Gilbert Munger's quest for distinction

Magazine Antiques, July, 2003 by Michael D. Schroeder, J. Gray Sweeney

Reflections on a Lake (P1. X) represents Munger's fully developed Barbizon style. Gone is the focus on a particular element, such as a tree, although the entire scene is rendered with a level of detail seldom seen in the Barbizon paintings of others. Typically in Munger's later Barbizon pictures, country folk and animals are glimpsed beside placid rivers or ponds, or in sunlit clearings of the stately forests. For late nineteenth-century viewers, such scenes muted the unsettling displacement of nature by modem life. Munger, with his background in the service of geology and science, was well suited to frame these perceptions within his own use of the Barbizon aesthetic conventions. Critics approved of Munger's contributions to the style. The London Daily Telegraph remarked:

Rub out the signature of Gilbert Munger ... from any one of his landscapes, and it would pass for a work of that same school which glorifies the forest scenery of Fontainebleau. Corot, in his deeper and firmer moods, is reproduced, with no slavish effort of dull mechanical imitation, but with the appreciative reverence of an original hand, by this same Mr. Munger. (21)

Munger returned to the United States in April 1893. Attempting to resume the American career he had left more than sixteen years earlier, he hoped to capitalize on his European reputation and honors. But his connections with the American art market had grown stale. Buyers for his paintings were hard to find and critics largely ignored him. He never regained the recognition he once enjoyed nor achieved the financial success he wanted. Near the end of his career he wrote sardonically, "It will not be my fate to become a millionaire (this misfortune has come to many of my friends)." (22)

In this last phase of his career, despite financial adversity and illness, his paintings achieved a new weight and concentration of emotion, further refining the lessons of Europe. Cazenovia Corn Field (Pl. XII), painted around 1900 while visiting Dwight Williams (1856-1932), an artist friend in upstate New York, shows this more expressive style, producing his own compelling vision of a rural American Barbizon.

Munger's early works are painted in the crisp realistic style of the Hudson River school; his later European pictures blend an American sensibility with the aestheticism of Turner and the French Barbizon style. Through his long career Munger's perception of nature deepened and matured, but he always remained true to the commitment he forged in the open air of the American West to painting finished pictures on the spot. Critics acknowledged that his finest paintings equaled the work of leading artists of his generation, such as Bierstadt. Later he was compared with Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and artists associated with the Barbizon school. Most compelling to many viewers today are his western landscapes. Their clarity, geological specificity, and poetry are a remarkable record of exploration and first encounter that communicates Munger's sense of wonder and beauty in the landscape, placing them among the major achievements of the nation's artist-explorers in the 1870s.