What is Tonalism?

The stylistic characteristics of Tonalism comprise twelve visual components or visual emotions:

These twelve characteristics of American Tonalism rarely if ever operated in isolation from one another, rather the opposite: in most cases, several or even all the characteristics can be seen to function seamlessly in a single work, whereby the emotional emphasis of the painting is tempered by the artistic choices among and balance between these various technical/stylistic options. What’s more, there is clearly overlap and blurring of affinities, just as in any work of art employing a range of colors that blend and bleed one into the other. Nevertheless, it is useful to try and tease out these various technical and stylistic strains because it adds to our understanding of how artistic choices shaped the Tonalist aesthetic and, most especially, the progressive nature of Tonalism and the deep cultural roots out of which the movement developed. Lastly, by systematically enumerating these characteristics, the synergy between them is grasped more concretely, a synergy that is further galvanized by the qualitative and cumulative technical choices made by individual artists, each with their unique strengths and proclivities. I might further suggest that a familiarity with these twelve characteristics, almost all without exception fundamental to the modernist canon, will go a long way to educating young people about the historical blood lines of contemporary art, especially contemporary Tonalism, and so better connect them into the deeper heritage of art history. Such an appreciation and understanding and—dare I say it, level of connoisseurship is sorely lacking among today’s collectors, who, in many cases, have become overly dependent on digital images of artwork—quickly summoned and just as quickly dismissed—rather than long sessions of sweet, silent thought given over to contemplating actual artworks, and so fathoming their infinite complexity and the hard-won skills and singular visions of their creators.

1) Use of subtle color tones comprised of various greens, purples, blues, and grays that are harmonious, tranquil, restful, quiet, and easy on the eye: The most obvious artistic strategy of the Tonalists, as the name implies, was the use of a subtle range of similar color tones on the scale between red and blue and yellow to produce a sensation that is quiet, cool, and conducive to reverie. These restricted earth and sky tones, with admixtures of grays and blacks, sometimes verging on monochrome, have the salutatory effect, like black and white photography, of highlighting or dramatizing the basic components of the composition, and so emphasizing the abstract and symbolic quality of natural forms. J. Francis Murphy’s Summertime, 1885, is a classic early example from this master Tonalist; the key elements of the landscape have been synthetically arranged to please the eye, while the prominent array of green tones in the meadow grass, wild flowers, and trees create a sense of bucolic repose. As a whole, the multitude of greens give the painting an ineffable sense of seasonal glory. A later work by Murphy, Summer, 1906, shows how a similar array of greens and ochers can be applied in broader swaths of energized pigment to create the same poetic effect, in which the variety and intensity of the color tones carry the emotional weight of the painting.

A period review by Charles de Kay in the New York Times of an exhibition of paintings by William Sartain, see Nonquit, c. 1900, illustrates how period reviewers were conversant with the emotional quality of Tonalist color: “[Sartain’s] way of looking at the landscape is austere.  He’s a very Quaker in tones and loves the broad smooth browns, the grays, the drab-colored sketches of moorlands, the pale-yellowish-brown sweeps of the sand dunes by the sea . . . a general harmoniousness as to tone.”  (NYT, Thu, Feb 2, 1905, p. 9)

2) Aesthetic Tonalism and Expressive Tonalism: As has been demonstrated in the first edition of A History of American Tonalism, the Tonalists movement evolved from an early style, circa 1880, of small scale landscapes, Aesthetic Tonalism, characterized by formal design and paint handling that is refined and nuanced, quiet and intimate in visual effect; to a later style of Expressive Tonalism, circa 1900, where the use of expressive brushstrokes on larger and larger canvases become commonplace, as modernist tendencies to display freewheeling paint handling took root in America, if not throughout the international art world. Aesthetic Tonalism with its emphasis on balanced design, subtle patterning, and a kind of otherworldly equipoise came directly out of the Aesthetic movement and artistic philosophy of art for art’s sake promoted by its greatest exponent, James McNeil Whistler, whose small scale exquisitely executed non-narrative etchings, pastels, and oils, embodied this artistic credo. By 1880, Whistler was all the rage in American progressive art circles. Whistler’s followers embraced Asian art, especially Japanese woodblock prints with their emphasis on flat formal design, repeating decorative patterns, and low-toned abstraction of organic shapes. William Anderson Coffin’s, Sunset Trees, c. 1890 is a classic example of this intimate, low-toned, and exquisite landscape mode of the 1880s and 90s; the subdued light of dusk exaggerates the barebones forms of the landscape, an artificial pattern that has been deliberately arranged by Coffin to allow the eye to wander in zig-zags from the foreground throughout the landscape, and even into the cloud-streaked sky, where the diagonal grids are echoed ad infinitum. Balance, equipoise, and sensuous form make the work an eye-catching window into some super-sensible world.

