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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Throughout his life as teacher, lecturer, and author of numerous articles, as well as in his letters and in his journal, Robert Henri gave vigorous expression to attitudes and ideas which exerted a pervasive and significant influence upon his contemporaries. It will be seen that these ideas were ultimately linked with the great intellectual tradition of American transcendentalism whose leading exponents—Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—explored, among other problems, the persisting cultural dependence of America on Europe and the individual, social, political, and artistic implications of the new democracy. As one writer has stated in commenting upon the movement, “its vitalizing effect upon American art and literature and, indeed, upon the development of American democracy as a whole, remains unrivaled.”
1 Robert Henri was born in 1865, and died in 1929. These unpublished letters and journals are reproduced here for the first time through the courtesy and generosity of Henri's sister-in-law, Miss Violet Organ. Hereinafter they will be indicated as Henri Journal or Henri Letters.
2 David Bowers, “Democratic Vistas,” in Literary History of the United States, eds. Robert E. Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, and Henry Seidel Canby (New York, 1948), i, 346.
3 Both Eakins and Whitman played strikingly similar roles in going against the grain of the Genteel Tradition in the latter half of the 19th century.
4 R. J. Wickenden, “Thomas Anshutz,” in DAB. In a journal entry written in Paris in 1888, soon after leaving the Pennsylvania Academy, Henri commented on the art news in Philadelphia: “Anshutz is now head professor. He works altogether in the Eakins method and is trying to introduce it into the classes in a quiet way.”
5 Henri Journal, 18 Feb. 1890. He was also reading, among others, Ruskin, Paine, Browning, Daudet, and Tolstoy. Emerson, however, was the strongest influence at this time.
6 Ibid., 6 Apr. 1890. Henri's fight against the tyranny of the Academy which did not give the young and unknown artist in America an opportunity to exhibit his work is one of his major achievements. Thus he assumed the leadership in the formation of the “Eight” Show in 1908 and he was largely responsible for the Independent Exhibition several years later. Henri, it is apparent, discovered the sources for these ideas during his student years in Paris where he had read Emerson and observed the cultural life about him.
7 Henri Journal, 22 Feb., 14 Mar., 25 Apr., 22 June, 28 July 1890.
8 In Henri's early unpublished letters and journal we find a forecast of many of the “liberal” views which characterized his more mature thought. He expressed sympathy for a Negro who was not permitted to enter Jefferson Medical College in 1886 because of his color. After attending a lecture on women's rights in Philadelphia in 1887, he wrote: “At last the age of reason, the kindling of a spark that will grow to enlighten the world.” Several years later, he expressed indignation at the plight of still another underprivileged group, the American Indian. Significantly, he opposed the argument for capital punishment and the hanging of the Chicago anarchists, and he was stirred by the Homestead Riots. A defender, even during this formative period, of the rights of all mankind on the fundamental ground that if injustice is tolerated for a minority then all men are in potential danger of losing their precious heritage of freedom, Henri is a worthy representative of the liberal position in America during a period of acute social and economic tension.
9 Robert Henri, “Progress in Our National Art Must Spring from the Development of Individuality of Ideas and Freedom of Expression: A Suggestion for a New Art School,” Craftsman, xv (Jan. 1909), 389. Henri's contagious enthusiasm for Whitman was shared by his younger friend and fellow-painter, John Sloan. “Henri,” Sloan said, “was my father in Art, I got my Whitman through him. Whitman's love for all men, his beautiful attitude toward the physical, the absence of prudishness … all this represented a force of freedom. … I liked what resulted from his descriptive catalogues of life. They helped to interest me in the details of life around me” (conversation with the writer, 30 Nov. 1948). Mr. Sloan's unpublished diary reveals other examples of Whitman's impact upon his thought.
10 Henri, “Progress in Our National Art,” Craftsman, xv (Jan. 1909), 390.
11 The Art Spirit (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 86.
12 “What about Art in America?” Arts and Decoration, xxiv (Nov. 1925), 35.
13 The Art Spirit, pp. 126–127.
14 “We had a very interesting talk in the evening, Henri taking the stand that man's highest form of intellect is the subconscious—that it is discredited by being called ‘instincts’ (Sloan Diary, unpublished, 6 Dec. 1906; courtesy of Mrs. John Sloan).
