The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part VIII

One last picture from William R. Leigh (1866-1955) before we allow him to ride off into the great Western sunset reserved for American artists of the first rank.  Above is Leigh’s color study of the Grand Canyon, painted in 1909.  This is a smallish picture, 16 x 12, oil on canvas board.  It is a stunning landscape that perfectly captures the majesty and mystery of the American landscape.

Once again, I’m indebted to artist/author Stephen Gjerston and his magisterial Frontiers of Enchantment: The Outdoor Studies of William R. Leigh for what may be the best summation of Leigh and his work:  Leigh’s artistic legacy rests primarily on his paintings of the West and Southwest which he painted in his New York studio.  The convincing sense of reality that he achieved in the best of them is due, in large measure, to the excellence of the outdoor studies which he used as sources of information.  The majority of these studies are masterpieces of their kind.  They have an intensity and immediacy that can only be achieved by a fine artist, with a sensitive eye, in the presence of nature.  Through unerring draftsmanship and an acute eye for color values Leigh has fixed on these panels the form and atmosphere of the frontiers he loved….

A few words about Grand Canyon.  Many contemporary artists depicting the West fall back on trite-and-true tropes garnered in revisionist Westerns that sought to render the time and place as squalid, muddy and barren.  Actually, the colorful panorama that was the real West would present a challenge to the most extravagant colorist and the most gifted of artists.  The West of Leigh was much like that of fellow-artist Charlie Russell – a place of wonder and of marvels, where nature ran riot with color and the world is once again young.

This color study is the kind of thing upon which Leigh would spend his days out West, painting in the open air and finding just that magical mix of color and light.  His brush is heavily loaded with paint, and the brush strokes are particularly evident in the clouds.  The peaks in the distance merge with the blue of the sky, making the horizon (and our horizon) a thing infinite and mysterious. 

But while Leigh is sketchy, he is also exact.  Never if there a misplaced stroke, a piece of scenery that is unclear or ill-fitting to the composition.  This is nature transformed into art by the hand of a master.

It was somehow fitting to end the celebration of our nation’s birthday with Leigh.  His America is indeed a vanished America, and place that now only resides in the dreams of a lucky few.  When thinking of the settling of this great land, and of the days of brave pioneers and stalwart settlers, heroic Indians and nature-in-the-raw, spare a thought for the great American artists who helped focus this picture in our mind’s eye, turning natural beauty into national legend.

The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part VII

In his masterful study on William R. Leigh (1866 –1955) Frontiers of Enchantment: The Outdoor Studies of William R. Leigh, artist/author Stephen Gjerston quotes the artist as saying, “The world is so wonderful, so marvelous … If people would only open their eyes to it.  If only they would see the color and enchantment waiting to be discovered right before them.”  Words that could be the motto of everyone here at The Jade Sphinx.

After returning to the US following a series of prolonged painting trips to Africa (on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History), Leigh resumed painting his vision of the American West with a vengeance.  To do this, Leigh used the hundreds of studies he painted during his many trips there, later making large pictures in his New York studio.  His painting method was consistent with his European training:

You start with a detailed charcoal drawing and then paint over that – the most distant things first.  If there are no clouds, the sky may take no more than a day.  The distant figures may be done in a week.  It gets more difficult as you approach the foreground – a large canvas make take four or six months altogether – but the most economical way is to finish as you go. 

Today’s picture, Buffalo Drive from 1947, is indeed a large canvas: 6.5 feet x 10.5 feet.  It currently resides in the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY.  This is an incredibly energetic and dramatic picture, replete with many of Leigh’s signature touches.

First, let’s look at central figure of the Indian carrying the spear.  Once again, Leigh does many things to isolate and draw attention to the figure: the Indian is “framed” by the white of his white horse, the patch of white dust at his feet and brown shadow over his shoulder, and the whiteness of his spear.  He further underscores the figure with the ornate saddle blanket that creates a pedestal for the muscular torso and detailed posing. (The same saddle blanket used in The Leader's Downfall – how I would have loved to have pawed through Leigh’s collection of props!) 