An early oil by William Gedney Bunce, Venice, Sail Reflections, 1885, demonstrates how Aesthetic Tonalism could be translated as well to marine subject matter, here mostly executed with the slashing strokes of the palette knife but retaining all the equipoise and formal design of the style. A later work by Bunce from around 1900, Venezia, shows how the latent expressionism of Bunce’s style developed into a full-blown work of Expressive Tonalism, where the pinwheels of slathered yellows—Bunce’s favorite color—careen across the dun sky of the support in an uninhibited celebration of light and color. The design element of Aesthetic Tonalism remains but the emphasis is now on the energy and reflected glory of the sunset, if not the artist’s sheer joy in creation.

The transition from early to late style Tonalism, from Aesthetic Tonalism to Expressive Tonalism, can be illustrated in the work of scores of the best artists of the period from 1880 to 1920, none more brilliantly than that of J. Francis Murphy in his Summertime, 1885 and Summer, 1906, a twenty year stretch that illustrates how the artist’s work evolved from a masterful example of classic Aesthetic Tonalism, where every detail in the painting from paint marks to landscape forms have been orchestrated to create an aura of poetic repose and harmony, to the later landscape, where detail has been dramatically reduced, form minimized, so enabling the expressive power of the supersaturated green tones to create a kind of muted energy field that seems to radiate heat, if not the dazzle and cicada-buzz of high summer.

While Leonard Ochtman’s, Greenwich, 1896 and Fall Meadow, c. 1910, or a much larger canvas, Spirit of Fall, c. 1910, illustrates the evolution among leading Tonalists from their early emphasis on a perfectly composed conceptual art to a later energized version with its embrace of personal expression on larger supports, and ultimately, a portrayal of the carrying power of nature’s metamorphic energy as embodied in the paint mark itself.

3) Stress on Symbolic Form: The Tonalist use of a narrow range of tones and the synthetic arrangement of landscape elements adds to the immediacy of the composition, strengthening the graphic read of organic, geologic, and manmade features, and thus the symbolic impact of natural forms, whether in stark silhouette or set against a neutral background. In Europe, Whistler almost single-handedly developed the symbolic mode in his mysterious Thames nocturnes, setting the example for Degas’ landscapes of the 1890s, and a host of later Symbolist painters that would come to include modernists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Shielle. On American shores, Verdant Hills, 1901, by Franklin De Haven, illustrates the expressive use of a limited tonal range in dramatizing his gesticulating tree trunks and the shape of a mass of tree tops receding into the background. Even the foreground path and boulders seem alive in this dynamic counterpoint of roiling green landforms against the spumey-blue of the sky.

Charles Warren Eaton achieves a similar if more subdued effect in his brooding watercolor, Gloaming Pines, c. 1910, where the extremely limited range of earth tones enforces a stark and compelling vision of a copse of white pine in near-silhouette. An effect further heightened in Eaton’s, Forest Edge c. 1904, where the soft-edged pine boughs verge on total two-dimensional symbolic abstraction, forms imprinted upon the sunset horizon where the horizontal bands of yellow-gold hues have been transmuted into formal elements of the interlocked composition.

In a similar manner, the Tonalists were able to convincingly portray their favored themes by the strategic arrangement of natural symbols, going beyond the standard repertoire: trees and tree trunks, boulders, hill shapes, horizon lines, stream banks, sun and moon orbs, and a plethora of cloud formations, to include the iconology of abandoned farmlands in the northeast, especially overgrown pastures and paths and roads, crumbled fences of stone and wood, along with the occasional roofline or barn or chimney releasing a ropey writhing of wood smoke into a fading sky.

4) Depiction of Atmosphere (the unseen air): The Tonalist’s use of a predominant tonality had the collateral effect of creating a pronounced atmospheric quality in which the very air that infuses the landscape has a palpable density and optical resonance.Hugh Bolton Jones’ Coastal Landscape, c. 1879, probably painted in Brittany, illustrates how many American artists working in the American artist colonies in Brittany in the 1870s developed a predilection for the silvery gray atmosphere or micro-climate of that then still-remote coastal countryside, a habit of mind and eye the expatriates brought back to American painting grounds, there settling on places with similar qualities of weather, and/or employing depictions of dawn and dusk, autumn and winter, in which the weight of the atmospheric envelop is most pronounced.

