Bruce Crane - Quiet Complex Simplicity

The Harvest Moon, by Bruce Crane, c. 1900

A student of mine sent in this autumnal landscape by Bruce Crane. As a prime example of 19th-early 20th century Tonalism, this lovely painting employs soft lines and a minimally limited palette in the service of delicate, subtlely modulated tones to produce an achingly lyrical, melancholy mood, an almost musical harmony of light, color, shape, and line.

The composition, as well as the atmospheric tonality, owes a rather large debt to George Inness.

George Inness, Moonlight, Tarpon Springs Florida, 1892

In both of the paintings above, the horizontal canvas is divided into four quadrants, three of which are blocked-in, atmospheric masses and the fourth of which is open sky crossed by two vertical trees (in both cases, one is dominant and one subordinate, one straight and one curvy). The foreground is in relative shadow and the middle ground gets a stripe of moonlight from one side of the canvas to the other.

Inness used some variation of this composition in many of his most evocative paintings (including one of my very favorites, Summer at Montclair, 1891). He placed spiritual significance on the geometrical arrangements of his landscapes and didn't hesitate to bring the four quadrants together in the exact center of the canvas, balancing out the resulting symmetry with the asymmetrical arrangement of masses and lines, as he did above in Tarpon Springs.

Crane uses some bared rocks and a patch of grass to mark the central dividing line of his landscape, but he raises the horizon line into golden mean/rule-of-thirds territory. Upping the contrast of the image shows that what seems at first to be a straightforward vertical arrangement contains significant "orthogonal dynamism" (High-Falutin for diagonals), achieved not with obvious lines nor color, but with subtle variations in the tonal values. (Hence, Tonalism)

Photoshop reveals the subtle diagonals that bring a sense of movement and life to an otherwise stripy composition. 

Note that, except for the moon, the brightest values appear on the two middle-to-background trees silhouetted against the background shrubbery. Inness placed most of the action in the middleground too, but here Crane, in the absence of figures, uses that technique to draw our eyes even deeper into the painting.

First, the eye strikes the main pair of trees in shadow at the center. It quickly glances along the exposed rock to the more brightly lit pair of trees in the back (which deliver a strong performance for supposedly supporting players). From there the gaze lands on the luminous disk of the rising moon, which Crane has floated quietly in a glowing web of pale violet and orange that's as true as any painting I've seen to the delicate atmospheric color tones of evening in New England.

Bruce Crane, winter radiance

Bruce Crane stands out as one of the most sensitive and ethereal of the American Tonalist painters who saw themselves as carrying the torch of the American landscape tradition after the demise of the 19th century Hudson River School style. Crane helped found a colony of landscape painters at Lyme Connecticut. Most active as a community during the first decades of the 20th century, they blent Barbizon and Impressionist sensibilities toward a fresh, evocative re-visioning of the American landscape.

His landscapes are spare, poetic meditations steeped in atmosphere. Painting into the 1920s, he increasingly suffused his arrangements of natural elements with a golden radiance suggestive of a spiritual sensibility. His subject is usually common scenery - everyday scraps of nature: pastures gone to seed, tall, thin scraggly trees, collapsing rock walls, fences, and stumps. But he wonderfully half-dissolves his forms in the airy atmosphere he builds around them (for all their subjects' gauziness, these paintings's surfaces are quite thick with substantial layers of paint).

Like so many of the Tonalists who followed in George Inness's footsteps, Crane spent time in Europe where he was awed by the compositions and moods of Barbizon painting. Inness, it seems, had articulated a vision of nature very like Crane's some years before.

The above painting is by Crane. In mood, tone, and even somewhat in composition it recalls a well-known Inness depicting a lone figure making its way through scrappy snow on Christmas Eve (below).

Another Inness in which Crane could have found inspiration for his own work.

I'll return to Crane another day to really get into some of his most interesting later work.