Leigh used these techniques to draw the viewer to his main figure, but that does not mean he stinted the other figures.  The buffalo heading right into our line of vision (tongue distended in fright and fatigue) is a little too realistic for our complete comfort, and the Indians to the left of the picture are sculpted by Leigh’s brush with all the subtlety of figures by a Renaissance master.  In fact, something about the figures – particularly the left-most four – smack of his European training and influence.  The poses are very similar to those of soldiers in Renaissance-era paintings and drawings.

The scene depicted is guaranteed to strike contemporary viewers as gratuitously violent (or perhaps even comedic), but it was not uncommon for American Indians to stampede buffalo off of  cliff sides as an easy method of killing them for food, clothing and the hundreds of other necessities they made from the carcass.   (This would include thread, hats, needles, tools and even primitive painting materials!)  The small calf (to the right of our fatigued buffalo) strikes a particular note of pathos – the struggle for survival can be extraordinarily unsentimental.

If we could overlook the exceptional draftsmanship of the piece (no small task), we would then be seduced by Leigh’s fabulous sense of color.  The buffalo are little more than carefully manipulated splotches of color (particularly those in the background), but Leigh manages to use color to carefully delineate each and every animal.  And the blue of his sky and the bright earth tones both on top and at the bottom of the cliff further frame the main action.

Despite the brutality of this picture, I find it still inescapably romantic.  Leigh shows the struggle for survival, but his heightened coloration gives the scene a sense of showbiz razzmatazz.

Many figures of the West – Buffalo Bill Cody comes to mind – were fully aware of the pageant that they lived through.  To those ranks we can add William Robinson Leigh.

More William Leigh tomorrow!

The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part IV

We end our week-long look at the West of William R. Leigh (1866 –1955) with Walpi, Arizona, Hopi Reservation, painted in 1912. This is oil on canvas, 22 x 33, currently housed in the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa. 

We had discussed how Leigh captured an other-worldly quality with is picture Afterglow Over the Zuni River, and I believe he manages to do the same thing here.  What is perhaps amazing, though, is that he does not need the dramatic coloration of dusk or the moon and a shimmering star to capture that sense of the uncanny; rather, he manages to convey a sense of mystery with a stark depiction of natural surroundings and a sense of remoteness.

Readers unfamiliar with Walpi would be interested to learn that it is a village in Navajo County, Arizona, inhabited by the Hopi-speaking Pueblo Indians.  Walpi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in the United States; even today several of it inhabitants live without electricity or running water.  The overall Hopi Reservation is a system of villages based on three mesas (flatlands atop of mountains) and Walpi (the First Mesa) established in 1690.  (There is a photo of the actual site below, dating from 1920.)

Leigh was fascinated by the First Mesa, painting countless studies of it and sometimes going up to the mesa “between two and four o’clock at night to paint moonlight effects.”

We previously noted Leigh’s European training and his brilliant sense of color, both apparent in Walpi.  As Stephen Gjerston notes in his excellent Frontiers of Enchantment: The Outdoor Studies of William R. Leigh, The emphasis of the German school was generally on form rather than color, the latter tending to be dark, heavy and rather dull, the so-called brown school that attempted to imitate certain works of the older Spanish, Flemish and Italian masters.  But that didn’t seem to affect Leigh, who was apparently one of those rare individuals gifted with a natural eye for seeing color.  Even in his early work the color was more brilliant and natural than that used by most German painters.

But let’s look at Walpi and examine why it is so evocative.  I’m sure that many readers, if not told it depicted an American Indian site, would have conjectured that it was a painting of some fairy tale place or the remote keep mentioned in a fantasy novel.  Like many pictures of the sublime, there is something decidedly uncanny in the overall effect. 

Part of that, of course, if Leigh’s use of scale.  The small figure walking towards the village is in the distance – the village itself, further away still, is enormous.  (Another Native American woman, closer to the village, is little more than a red dot.)

