Birge Harrison: Back East

"A Wintry Walk" by Birge Harrison

"Birge Harrison returned East in 1896, settling in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is from this year therefore, that we must date the beginning of his career as a painter of American Landscape.

He was at once fascinated by the beauty of the New England winter, especially when all nature was glorified and transfigured by the white beauty of the snow. To him this was a never ceasing wonder and delight. He saw it with the fresh vision of a child, who for the first time opens its eyes upon the world. To him the snow was not white only, but took on the wonderful tones of azure, of mauve and of pale and ethereal rose and amber. He painted it as he saw it, in the opalescent radiance of dawn, in the golden glow fo sunset, or under the pale mystery of twilight skies.

The original talent he showed in his snow pictures caused them to receive almost immediate recognition. The keynote of his work was the love of beauty, but this, most fortunately, was backed by craftsmanship of the first order. His long training enabled him to place his impressions upon canvas with admirable simplicity and directness, without fumbling or uncertainty in his technique. 

A close scrutiny of his canvases reveals the fact that he has command of all the methods of the impressionist and the luminarist school, but his technique is never obtrusive. It is the beauty of the scene itself which first appeals to us in one of his pictures, and it is only a second and much more sophisticated examination which shows us the process by which his atmospheric unity is achieved. Millet once said that technique should never open shop for itself; that it should always hid itself modestly away behind the idea to be expressed. In the work of Birge Harrison's later period this first law of all truly great art is never transgressed.

For him it is the intrinsic beauty of the subject, the effect or the mood to be rendered which is of the first importance, and he holds any technique bad which obstrudes itself between that and the observer; and that technique is only truly great which is sufficiently great to make us unconscious of its presence. Velasquez's work is preeminent not because its technique is apparent on the surface, but on the contrary, just because with him the method retires modestly into the background and one sees first of all the somber Spanish Grandees or the sober and beautiful children living and breathing upon his canvas."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)