Alexander Helwig Wyant | Woodland Shelter

Provenance
Sale, Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Robert Somerville, and Ortgies & Co., New York, February 5 – 6, 1894, no. 19 (as “A Woodland Sketch”)
Harry Jones, Kansas City, Missouri
The Findlay Family, New York, by descent

Literature

Catalogue of paintings by the late A. H. Wyant, N.A. (New York: Ortgies & Co., 1894), no. 19 (as “A Woodland Sketch”).

Alexander Helwig Wyant demonstrated tremendous dedication to painting throughout his life. After a stroke in 1873 paralyzed his right side, he endured with admirable persistence, learning to paint with his left hand. Art historian John C. Van Dyke wrote of Wyant’s perseverance: “He must have been a man with fortitude of soul beyond the average. It is not every painter that can turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.”^[1] Commenting on Wyant’s significance within art history, the early-twentieth-century critic Samuel Isham discussed a pivotal group of three artists—Wyant, George Inness, and Homer Dodge Martin—who were responsible for the creation of a unique style of painting. Isham asserted that each artist possessed a “style, personal and distinguished, which burst through the commonplace,”^[2] and considered these three painters to be America’s challenge to the best European art of the period. Van Dyke placed similar emphasis on Wyant, even suggesting that “he and Martin were perhaps rarer spirits, finer souls than either Inness or Homer. Their charm of mood, the serenity of their outlook, the loveliness of their vision will hardly be repeated in our art.”^[3]

Inclined toward art at early age, Wyant possessed an observant and creative nature, enjoying walks in the woods, fishing trips, and sketching on the floor with fireplace charcoal. In 1857, during a visit to Cincinnati, he was exposed to the paintings of Inness, who became a close colleague and a major influence. Wyant studied briefly at the Düsseldorf Academy and while abroad encountered the art of the British painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, whose atmospheric canvases and liberated brushwork inspired him to embrace Impressionist techniques. Wyant returned to America in 1865, settling in a studio on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York. He traveled extensively, sketching in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and West Virginia.

After 1880 Wyant spent less time in New York City, seeking respite at his house in Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks. There, uninhibited by his physical limitations, he ventured alone into the forest to sketch and paint. At the end of the decade the artist relocated to Arkville, in the Catskills, where the landscape inspired his mature works. After his death, his widow destroyed many of his early paintings, believing that only his later—and in her opinion best—work should survive. Wyant’s earlier canvases differ greatly from his later works, which, in their departure from the Hudson River School tradition, laid the groundwork for American Impressionism. His mature style, through freer brushwork, expressed, above all, the artist’s adoration of nature, “his earliest inheritance and his latest love.”^[4]

Woodland Shelter situates the viewer beneath an arboreal canopy crafted from painterly brushstrokes. A cool clearing ahead beckons with a sensation of open air. The path is framed by a hefty boulder and a sinewy birch that rises gracefully, culminating in a lush overhang of interwoven branches and leaves. The path, dappled with tones of pale sienna, appears soft and earthy, summoning the viewer forward. In the spirit of Barbizon painting, Woodland Shelter evokes the mood of the forest. Art critic Charles Caffin praised the poignancy of Wyant’s woodland scenes: “Strength and stability and the evidences of time confront us, just as they would in the forest itself.”^[5]

CAR

During his lifetime Alexander Helwig Wyant exhibited at many prestigious venues, including the National Academy of Design, where he was granted membership in 1869. Paintings by Wyant are included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The White House, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.