Also dramatic are the cliff walls surrounding the mesa.  Leigh does not satisfy himself with a sheer drop; rather, these are moss-covered outcroppings alternately bleached by the sun or sucking up the ambient color.  The sense of the great desert surrounding the village (almost blue like the sea), also lends an air of remoteness and unreality to the composition.

Coloration, too, adds to the air of enchantment: dusk lends a bluish tint to the world, allowing dramatic shafts of sunlight to illuminate distant columns.

Leigh abandons his usual technique of a realistically depicting a central figure and rendering the rest suggestively – here, most everything is created on a range of Impressionism unusual in much of his work.  I think that this is perhaps because one of the more realistic, anchor figures that he places in many of his pictures would ruin the effect.  Like Afterglow Over the Zuni River the absence of people are essential to the dream-like effect.

There are many other works in the William Leigh corpus.  If you are interested in seeing more, please let me know.

The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part II

Yesterday we looked at a beautiful picture by William Robinson Leigh (1866 –1955), a forgotten master at depicting the American West.  Today we venture West once again with Leigh and his picture Afterglow Over the Zuni River.

During his trips West, Leigh would paint many small studies from nature.  These pictures would later be used as reference materials for paintings executed in his New York studio.  Leigh was able to incorporate the new technology of oil paint in tubes to work with relative ease outdoors and capture an initial impression and a sense of color.  It is the opinion of Stephen Gjerston, author of Frontiers of Enchantment: The Outdoor Studies of William R. Leigh, that this practice of alla-prima color sketching accounts for much of the fine color of his studio work. 

Leigh had a particular affinity for native Americans and their homes.  During a sketching trip in the summer of 1906, he spent time in Zuni Indian and Pueblo country.  In his journal Leigh wrote: I was eager to waste no time at all.  I saw that I needed studies of everything, the vegetation, the rocks, the plains, mesas, sky, the Indians and their dwellings.  Scores of studies.  Dependable studies.  I saw so far as possible I must be a sponge, soak up everything I saw … I started to paint, paint, paint.

Today we look at Afterglow Over the Zuni River. This is oil on canvas board, 13 x 17, currently residing at the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa.  By any yardstick, Afterglow is a remarkable picture.

Perhaps the most startling thing about the painting is that nothing is really the color that you expect it to be.  This is perhaps the greatest pitfall that young artists make when attacking a landscape picture.  The immediate assumption is that clouds are white, the sky is blue, grass is green and water transparent.  However, any time spent in the outdoors open to the intoxication of color would give lie to those assumptions.  Clouds are never just white, as grass is seldom only green or skies blue.  In fact, in some of the more beautiful spaces of the American West, the natural landscape is a riot of color more than equal to anything a Post Modernist could dream up.

Here at the Zuni River, dusk has rendered the landscape purple.  Though the sky still holds some orange color from the setting (or already set) sun, the moon is out, a glowing scimitar in the sky.  The clouds, the river and the sandy river bed are stained purple as well, though the water really flows with a myriad of colors as it reflects the varying shades of dusk.

The Zuni village in the background is still – most native peoples were asleep with the sun.  However, the simple structures seem to be part of nature, as natural to the landscape as the river weeds Leigh uses to frame the image.

Afterglow is also a wonderfully evocative picture.  I believe – aside from the splendid and inspired color – the reason it is so effective is because of his use of the moon and the star in the upper left hand corner.  These celestial bodies provide a timeless sense to the picture – as if the Zuni River were part of an unending cosmos of creation and natural beauty.

What I find most fascinating about this picture is that, again, Leigh depicts the natural world in a fairly Impressionist manner; however, the moon and star have a sense of crystallization absent in Impressionism.  They are so clear and so cleanly delineated that they could almost come from an illustrated book of celestial bodies.  It is this mix of realism and a looser artistic style that I think is Leigh’s great accomplishment.

In the Zuni mythology, Awonawilona was the creator of the world, becoming the sun and making the Mother Earth and Father Sky, from whom all living creatures came.  The quiet power of that ancient deity can be felt in the picture, a sense of transcendence just beyond our power to see.