When I was a kid in the 1960s there was no “Live Free or Die” on the New Hampshire license plate. One single word graced the plate: “SCENIC”—the natural beauty of New Hampshire reduced to an abstraction. The state’s carving by Canadian arctic winds, glacial recession and rivers of meltwater, its grazing by 3 million sheep and the king’s lumbermen, and finally, the settlers’ scouring make New Hampshire radically distinctive and without equal. In an era ushered in by trains and ocean liners, and before photography revolutionized reproduction, our landscape’s originality began to intertwine with artistic movements from around the world.

Cultural cross-pollination in the 19th century brought to us the “Paris School” of painting, with its commitment to realistic natural figures and strong traditional skills. This French academic style schooled many Americans and Europeans in fine art painting. Artists spilled out of Europe and Paris toward New York, across the sea and then across the landscapes they were so fond of capturing. These painters pursued their own artistic visions and shared them with students in Boston and New York, giving birth to the Hudson River School, the Boston School and New Hampshire’s White Mountain School.
The Banks Gallery in Portsmouth has assembled a lovely collection of 19th century landscapes for its upcoming show, “Visions in Granite.” Gallery owner Jamie LaFleur is a painter and textile pattern designer, schooled in New York at Pratt Institute. LaFleur says Benjamin Champney (1817-1907) was the “dean” of the White Mountain School. Like Champney, LaFleur grew up in the shadow of Mount Monadnock (reportedly the second most-climbed mountain in the world, after Mount Fuji). He kicked around New York and Newport after school before returning to New Hampshire and the banks of the Piscataqua to found his gallery in Market Square, followed by an additional, salon-style location on State Street. 

LaFleur has long been enamored of the classical landscapes he encountered in art school and art history. His vision for the show was to create a dialogue between old school and new school painters; to look at the historical aesthetic’s influence upon that of the modern. For the upcoming show, he’s worked with private collectors and a long-established Boston gallery to procure the work of 19 19th-century artists, and he’s asked 20 21st-century artists from New Hampshire, New England and New York to offer both rebuttal and homage. The show contains lovely juxtapositions, brash departures and loving copy-cattiness. Many of modern painters in the show offer praise to the artists who have inspired them visually or stylistically. The essential love of the landscape remains a constant, but its treatment offers a different sort of emotional landscape to viewers.

Palettes are brighter, materials more durable and paint more technologically advanced, but more than anything else, a century’s experimentation in the art world offered new techniques and philosophies, new psychological and historical insights, and thus new ways of seeing and rendering a landscape.
Contemporary painter Dennis Sheehan’s “The Conway Meadow” offers peeks and hints, shrouded trees, of an inferred Mt. Washington. Usually the scene-stealer in paintings of this view, the mountain luminesces in the distance, allowing the foreground its moment to speak with viewers. Sheehan, from Warner, is honored to hang with these masters of technique.

“The monochromatic underpainting they used to enhance color; the depth and luminosity they created with varnishes, or their use of opaque colors in layers … These techniques have taught me so much as I’ve looked at the paintings, read about them in books, studied them and tried to copy them,” he says. Ways to express become myriad. Sheehan’s palette is dark and smoky with greens and grays, and honors historical antecedents.  LaFleur calls Sheehan’s work a “blend of abstraction and tradition.”
In a pre-photographic era, many of these academically-schooled painters saw themselves as neo-documentarians. Writes historian John Henderson, “artists of that time saw themselves as scientists making ‘documents’ that expressed Christian truths and democratic ideals.” These original plein-air artists painted realistically, but as the century progressed they also painted idealistically and allegorically. It’s fascinating when looking at the paintings in chronological order to watch the ways the French academic traditions softened and loosened with time as American painters explored their own world.

Nineteenth century biographies of White Mountain School painters such as Thomas Cole, Benjamin Champney, Albert Bierstadt, William Preston Phelps, Frank Henry Shapleigh and George Inness read like a who’s who of the landed gentry. They were inextricably linked to their Brahmin patrons. Meanwhile, European teachers/adventurers sought new American vistas in favor of a much-painted Europe. Conversely, young—often-affluent— painting students, wanderers, and travelers looked to European travel to escape American confines associated with class. Benjamin Champney fits comfortably in a number these categories.

