Dwight William Tryon
Dwight William Tryon
1849 - 1925
American painter. From 1876 to 1879 he studied in Paris with Jacquesson de La Chevreuse (1839–1903), a pupil of Ingres. Tryon also knew and was influenced by the Barbizon painters Henri-Joseph Harpignies and Daubigny. Study of their work as well as that of Whistler resulted in the poetic and darkly tonal orientation of many of Tryon’s earlier landscapes, for example Moonlight (1887; New York, Met.). The lighter palette and broken brushstroke of the Impressionist painters led Tryon to develop a subtle style, now known as Tonal Impressionism, which by the late 1890s concentrated on transient atmospheric effects as in Early Spring, New England (Springtime) (1897; Washington, DC, Freer). It is a pastoral scene of a brook in a pasture, with a plough team and hills in the distance and leafless trees across an open sky, which warms to the horizon. ‘People think of atmosphere as somehow less real than the other facts of Nature,’ Tryon commented, ‘but to the painter it is simply a more subtle truth, which he can no more disregard than the rocks in his foreground’ (quoted in J. Pearce: American Painting, 1560–1913, New York, 1964, p. 47).
In 1879 Tryon donated a gallery to Smith College, Northampton, MA, to house a collection of his own work and that of his contemporaries. His work is also well represented in the Freer Gallery, Washington, DC, since Charles Lang Freer had been an important patron of the artist. [Robert S. Olpin. "Tryon, Dwight W.." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T086404.]
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