Existing comment:
Charles Warren Eaton
Glacier Park (Montana), ca 1921
With technological advances in transportation, early-20th-century artists gained easier access to wilderness areas. Glacier Park is one of several paintings Eaton made during a visit to the new national park in the summer of 1921. Shortly after his return to New York, his canvases traveled as part of the Great Northern Railway's "See America First" campaign tour. Reviewing the exhibition, a critic praised Eaton's sensitivity to "the solitude and grandeur of high mountains" and summed up the artist's style as the embodiment of "quietness."
A pervasive, hushed mood is characteristic of Eaton's work. Early in his career, he became an adherent of tonalism -- an approach that softens contours and limits the palette to slight gradations of similar hues. Influenced by the earlier poetic landscapes of the French Barbizon painters and the muted harmonies of James McNeill Whistler, American tonalists were also indebted to George Inness. In the early 1890s, the well-known artist (whose work hangs in a nearby gallery) befriended Eaton, sharing painting methods as well as his Swedenborgian belief that art can convey a subject's spiritual essence through color and form. |