American Tonalism

About American Tonalism

A Tonalist picture is built around one dominant hue, a smoky green, grey-violet or amber, laid in thin glazes and rubbed layers so that forms seem to sit inside the atmosphere. Hard edges and strong colour contrasts are rare. The subject is often a meadow, a pond or a line of trees at twilight, painted from memory rather than outdoors.

The approach took shape in the 1880s and lasted into the 1910s. Its sources included the French Barbizon painters and James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Nocturnes. George Inness gave it its most spiritual form in late works such as Home of the Heron (1893), and Dwight Tryon, Alexander Wyant and Charles Warren Eaton worked similarly. In 1899 Henry Ward Ranger gathered painters at Old Lyme, Connecticut, as a Tonalist colony, though Impressionists soon took it over. Pictorialist photographers such as Edward Steichen sought the same effects with the camera.