Paintings of Florida in the Vickers collection

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr.

The most important artists to visit Florida were attracted by its landscape, not its history. This can be seen as part of the more general lure of the tropics in the late nineteenth century, the most celebrated example being the French artist Paul Gauguin's move to Tahiti. William Morris Hunt came to Florida in 1873 and 1874 to recuperate from a nervous collapse caused by the loss of his studio in the Boston fire of 1872. A student of Thomas Couture (1815-1879) and a disciple of Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875), Hunt was chiefly a figure and portrait painter. Late in life, however, he showed great promise as a landscape painter - an aptitude not fully realized because of his tragically premature death in 1879. His large View of the St. Johns River (Pl. X) is particularly beautiful for its subtle coloration, the limpid stillness of the scene, and the warm, moist density of the atmosphere. Hunt was so impressed by Florida's climate - so different from that of his native New England - that it is depicted as the principal feature of nature.

Thomas Moran visited Florida in 1877 to illustrate an article for Scribner's Monthly about one of the Sea Islands at the mouth of the Saint Johns River. Coming on the heels of his great Western paintings The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Chasm of the Colorado of 1872 and 1873 respectively,(7) the Florida landscape could not have been a greater contrast. Nevertheless, in the painting shown in Plate XII he captured the distinctive light and lush landscape of Florida as convincingly and dramatically as he had the arid and spacious landscape of the American West. This is one of the most captivating paintings in the Vickers collection and one of Moran's greatest Florida canvases.

Evening, Lake Alto (Pl. XX) is Martin Johnson Heade's first important Florida painting. Of all the artists who came to the state, he was most prepared by sensibility and experience for its flatness and relative featurelessness, in comparison to the scenery of the Northeast and the West, which had established the norm for the American landscape. Heade found in Florida the counterpart to the salt marshes of New England and New Jersey, which had been the chief subject of his landscapes since the 1860s. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to be sure which were painted where.

George Inness began visiting Florida in 1890, when he took a house and studio in Tarpon Springs on the Gulf Coast. Like Moran, and indeed most artists who visited Florida, Inness came to it from experiences of very different kinds of American, French, and Italian landscapes. But like Moran he quickly came to grips with its distinctive properties and painted a number of his most beautiful late landscapes there (see Pl. XVIII).

Winslow Homer was not only the greatest American artist to visit Florida but, next to Heade, the one who spent the most time there. On his first trip in January 1886 he visited Jacksonville, Tampa, and Key West, painting about a dozen watercolors in the last two places. He returned to Florida in 1890, going to Enterprise chiefly to fish, but also to paint watercolors. Although he made four more trips to Florida, he painted again only on his 1903-1904 visit. One of his most splendid watercolors, Black Bass, Florida (Pl. V), dates from that visit. As an avid fisherman, it was a subject he knew intimately and directly, yet like all his paintings of sporting subjects, it is not, in the conventional sense, a sporting painting. The startling immediacy of the hooked fish rising almost in one's face creates a sense of drama and expressive force that few sporting paintings achieve. The monumentality of effect is vastly greater in Homer's hands than is normally found in paintings of this size and in this medium.