New York Times critic, Charles de Kay, reviewing a William Sartain exhibit in 1905, notes, as he did in so many of his reviews, the micro-climate so skillfully invoked by Tonalist artists: “The structure of the landscape as it must have been when drawn on the canvas is softened and veiled until the effect is that of an atmosphere full of the vapor of the seashore . . . There is great poetry of a Wordsworthian reserve and simplicity in this quiet seaside view.  The ocean is not visible but it is implied.”  (NYT, Thu, Feb 2, 1905, p. 9) Or in a review of Charles Melville Dewey’s work: “The earth hangs in that atmosphere of peace which strikes most poignantly upon the human heart accustomed to the warring of complex emotions.” (NYT, Sun, April, 16, 1916, p. 78)  Arthur Bowen Davies’ Blue Distance, c. 1926 takes the Tonalist fascination with atmosphere to its logical conclusion: where the envelop of air through which all objects are seen has become both subject and object.  As so many of the period titles indicate, the precise seasonal and climatic circumstances and the subjective feelings they invoke were subjects of great moment for the Tonalists and their collectors.

5) A sense of movement or metamorphosis in nature (the vibration and refraction of tones):  In the age when Darwin’s theory of evolution was revolutionizing science and attitudes towards traditional religion and literary culture, the Tonalist artists, thoroughly steeped in Darwinism as well as transcendentalist authors Thoreau and Emerson, intently explored the hidden modalities of nature, and the inexorable process of evolution and metamorphosis operating beneath the surface of all things, a process of transformation mirrored in the very act of artistic creation itself. Atmosphere was not just a transmitter of mood but an energy field alive to the painter’s touch. Technical advances, assimilated by American artists working in Europe allowed artists to approximate the visual sensation of metamorphic light energy in nature by applying paint marks of similar tones in juxtaposition to one another, refraction, or layering brush marks over a complementary ground tone, vibration, in which cool overtones are painted freshly into warm undertones, with the undertones allowed to break through to the surface of the canvas.  A technical resource superbly executed in J. Francis Murphy’s early 1885 work, Summertime, where the foreground meadow grass to the right and left of the old farm road display the use of green paint marks of varied tones, placed cheek-by-jowl, or overlaying the warm neutral ground, so that the greens have a visual jitter—vibration and refraction, an uncanny aural approximation of the hum of cicadas on a late summer day.

This sense of motion created by activated light and color was often remarked upon by period critics: “[The light] winds its way among the foliage, strays across the backs of the idle sheep, strikes the reflecting surface of a pool, and plays the part of the joy-bringing god Apollo in this cosmic drama.  Under its influence all the subtleties of color in the chromatic pattern fall into order and harmony as dancers move to music.  The complication of the foreground flexibly unrolled to express in sensitive modulations the gradual recession of the landscape and the perfect equilibrium between the fluent mists of distance and these sharp notes of  foreground interest . . . ”  (NYT, Sun, April 16, 1916, p. 78, review of Charles Melville Dewey)  Perhaps the most daring, subtle, and technically astute employment of this method of tonal vibration and refraction is found in J. Francis Murphy’s late works, such as Flaming Trees, 1917 in which the reds and scarlets in the foreground tree fairly pulse with compressed energy, while the broad sky behind, a craggy variegated paint surface, comprised of an array of whites, nacreous grays, and off-yellows, provides a prismatic backdrop activated as much by color juxtaposition as the scumbled, angled, and slashed paint activated by the prevailing light as it is absorbed and reflected in an infinite array of tones.

6) The use of expressive paint handling to embody emotion or mimic the felt-life of nature:  What is noteworthy about the Tonalists is how early expressive paint handling came to the fore, especially among progressives like John Twachtman, J. Frank Currier, and William Gedney Bunce, who were exposed to the teaching of the Munich School, which put a premium on flashy and dexterous paint handling.  J. Frank Currier’s Setting Sun, c. 1880 is far ahead of most of his contemporaries in either America or Europe in the slashing expressive freedom of his watercolor and pastel methods, creating a surface energy that both approximates nature’s underlying forces while augmenting the inherent symbolic power of landscape forms: trees, rooflines, clouds, horizons and the atmosphere that encloses them.  (Only Courbet, Whistler, and Degas, especially his pastel and monotype landscapes of the 1870s, approached Currier’s exuberant freedom of expression.)

7) The use of formal strategies of embedded patterns and the decorative deployment of natural and abstract forms (derived from Whistler and influenced by Asian art), often in conjunction with serial renderings of the same subject in different lights and from various angles of perception:  As we have seen in the previous discussion of Aesthetic and Expressive Tonalism, Whistler first became a force in American art circles in the 1880s, when the formal devices of Asian art were being adopted by the most progressive artists of the era, when Aesthetic Tonalism became the lingua franca of the earlier adopters of Tonalism as they broke with the Hudson River School.  These formal characteristics remained central throughout the forty odd years when the Tonalist movement was at its height.  We have already examined William Coffin’s Sunset Tones, c. 1890, as a classic example of Aesthetic Tonalism with its serene and sensuous proportions and whispered equilibrium. 