Champney was a New Hampshire lad born in New Ipswich in 1817. Schooled in the Berkshires and Boston, he headed for an extended tour and schooling in Paris and greater Europe. After leapfrogging back and forth across the pond, in his early 20s Champney landed back in New Hampshire. He’d spent time painting in Paris, Florence, Boston and New York before taking up lodgings in North Conway at the Kearsarge Tavern for $3.50 a week, painting and teaching to earn his keep. He later established a summer home between Conway and North Conway and did much social, artistic and economic networking with other artists, popularizing the White Mountain School as a desired painting destination.
The train from Boston brought summer and winter people alike who could have a “paint with the artist” day of plein-air painting or commission a favorite scene from a slew of resident painters who peopled the inns, academies and studios in the Conways, Glen and Jackson during the summer. Some artists preferred a realistic “paint it as I see it” ethos, while others were familiar enough with the local sights to be amalgamators. In this departure from academic “rules,” artists blended scenes, painting both realistically and imaginatively.

“A lot of these guys were plein-air painters, easel on their back hiking up into the hills to paint, and like them, I’m always painting the subject in front of me,” Dennis Perrin says. Perrin is Seacoast resident who’s sent a great deal of time in the White Mountains. He also amalgamates, and that’s part of what lends his work its dreamy quality. His “Great Blue Sky” stands out, straying from the historical palette yet honoring the grace of natural details. Interlaced fingers of ridges and valleys are topped by a big Maxfield Parrish-blue sky with cumulous clouds, mirrored in a slow river’s diminuendo and disappearance, its surface emblazoned with a spangle of white water lilies.

“‘Great Blue Sky’ is a combination of places I dreamed together influenced by two or three places I’ve painted before,” confides Perrin. “I often paint based on places I’ve been, studies I’ve made, or things that I’ve felt. Something about lilies on water is almost archetypal. You’ve got them with their own pull, defining a surface and reflected in it too. Trees rise vertically; blue sky works to define the dimension of the horizon and then you have all this interplay of elements as if to create a fourth dimension.” His observation pinpoints a visual dynamic in the show’s most successful works: whether historical or modern, when a landscape is lovingly rendered, you’re offered a new way of seeing the world.

This echoes LaFleur’s notion of a visual “dialogue” across generations, and he has enlisted Blue Tree to publish the show’s catalog as a fine art book entitled “Visions in Granite: Two Hundred Years of Painting in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.” Art historian Robert McGrath writes of the White Mountain School’s decline in the introduction to the collection. “Nature was largely subsumed by culture as the blandishments of early modernism seduced the nation’s major cultural figures. Still, a lingering memory of the role of the White Mountains in the formation of our early national identity—amounting almost to a subconscious desire to return to nature—caused several major American early modernist painters to depict the historic regional landscape.”

As Manifest Destiny opened up the West and photography came in vogue, the local “schools,” if you’ll pardon the pun, “recessed.” However, in his foreword, McGrath postulates of modern painters responding to this primordial sense-memory that,“(U)nlike their 19th century Romantic-Realist forebears, they brought an entirely new sensibility to bear upon the representation of the old mountains. Strident coloration, formal abstraction, and active brushwork were among the aesthetic strategies deployed to render the region up-to-date.” This commentary echoes interpretations of the landscape and its iconic elements in paintings by Wolf Kahn, Laurence Young, Richard Whitney and Catherine Raynes.

William R. Davis’ “January Morning, Mount Washington Valley” is one of my favorite modern paintings that tips its hat to the historical. A cold morning with a moon sliver still aloft, a breeze sways the white pine boughs that frame the foreground. Looking westward from Mount Cranmore, there’s an omniscient feel: soon folks will rise and smoke will issue from cooking fires across the valley floor; no electric lights or cars besmirch twilight. And though I might experience this from the top of a ski lift, I’m a hundred and fifty years away.

The book’s galleys are gorgeous, but its printing in Hong Kong was slowed down by the Chinese New Year holiday, so the book’s launch will be Friday, March 10 at the Banks Gallery (5-9 p.m.) in a separate evening from the show’s opening on Friday, Feb. 10 (5-9 p.m.). This affords viewers another excuse to peruse the book and paintings, meet the artists and have copies signed.
 
“Visions in Granite”
The Banks Gallery Exhibition Hall
16 Market Square, Portsmouth
603-431-9799

Opening reception Friday,
Feb. 10, 5 to 9 p.m.

Book signing for “Visions in Granite: Two Hundred Years of Painting in New Hampshire’s White Mountains” on Friday, March 10, 5 to 9 p.m.