modern landscape Art so cherishes and patiently interprets, Mr. Thompson is by no means indifferent. Qnly their sufficiency for pictorial purposes he seems to question, the reason perhaps being that he is not perfectly susceptible to the religious potentialities of inanimate beauty.
The skillful honesty of Mr. Thompson's methods is unquestionable. He is not a Paganini who performs cleverly on a single-stringed instrument. He has no pride of eccentricity, and he manifests no desire to detain the attention of the crowd by making a clown of himself. Nor has his liberal course of study in Europe brought him to the sincere conviction that the oldest and best known American painters are a set of ninnies. It is unnecessary to add that an artist who has worked not only under the instruction, but in the atelier, of such a painter as Pasini, has some respect for brilliancy and purity of color, for delicacy and finish in execution, for beauty of keeping not less than for technical dexterity, and a decided distaste for ungraceful trickiness. Mr. Thompson occupies an honorable position in the hierarchy of American artists. His solid and earnest work will stand while other work is tottering around it."
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