Hugh Bolton Jones’ Winter Light, c. 1900 demonstrates another use of zig-zag patterning of snowy banks, complimented by skyline horizontals, while Ben Foster’s, Rainy Autumn Day, 1914 employs the same principle with a careful arrangement of landscape elements to weave his composition together as tight as a piece of dyed gingham.

The greatest practitioners of these synthetic and formal arrangements of landscape forms were able to reassemble their elements so that the artificial patterns created echo, in an uncanny and often haunting manner, the underlying physical armature of the biosphere: measure for measure. Thus, under the artist’s intense gaze, nature reflects an underlying reality more profound than the mundane quotidian captured in a conventional snapshot view.

8) The use of soft-edged forms to further the sense of ambiguity and mystery of place (known as lost-edge technique in the nineteenth century):  Given the Tonalists fondness for the transcendentalist authors, Emerson and Thoreau, and their naturalist followers like William Burroughs and John Muir, it is hardly surprising that a subjective feeling for the underlying mystery and wonder of the natural world should be all pervasive.  A critical stylistic aspect of this artistic strategy is a tendency to ambiguity of form as opposed to a detailed graphic depiction, soft-edged forms as opposed to hard, and an emphasis on blurry atmospheric edges ultimately derived from the Venetian tradition of “colore” (color as the basis of art) versus the Florentine tradition of “disegno” (drawing or design as the basis of art).

An impulse to nearly complete abstraction is inherent in the Tonalist style and prefigured magnificently by Arthur Bowen Davies late watercolors, Misted Hills, 1922, and Cloudscape, 1922. Notice that in Misted Hills Davies has crisply outlined in black a few of the low-lying clouds to offer context for the eye, and a contrast to the otherwise amorphous forms that predominate; whereas in Cloudscape there are almost no hard-edges whatsoever except at a few demarcation points of horizontal forms where they hazily interact.

9) An emphasis on the broad, graphic, ultimately abstract reading of major forms, producing an immediacy of emotional response—feeling—to paintings, especially at a distance:  Underlying all the technical and stylistic innovations of the Tonalist movement was an embrace of abstraction, first as a formal compositional mode, Aesthetic Tonalism, and later as a way of dramatizing the emotional impact of an artwork, prompted less by a progressive mantra than by a craftsman’s logic to produce imagery that had immediate visceral impact.

10) Emphasis on the elegiac poetry of landscape (reflecting the trauma of the Civil War):  If there is a predominant emotional charge underlying the Tonalist style: nostalgia, reverie, melancholy, joyous recollection in times of sweet repose, it probably reflects the deep trauma of the Civil War and the relentless changes affecting American society in the following decades from rapid industrialization and urban growth. Such feelings of loss, dislocation, nostalgic longing for a lost and more peaceful world are best expressed in a fundamentally non-narrative art through poetry, metaphor, and non-specific allusion. Thus Tonalism’s prime locus was landscape, especially depictions of the intimate near-at-home farmlands and rural places—often at dusk or dawn, that display the once-upon-a-time presence of human habitation: abandoned fields, tumbled fieldstone fences, old roads and second growth forests. The absence of figures in the Tonalist landscape is almost universal, while the remnants of human presence cheek-by-jowl with the wild is a ubiquitous iconology in Tonalist art. This elegiac quality, a kind of quietist soothing poetry was remarked on like a mantra in period texts, here by Charles de Kay in the New York Times review of a Leonard Ochtman exhibition (see Ochtman’s Spirit of Fall, Greenwich, Fall Meadow, and Spring Colors) at the MacBeth Gallery in 1898: “Tender sentiment for and sympathy with nature’s softer moods are the features of Mr. Ochtman’s work, and, whether he paints the flush of dawn, the dreamy noon hour of a still Summer day, the rosy tints of sunset, or the misty, weird atmosphere of a Summer moonlit night, he is in tune with that side of nature which only a poet artist can adequately portray.”  (NYT, Sat, Feb 5, 1898, p 18)

Losses expressed in homesteads gone to riot and ruin, populated by second growth saplings and tumbled fieldstone walls, as in Ben Foster’s Autumn Road, c. 1915 or Charles Harold Davis’, Autumn, 1910.  Such imagery speaks volumes to the hundreds of thousands who never returned home to take on the family farm, and others who moved on west for better prospects.

