19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Alfred C. Harrison Jr.

Munger left California in November 1873, and by 1877 he had moved to Europe, when he remained until 1893, painting with considerable success in the popular Barbizon style. Munger's place as a luminist in California was taken by Raymond Dabb Yelland, who arrived in December 1873 or January 1874 Born in England as Raymond Dabb, he added Yelland to his name for reasons unknown when he moved to California. He had been brought to New York City as an infant, attended the National Academy of Design in the late 1860s, and was hired as an instructor there as soon as he concluded his studies.

In California, Yelland embarked on a long career as an art teachers, first at Mills Seminary (now Mills College) in Oakland and then at the California School of Design in San Francisco. He also became a major landscape painter on the West Coast. A versatile artist, he traveled widely, making drawings and oil studies that formed the raw material for his exhibition paintings. His most celebrated works were quiet coastal scenes in the luminist style such as the one in Plate XIV. This large canvas has as its subject a beach, braking waves, and ocean, as simple and empty in composition as Munger's Glimpse of the Pacific (Pl. XII). Like many of the late paintings of John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872). Yelland's work appeals to the emotions entirely because of his treatment of light. The reflections of the rosy clouds in the water owe a debt to the technique of Yelland's colleague James Hamilton (1819-1878). Philadelphia' leading marine painter, who went to San Francisco in 1875. Unlike Hamilton, whose sunsets are l uridly theatrical, Yelland has muted the sunset colors, producing a mood of delicate melancholy As the critic of the San Francisco Evening Post wrote of Yelland's painting: "In the general treatment there is delicacy and power, rendering the scene far more attractive than if it were given an exclusively vigorous handling." [8] Yelland has treated the waves with similar restraint. Whereas Bierstadt's waves dramatize the terrifying power of nature, Yelland's are frozen in mid-break, exhibiting a lacelike beauty all their own. In nature, this beauty is so transient that it passes almost before it can be perceived by the human eye. The poet John Keats (1795-1821) included "the rainbow of the salt sand-wave" [9] as a natural phenomenon that would inspire melancholy in the beholder because of its evanescent beauty. The artist, on the other band, can create permanent beauty out of the transient nature of the waves. The same applies to twilight, the most beautiful time of day, which lasts only a few moments but is pr eserved forever in a work of art.

Another Yelland work that embraces the same theme in a brighter mood is Point Bonita from Point Lobos, Golden Gate (P1. XV), painted in the early 1880s. By then fashions in landscape had shifted from the meticulously detailed realism of luminism toward the looser, vaguer pictorial strategies of the French Barbizon painters Yelland was aware of this change in taste, and as early as 1878 he painted works that have the flavor of Barbizon landscapes. However, he continued to paint luminist works like Point Bonita that earned him a critical scolding in the press. A writer in The Californian of December 1881 criticized a Yelland painting in these terms: "The almost equal elaboration of every part of the picture detracts from the imaginative coherence of the whole. We feel that we are in the presence of physical facts rather than suggested mysteries." [10]