Lovell Birge Harrison 1854-1929

Friends, fellow-artists, critics, and collectors celebrated Birge Harrison as a painter of exquisite sentiment and sensitivity. As one critic noted, “if [Harrison] had not been a painter, he would have been a poet.” Born in Philadelphia in 1854, Harrison was known for misty landscape paintings that used a restricted range of subtle colors and hazy outlines to suggest a tranquil mood. He was a leading figure among the Tonalists, a loosely associated group of artists working from approximately 1880 to 1920 that included George Inness and Alexander Helwig Wyant. Tonalism was a movement whose main products were small to moderately sized landscape paintings that sought to reveal nature in her quieter, more intimate moments through an exploration of the effects of light and atmosphere. Tonalist painters made no efforts to disguise their brushstrokes, delighting in the thick application of paint on canvas to suggest evanescent atmospheric effects like smoke, snow, and fog.

Like Luminism, Tonalism sprang from the common intellectual stock of the American Transcendentalists, whose ecstatic, pantheistic appreciation of nature they shared. Harrison wrote in 1913: “A subject may be commonplace in itself, but seen under some rare and fleeting effects—such as the mysterious half lights between day and darkness—is transformed and glorified. That which was banal becomes beautiful.” The artistic skill required to transform the banal into the beautiful was considerable, and Harrison’s ability to effect such a change in a picture like New York Harbor reflects his long academic training. Like many prominent Philadelphia artists, he first trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Urged by John Singer Sargent to broaden his horizons, he then traveled to Paris to study at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He spent six years in Paris, during which time he became familiar with the work of Barbizon School painters such as Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau. The association was important to Harrison’s artistic development, since they, along with the British artists John Constable and John Crome, were pioneers of plein air painting. New York Harbor silently attests to the many frigid sunsets and sunrises the artist must have sat through, observing and sketching what he called “the moments when things are glimpsed rather than seen.”

Harrison also engaged in considerable experimentation beyond the naturalistic and Romantic style of the Barbizon School. In New York Harbor he flattened and tilted the picture plane up toward the viewer, playing with perspective in a characteristically modern way. As a result, the kind of artistic vision that Harrison achieved in this work is not that of an all-seeing, Emersonian “transparent eyeball,” but rather that of a modern subject whose contingent, sometimes imperfect vision constantly transforms and renews itself as the light changes and the clouds roll past. Harrison was a member of many professional organizations including the National Academy of Design, the famed Century Association, and the New York Water-Color Club. His canvases can currently be seen in museums such as the National Academy of Design Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.