Such fleeting Proustian visions, when memory is triggered by vague recollections of a time out of mind, casts a mesmerizing spell over the most ordinary events and places, such as the turning of a empty road in Frederick Kost’s, Summer Shadows, c. 1910, or his equally haunting Southfield Marshes, Staten Island, c. 1895 in which emptiness and solitude are invoked, and so abandoning the viewer to their own melancholy remembrance.

11) The portrayal of a mystical organic relationship between perceiver and the perceived (the transcendentalist subjectivity espoused by Emerson and Thoreau).:  Hand in hand with the elegiac poetry of Tonalism, a style that provides consolation in the face of unimaginable horror, is the fundamentally spiritual dimension of Tonalism that offered a bereft nation a new focus for religiosity in all it many turn-of-the-century guises. The writings of the transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, became widely read and absorbed by the cultivated public precisely in the years that saw the emergence and flourishing of the Tonalist movement as it replaced the more bombastic literalism of the Hudson River School. Thus a more subjective, mystical, and organic spirituality invested in the values of home ground infused Tonalism with concrete yet diffuse imagery that mirrors the spiritual yearning of the individual, a meaning as ineffable as the essentially human experience of solitude is universal. A review of a 1893 exhibition of Charles Warren Eaton, see Forest Edge, Gloaming Pines, Quarter Moon, Twilit Sky, touches on the spiritual dynamic of Tonalism in explicitly religious terminology: “He has many moods, but most of them thoughtful and are faintly touched with that sadness without which there is no perfect beauty.  He is fond of veiled sunshine, of twilight, of moonbeams and candle gleams of the autumn time when foliage turns to clouds of brown and when forest aisles become places of haunting mystery.  He prefers that nature shall be subjective—and manifestation of the thought; and that the thought which it symbolizes be gentle and pure.”  (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sun, Mar 12, 1893, p. 4)

Similar religious imagery is invoked in a 1916 review, in the third catastrophic year of WWI, by Charles de Kay in the New York Times, reviewing an exhibition of Charles Melville Dewey: “The earth hangs in that atmosphere of peace which strikes most poignantly upon the human heart accustomed to the warring of complex emotions. The large silhouette of the tree masses, the breadth of the nobly designed sky, the solidity of the earth, are elements of that sense of security in the working of eternal laws throughout the universe which the sight of wide horizons at still moments inspires. Against this background of austere peace enters the light with its delicate slow song of lyric joy . . . . “(NYT, Sun, April 16, 1916, p. 78)

It is hard to conceive of another artistic movement beyond the great age of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art so conceived in and so intimately responding to the evolving spiritual needs of a bereft people, dealing not only with loss but the many anxieties of rapid change in an age of rapid industrialization and social dislocation. This spiritual dimension, inherent in Tonalism, is reinforced and expressed by many of the style’s essential characteristics already enumerated: mysterious, ambiguous, suggestive, poetic, elegiac, quiet, solitary, timeless, memory-filled, symbolic, abstract, metamorphic, transcendent, subjective, expressive, intuiting the invisible or hidden, and employing colors muted, restful, and conducive to a meditative state of mind. Tonalism is an art for the contemplative spirit, a balm for body and soul.

12)  A non-narrative synthetic art: an art about the feeling or mood evoked by the arrangement of landscape elements to project an emotion, rather than a realistic or representational depiction of a specific place:  Finally, it cannot be stressed enough that the defining characteristic of Tonalist art, especially vis a vis French Impressionism and its American counterpart–if not competitors in Tonalism’s heyday, certainly an alternative technical style that Tonalists mostly rejected–is its strictly non-narrative stance and focus on describing the subjective feeling of landscape under subdued light. Tonalism is fundamentally a synthetic studio art, derived from field sketches and memory, but concentrating its picture-making energies on formal and abstract values that evoke emotion without recourse to an explicit story.

Even an urban or town setting like Alexander Shilling’s, Winter Road, 1883, excludes the presence of pedestrians or hints of daily life; the same with Charles Fromuth’s Concarneau, 1893, where the often busy quayside serves solely as a prop for the artist’s exploration of muted color and the formal arrangement of trees and house-geometries in a snug harbor setting.

 In this and so many other technical dimensions of the style, Tonalism was a sophisticated progressive force in the art scene of its day.  By eschewing traditional narrative and the specifics of place, Tonalist artists intuited a subjective arrangement of natural symbols—untold stories at once exquisitely personal yet universal in import.

Life is not a thing of knowing only — nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotion.
Judge Learned Hand, 1893

Source: https://www.artsy.net/article/david-adams-cleveland-what-is-tonalism-12-essential-characteristics