Elliott Daingerfield

In both his paintings and his writings, Elliott Daingerfield (1859–1932) was attracted to the spiritual, even promoting the religious mission of the artist. He defined art as "a principle flowing out of God through certain men and women by which they perceive and understand the beautiful. The office of the artist is to express the beautiful." [1] In their evocative and atmospheric qualities, Daingerfield's paintings reflect his fondness for the ethereal; his work is usually associated with Symbolism, a movement that emphasized mental and emotional states over concrete realism.

Daingerfield was born in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, but soon after moved with his parents to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where his father, a Confederate captain, commanded the arsenal. Demonstrating an early interest in art, he worked with a local china painter, and as an assistant to a photographer who taught him tinting techniques. He went to New York in 1880 to study at the Art Students League, and for four years he was a studio assistant and taught still life classes for Walter Satterlee, one of the instructors at the League. In 1884, he moved to the Holbein Studios on west Fifty-fifth Street, built specifically for artists. A fellow resident, George Inness, became a good friend and taught his young protégé his glazing technique, which alternated layers of pigment and varnish, creating a surface that was simultaneously rich and deep. Daingerfield celebrated his mentor in writing: “The greatest of his pictures were painted out of what people fondly called his imagination, his memory—painted within the four walls of a room, away from and without reference to any particular nature; for he himself was nature.” [2]

In the mid-1880s, Daingerfield began to spend summers in western North Carolina, where the landscape and the people inspired his work. There he built an imposing home on a hill and called it Westglow after the sunset. Although he did not go abroad until 1897, he was influenced by the Barbizon School—a group of French painters who gravitated to the Forest of Fontainebleau and depicted the local peasantry and pastoral scenery in dark tonalities. Working in a similar manner in his early work, Daingerfield earned the sobriquet "the American Millet," after Jean-François Millet, one of the leading Barbizon artists.

In 1911, Daingerfield made his first of several trips to the Grand Canyon, employed by the Santa Fe Railroad Company to execute preparatory sketches for paintings celebrating the West. For the artist, the experience was revelatory, and in keeping with his passion for nature. "There are times when one is permitted to see in nature supremely beautiful moments; when the assembling of time, color, light and atmosphere produces a harmony that appeals to our deepest emotion. If the mystery of effect such as the rising of the moon, is added, how perfect the emotion and how intense the reverence in even the most sordid of us." [3]

Daingerfield was both critic and theoretician. He wrote many articles on fellow artists, several of whom—Albert Blakelock, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Henry Ward Ranger— shared his aesthetic and his penchant for the spiritual in art. In one particularly animated piece, he rails against American artists who are eager to replicate nature and cling too close to their models: “The condition of our art here in America is confused and vague for the most part, with very little to say.” After commending Winslow Homer for his “great marines” and John Singer Sargent as “virile and direct … [having] keen insight,” he calls for an art that embraces “the first and last letter of Art—the principle of beauty.” [4]

Notes:

[1] Daingerfield, "Sketch of His Life—Written by Elliott Daingerfield—in Response to a Request," undated manuscript, Elliott Daingerfield Papers. Center for the Study of Southern Painting, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.

[2] Daingerfield, “Introduction,” in George Inness, Jr., Life, Art and Letters of George Inness (New York: The Century Club, 1917).

[3] Daingerfield to William O'Brien, May 6, 1917. Daingerfield Papers, Archives of American Art, roll 89.

[4] Daingerfield, “Nature vs. Art,” Scribner’s Magazine 54 (February 1911), 256–257.