“Luminism” is a term first used by the art historian John Baur in the 1950’s to describe some of the second generation of Hudson River School landscape painters, such as John Frederick Kensett and Fitz Hugh Lane, who had a distinctive style which created, so art critics say, a serene view of nautical and seashore life by emphasizing distinctive colors, hiding their brush strokes, and highlighting the light-- “the illumination”-- of their paintings. They are supposedly influenced by Transcendentalist thought about the immanence of religion. I want to provide another category for the description of their paintings that I think better captures their essence and explains the other facets of their work and better places this modest sub species of landscape painting in the context of overall art history. That is the fact that they were dedicated to sweeping geometrical shapes and used hard edges on both human and natural objects. That made the Luminists quite different from the artists that preceded them where the power of the painting came from the richness of its darker hues and the thickness of paint that assumed an almost velvet like sheen, and where colors blended or even seemed to leech over to one another so as to create shadows and thickness and perspective. To the contrary, Luminism created a painting very much in focus and so seems remarkably realistic, almost photographic, even if its colors were fanciful or, what is the same thing, more true to life in a funny kind of way. than actual skies and seas are.
Beach at Beverley
All these characteristics of Luminism are present in John Frederick Kensett’s “Beach at Beverley”, painted in 1873. There is a sharp line as well as distinct color to set off the rocks from the other elements in the picture. The rocks are each curved separately and follow the curve of descent from left to right which is echoed by a curve perpendicular to it, moving up and down the beach, which marks the separation of the seashore from the sea. There is one human figure and a row boat to provide a sense of scale. The trees above the rocks are carefully defined and in sharp contrast in color to the rocks. The boat that is offshore demarks the place where sea and sky meet, though that they are separate is not lost, and so this is not a turner, for all its attention to providing plenty of space for air and water, because an accurate presentation is not overwhelmed by the colors of the objects recoiling against one another, as is what happens in a Turner. So we get a picture which is very open and stretches on as far as the eye can carry the viewer, and yet realistic in its appreciation of a shoreline and a horizon.
The Fort and Ten Pound Island, Glocester, Massachusetts
Another Luminist painting is Fitz Hugh Lane’s “The Fort and Ten Pound Island, Glocester, Massachusetts,” from 1847.It also has repetitive and echoing curves created by the islands seen off shore and in the mounds of sand or earth that are on the land in the bottom forefront of the painting. There is also the same realism in the depiction of a very open sky that allows a viewer, as in the Kensett painting, a sense of openness, as if the sky at peace was in conflict in our imaginations with the sea as a roiling and threatening place. Most important, the ships and the activities of the people on shore are treated with extreme exactness. They are drawn with clear borders between themselves and other items in the painting, as if the artist is insisting on coloring within the lines, which is something the Impressionists after Manet would abandon. The masts of the ships are delineated in a line or two and the white stripes across the keels of the ships is also carefully drawn even for the smaller of the ships. The lumber on shore is rendered with an attention to the fact that the boards have been cut in straight lines, this not an artificiality but the way lumber prepared for use looks, and not at all like tree stumps or trees in the wilderness, burdened by their gnarled limbs and the mosses that grow on them, as is the case with other Hudson River School painters.
Sunlight and Shadow: The Newberry Marsh
Martin Johnson Heade provides a landscape painting that touches all the points of Luminism. Mostly known for his paintings of vividly colored and hard edged flowers, he applied his gifts to “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newberry Marsh”, which was painted between 1871 and 1875. He captures the concern of his title by showing shadows creeping across a marsh, clouds white and blue against a green sky, and so showing a fresh approach to the openness of the sky. Heade also makes the point of view of the painter sufficiently remote from the objects of attention, as had been the case with Fitz Hugh Lane, so that the objects in the painting appear in miniature and as such are realized realistically. There are some cattle grazing in the marsh and there is a prominently featured haystack to act as a point of interest in the painting. What is most striking, however, is the rendering of the marsh itself, and here Heade uses his botanical knowledge. The marsh is cut by a leisurely and curved stream, and so has the geometry of other Luminist paintings. The marsh itself is made up of plants that are close together but independant and the painting captures the texture of such mostly submerged growth.The viewer can make out a number of tall trees in the distance, beyond the marshes and beneath the sky that stands out against the green of the marsh itself. A nice play of features against one another.
The sources for Luminism are not at all clear. It is as if it sprang out of nothing. There is no connection to early Impressionism and, in any event, Impressionism was heading off in a different direction in that it was colorful but concerned with closeups, except for Monet’s rightly renowned “Garden at Sainte-Adresse”, from 1867, and after that, when it did boulevards, with its painterly effects rather than its subject matter. A more likely source are the French Orientalists from earlier in the Nineteenth Century who played with sky and light and very exact representations of their subject matters. Charles Theodore Frere offers “Along the Nile River at Giza”, which was painted in the late 1850’s. This painting presents sharply outlined dark animals and some equally shadowed trees in the foreground with a pyramid in the background caught against the coming sunset. The Orientalists produced numerous quality paintings that were not at all condescending but rather inquisitive about their subjects.
Even more intriguing but even more unanswerable is why Luminism had such a short run, why it did not develop into a lasting art movement, even though it had such a strong set of resources at its disposal. A possible reason for that, I think, is that it so restricted its subject matter to seascapes and landscapes that it neglected to do cityscapes with the same degree of precision, distance, and an enclosing sky. Imagine if one of the genre paintings of the Nineteenth Century, such as John Caleb Bingham’s “The Verdict of the People”, had been done less for its comedy than for the way people and their towns take up only part of a landscape. Let us say that the voters were reduced to the size of dolls and seen from a distance that allowed the inclusion of plenty of sky. That would create a very different effect. Instead, cityscapes await the arrival of the AshCan School, which uses gobs of paint and heavy brushstrokes to realize its accurate images that are nevertheless more painterly than realistic. America would then have had a very different art history, but the succession of artistic movements and periods seems to be very unpredictable, there no Darwinian rule about why some make it while others don’t, and so art critics are left to observe what happened more than what might have happened or had to happen.