Yankee Impressed

Popular theory alleges that pastels are physically soothing and pleasing to the eye. At least their color and tonal properties offer no offense, unless one calls gentility and utopianism an offense to sensibility. Impressionism might be attacked with this double-edged critique, which encapsulates both polarized personal responses; sentimental whimsy on the one hand and mild aversion on the other, posthaste from contemplating the first emotion.

European masters endeavored to create visions of sensual paradise concurrent with the political utopianism of the age by arraying dabs of pastel to convey gardens, canals and the like while subject, style, and color coaxed and relaxed viewers into bubble-bath bliss. American painters such as Walter Farndon, N.A., took a while to learn of the trends emanating from the Romantic school, but were not long to follow suit.

Farndon's oils evoke the same, mildly pleasant feelings, soothing and persuading viewers to luxuriate in his images of the ideal moment. Rarely does his subject venture beyond a ship yard or a wharf, a sun-drenched path or a perfectly motionless pond. Thick paint and broad strokes complete his portrayal of utter screnity through the heaviness and fixity of the surface texture of his canvases. Figures are rendered almost motionless, defined only by a few cursory passes of his brush, while those figures standing on a path or in a park as if on a stroll end up pasted to the canvas-like statuettes, unable to draw up the anchor of layered oil that bonds them to their station in Farndon's visual space.

Over the course of Walter Farndon's long and productive years, the artist America knew in a variety of styles and associated with a variety of movements gathered awards and national recognition without ever achieving the international fame of the masters who influenced his work. For years, Farndon heightened his sense of the delicate harmony of pastel pinks, blues and light greens that modified the color scales made popular by such notables as Monet and the atmospheric exuberance of Renoir before darkening his palette to imitate the growing popularity of the post-impressionists.

The bulk of Farndon's more than 300 oils study the contrast of large dark masses comprised of forest greens, moving to navy blue and brown-black with lighter earth- and autumnal tones. In his most important works, such as Mending the Nets, Farndon displays his receptivity to the emptiness of shadow and the seeming endless depth of murky harbor water. His preoccupation with water runs throughout his work and serves as a motif he returns to again and again through his life.

At times water and the shore were nothing but the playpen of high class society to him. Light mixes of baby blue and lavender reflect a magical violet and pink sky shining down on picnickers in sun-bonnets sitting under the shade of stubby saplings whilst a glow of yellow gold bathes the hillock rising up from the watery expanse. Vose Galleries deemed this, Picnic Overlooking the Harbor, as Farndon's most important work, and indeed his success in capturing a vision of paradise seems to have compelled him in many of his works only with incomplete and less satisfactory results.

So simplified is the subject though, that the composition and experimentation with the physical nature of the paint and the interaction of texture and color overtook any consideration of thematic interpretation.

Spanning about 70 years, Farndon's career saw the compilation of a fairly large corpus of work. He won numerous prizes for both oil and watercolor (mostly for his oils) and made the transition between four or five fairly distinct styles with varying degrees of success. Presumably early influences (Farndon eccentrically refused to date a single canvas) can be found in the late Romantics, as evidenced in some uneventful and rather unexciting landscapes which ended up relegated to the basement of Vose galleries.

Farndon's later experimentation with ever greater abstraction found a model in Munch's simplification of form and the Jugendstil's fragmentation of form through the juxtaposition of radically polarized colors as demonstrated by his Central Park. New York City and Relaxing under the Porch.

Although Farndon was known primarily as an impressionist, he was not one exclusively. Summer Sails and Eastport Maine show Farndon was capable not only of great freedom of workmanship and loose interpretation of the buildings and boats from which he painted, but also of extending himself beyond a purely idealistic frame into moody, sometimes hasty applications of deep oranges and purples, casting darker clouds on the exuberance of his most popular Renoir imitations.

Farndon neglected to title any of his work (his family later coined titles in cooperation with Vose galleries) and none of it was framed or dated; only at the prompting of his family did Farndon ever bother to sign his work. Despite what seems a casual approach, Farndon was elected to the National Academy and his work exhibited in the permanent collections of such prestigious museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and others. But with out his family's pursuit of the posthumous gallery exhibition and sale of his work, its future would have remained uncertain. Thanks in part to their valiant efforts. Farndon's work will be on display through December.