Charles Caryl Coleman on Capri

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2005 by Adrienne Baxter Bell

To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who beguile all men whosoever comes
to them.
Homer, The Odyssey, XII, 39-40

The American artist Charles Caryl Coleman (Fig. 1) celebrated his eighty-first birthday at Villa Narcissus, his home on the island of Capri, by dancing the tarantella. According to a witness, he was dressed "in his blue velvet dinner jacket with his snowy curls and beard shining in the candle-light ... his long thin legs flying." (1) Although nearly deaf and unable to see well, he continued to entertain visitors. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was one of them, only eight days earlier. (2)

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After periodic illnesses, Coleman died on December 3, 1928, and was buried, with other expatriates, in Capri's cimitero acattolico (non-Catholic cemetery). One year later, the Brooklyn Museum, in Brooklyn, New York, whose director, William Henry Fox (1858-1952), had been an early and ardent champion of Coleman's work, held a memorial exhibition of his oils, watercolors, and pastels. (3) It proved to be his last solo show. In succeeding years, his art slipped through the cracks of history. He had disregarded the major trends in nineteenth-century American landscape painting and the drive toward abstraction in the twentieth. Ultimately, his art remained as isolated and idiosyncratic as the island that was Coleman's home from 1886 until his death.

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An eccentric on the order of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Coleman enveloped himself in the kinds of myths that Homer cultivated when he described the waters around Capri as the home of the Sirens, who were said to lure unwitting sailors to their death with their song. Well into the industrialized twentieth century, Coleman lived in a bucolic past, recalling idyllic lands and ancient cultures in more than three hundred paintings, watercolors, drawings, and pastels. Fueled by a vigorous imagination, he even presented himself in theatrical guises, such as a Bedouin merchant and a Venetian senator (Fig. 1).

Coleman's early years hint at his attraction to the eccentric expatriate's way of life. Born in Buffalo, New York, he briefly studied painting in the studio of William Holbrook Beard (1824-1900), an artist known for his fantastical scenes of anthropomorphic bears cavorting in the forest. (4) Recognizing the limitations of art education in the United States, Coleman sought training in Paris. In 1856 he joined legions of American and European artists to study under the direction of Thomas Couture (1815-1879). (5) As Couture always worked with live male and female models, his painting exercises may have provided Coleman with the confidence to execute the riveting portrait of the English poet Walter Savage Landor shown in Plate VI, a work equally indebted to the self-portraits of Titian (c. 1488-1576) and Tintoretto (1519-1594). (6) In Paris Coleman met the American painter Elihu Vedder (1836-1923), who became a lifelong friend. (7) They traveled to Florence, where they befriended Giovanni (Nino) Costa (1826-1903) and other members of the Macchiaioli, the group of Italian painters opposing the teachings of the Florentine Accademia and its penchant for histrionic renderings of medieval and Renaissance subjects. (8) The atmosphere of rebelliousness supported the instincts of the American painters who focused on domestic scenes, and their work from this period is filled with pictures of monks strolling in walled gardens and crumbling medieval houses along the narrow cobblestone streets of Fiesole and neighboring towns. The mythic overtones of these locations, where centuries of history remain visible and accessible, would form a leitmotif in much of Coleman's subsequent work.

Coleman returned to the United States in the winter of 1862 during the Civil War to serve in Buffalo's Company K, a regiment of volunteers. After being accidentally wounded by a fellow officer in South Carolina, he was granted an honorable discharge and returned to New York City where, from 1863 to 1866, he maintained a studio on Broadway. He showed his paintings at the Boston Athenaeum, the Brooklyn Art Academy, and the National Academy of Design. A rare still life from this period reflects the high level of Coleman's technical abilities and justifies his election to associate membership at the National Academy in 1865. (9)

Coleman would have endorsed Henry James's description of Rome as "the aesthetic antidote to the ugliness of the rest of the world," (10) for he became a full-time resident of the city by the end of 1866. His love of spectacle then drew him to Venice, where he celebrated the city's rich artistic and historical legacies in his inventive representation of the bronze horses of San Marco, commissioned by Louisa (1827-1903), Lady Ashburton, in 1876 and exhibited at the Paris Salon the following year (Pl. IV). So successful was this picture that he painted a second version, with only minor alterations, between 1883 and 1885. (11) Whereas previous artists had depicted the horses from the piazza below, Coleman painted them from the stone parapet above the entrance to the cathedral. From this vantage point he aligned the celebrated horses, well-known symbols of the republic's military power, with its major religious and civic symbols on the Torre dell'Orologio (the Renaissance clock tower) on the north side of the piazza. (12)