Alexander Helwig Wyant | The Old Schoolhouse

Provenance
Private Collection, Yonkers, New York

In 1860, Alexander Wyant left his native Ohio for New York City to visit George Inness, the Tonalist master who had awakened his artistic impulse. Inspired by the enchanting beauty of Inness’s paintings, Wyant sought his counsel and, with the aid of Inness’s patron, Nicholas Longworth, was able to remain in New York for one year.[1] There, Wyant gleaned the ingredients for his own Tonalist style, which would make him one of the late nineteenth century’s most prominent landscape painters. He received additional training in Germany and England, learning the style of the Dusseldorf School, before returning to New York to establish his studio in 1867. Wyant became increasingly well-known over the course of the late-nineteenth century, prompting a critic in the Art Journal to write: “As a painter of the wild and rugged scenery of the northern wilderness of New York, Wyant has but few equals in the Academic ranks.”[2]

In The Old Schoolhouse, Wyant departs from American prototypes in his soft, visionary handling to the scene. Breaking with the romantic realism of the Hudson River School, the painting approaches the hazy generalization of Inness and the French Barbizon School. Critics observed this shift in his style, with the contemporary critic G.W. Sheldon noting that:

Mr. Wyant’s landscapes in recent years have received a great deal of attention and intelligent admiration, and the spectator who appreciates them would think it almost incredible that their maker ever studied at Duseldorf…..Mr. Bierstadt one might say is a typical Dusseldorfian, and Mr. Wyant is a negation of Mr. Bierstadt. It is to the influence of Constable primarily that the pictures of Mr. Wyant, like those of the best French landscapists, owe their breadth and freedom of treatment…His soft, far distances, and immediate foregrounds are alike impressive…And his art, like all good art, is delicate, simple and direct.^[3]

With Wyant’s art one witnesses the evolution of American landscape painting from Realism to Impressionism. His later paintings are marked by fluid, spontaneous brushstrokes that capture subtle variations of atmosphere, time of day, distance, and meterological effects. The Old Schoolhouse bears this tranquil character, which Charles Caffin described as “the ineffable loveliness of quiet”:

While so many of his twilights breathe simply the ineffable loveliness of quiet, others are astir with persuasion to spiritual reflection…or with deeper, fuller suggestion of the infinite mystery of nature’s recurring sleep that swallows up the littleness of man in its immensity.^[4]

Here Caffin, an important turn-of-the-century art historian, illuminates the poetic grandeur of Wyant’s pastoral scenes. With its hazy, Barbizon-inspired brushwork and muted palette, The Duck Hunters achieves this grandeur not through size or subject, but through tone and mood.

Wyant was a member of the National Academy of Design and the Century Association and exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Arts Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings are now in over seventy-five important museum collections, including the White House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

JK:ajc