| Lovell Birge Harrison (1854--1929) was one of the few artists of his generation to receive national and international recognition as a talented artist, gifted teacher and articulate critic. Leaving the United States in 1876, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, with other important artists of the period including his brother, Thomas Alexander Harrison (1853--1930), painted in several important artist colonies in France. His figure painting November, 1881, which was among the first American works purchased at the Paris Salon by the French government, prepared the way for other American artists to gain access to this important source of patronage.;Forced by ill health to leave France in 1883, Harrison embarked on a decade of extensive travel including eighteen months in Australia from 1890--91, where he painted and worked as a writer and illustrator. During this period, Harrison continued to pursue his personal expression of his pantheistic belief in the harmonious unity of man and nature while redirecting his art toward landscape painting. By the beginning of the twentieth century, having participated in almost all of the major exhibitions of American art, he was recognized as one of the America's foremost Tonalist landscape painters. Primarily concerned with landscape, the Tonalist movement produced an art of poetic suggestion that is characterized by the harmonious modulation of color, simplified composition, and an interest in atmospheric effects.;Following his return to the United States, Harrison, like others of his generation, worked to secure a role for art in American society, first as a teacher and later as a critic. In 1904, he became the director of painting at the at the Arts and Crafts colony of Byrdcliffe, and in 1906, the head of the Woodstock Summer School of the Art Students League of New York. Harrison considered teaching to be his most enduring contribution to the development of American art.;Although he published numerous articles in the leading art journals of the period, Harrison's authoritative book Landscape Painting, 1909, remains the most comprehensive statement of his art theory and criticism, and established his reputation as one of the leading spokesmen of Tonalism. It continues to be sighted in studies of landscape painting of the period. His theoretical stance, that art is nature seen through the individual artist's temperament, aligned him to representatives of contemporary art movements, such as Robert Henri, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Charles H. Caffin, whose theories have historically been viewed as antithetical to Tonalism. Documenting Harrison's career reveals more than the diversity and richness of this period. It also reveals an artist who made a significant contribution to the development of American art. |