15 “My People,'? Craftsman, xxvii (Feb. 1915), 461, 467–468.
16 Quoted from “Only Out of Home's Narrow Confines Is Full Growth Possible for Children, says Robert Henri,” New York Tribune, 25 Jan. 1915.
17 Quoted in Giles Edgerton, “The Younger American Painters,” Craftsman, xiii (Feb. 1908), 524.
18 “The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists,” Craftsman, xvrn (May 1910), 161–162.
19 “My People,” Craftsman, xxvn (Feb. 1915), 467.
20 Quoted in “W. J. Glackens: His Significance to the Art of His Day,” Touchstone, vii (June 1920), 192.
21 The Art Spirit, p. 221.
22 Robert Henri: His Life and Work, eds. William Yarrow and Louis Bouché (New York, 1921), p. 24.
23 S. H., “Studio-Talk,” International Studio, xxx (Dec. 1906), 183. The Henri circle is reminiscent, in many ways, of Whitman's relationship to his followers.
24 See n. 17.
25 Artists Say the Silliest Things (New York, 1940), pp. 82, 84. See, also, Mr. du Bois's vivid interpretation of the Henri class and its significance: “The Henri class in full momentum was one of the outstanding manifestations of its period. … Henri himself believed that he was creating a class of men. The student of art must be a man first, with a good strong conscience and the courage to live up to it. … The Henri class … was no place for a painter of preciosities. It had no patience for the tastefully arranged obscurities of the escapist. It despised the merely pretty. It abhorred fancy or finicky or overstudied words. Its own predilections were rather in the vein of the uncouth. And though Americanism … was never mentioned, the man the artist was to begin by being had a remarkably close resemblance to an American, or to the American ideal of an American” (pp. 88–89).
26 Quoted in New York Realists, 1900–1914 (New York, 1937), p. 6.
27 “Progress in Our National Art,” Craftsman, xv (Jan. 1909), 387–388, 391.
28 Emerson commented in “The Poet”: “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away. Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.” And in “A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads,” Whitman observed: “As America fully and fairly construed is the legitimate result and evolutionary outcome of the past, so I would dare to claim for my verse. Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exr ceptional characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New.”
29 “The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists,” Craftsman, xviii (May 1910), 161.
30 “The ‘Big Exhibition,‘ the Artist and the Public,” Touchstone, i (June 1917), 174, 216.
31 The Art Spirit, pp. 9, 133. “One main genesis-motive of the ‘Leaves’,” Whitman wrote in “A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads,” “was my conviction … that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth—or even to call attention to it, or the need of it—is the beginning, middle and final purpose of the poems.”
32 American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London, 1941), pp. 144, 592. In addition, see Vivian C. Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 78–104, for a comprehensive discussion of Emerson's conception of organic form in the fine arts.
33 “The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists,” Craftsman, xviii (May 1910), 167.
34 “What is Art?” Arts and Decoration, vii (April 1917), 317, 324. The difference between mechanical construction and organic form, Emerson wrote in the Journals, “is the difference between the carpenter who makes a box, and the mother who bears a child. The box was all in the carpenter; but the child was not all in the parents. They knew no more of the child's formation than they did of their own. They were merely channels through which the child's nature flowed from quite another and eternal power, and the child is as much a wonder to them as to any …”
35 Helen Appleton Read, Robert Henri (New York, 1931), p. 10.
36 Quoted in “W. J. Glackens: His Significance to the Art of His Day,” Toudistone, vii (June 1920), 192.
37 “Progress in Our National Art,” Craftsman, xv (Jan. 1909), 391.
38 “My People,” Craftsman, xxvii (Feb. 1915), 459–460, 461–462.
39 “What about Art in America?” Arts and Decoration, xxiv (Nov. 1925), 75.
40 The discussions of Emerson's and Whitman's aesthetic theories in Matthiessen, American Renaissante, and Hopkins, Spires of Form, are particularly suggestive.
41 I wish to express my gratitude to the American Council of Learned Societies for a grant in support of my broader, forthcoming study of the social, intellectual, and artistic inter-relationships between the various arts in American culture.
