FENWICK, EZRA (1794-1867), landscape painter, President of the Free Academy of the Arts 1849-61, and the master of what the criticism of two continents now agrees to call the Western light. He was born in the Hudson (q.v.) province, at the falls of the Mohawk, a miller's son; the first pictures he knew were the river's own, and he could draw the fall of water over the wheel before he had his letters. Sent to London in the last year of the Buonapartist wars, he passed four years in the schools of the Free Academy (q.v.) — a pupil, one of his masters noted, of a silence that was not slowness — and returned to the West in 1819 resolved, in his own later phrase, to paint the country that had not yet sat to anybody.
The Falls of the Genesee, shown at the Exhibition of 1822 and now in the Commonwealth Gallery (q.v.), made his name in a single season: the fall taken not at its thunder but at the still reach above it, where the water gathers and the light comes down the gorge — the first picture, said the criticism of the day, in which the Western Provinces had looked at themselves and found the face good. There followed the great decades of the Lakes (q.v.) and of the rivers: water in every weather, handled with a breadth the Home Provinces found new and the West found true; and the light itself — wider, higher, and more indifferent than the light of Europe — which he did not so much paint as establish, so that travellers now report the West, a little absurdly, to be very like a Fenwick. His method never varied in forty years: the summers spent upon the water or the grass, filling the small paper studies of which the Gallery preserves above three hundred; the winters in the painting-room, where the studies were weighed, sifted, and enlarged at last into the great canvases — for he held that a picture is a judgment upon many days, and not the testimony of one.
In 1849 the Academy called him to its chair, the first man born in the Western Provinces to hold it. He governed for twelve years, hung the Exhibitions with a fairness the disappointed themselves conceded, and said less in the chair, it was reckoned, than any president of any chartered body in the Commonwealth; in 1861 he laid the office down and went home to the West. The parallel with the first Strategus's retirement (see LAMBERT, JOHN) has been drawn too often to require drawing here again.
It was after his sixtieth year, upon the grass-lands beyond the great river, that he found the subject for which his whole life reads, in the retrospect, like a preparation. The Long Prairie, painted in 1856 from the studies of two summers on the plains, hangs in the Commonwealth Gallery and is soon described: grass to the sky-line under a weather of great clouds, a waggon-track entering from the south and going out of the picture empty, and no figure anywhere. Upon such materials he built the unpeopled breadth of his late manner, and upon that breadth rests his claim — this article states it deliberately — to stand with the masters of landscape entire. Ruisdael's emptiness is weather; Claude's light falls upon what men have built; Fenwick's light falls upon what no man has touched, a country lying open as upon the first morning, and waiting, as it seems, to be entered upon. No school of Europe possesses the subject, for no country of Europe possesses the fact.
He painted to within two summers of his death, and died in 1867 at the falls of the Mohawk, within sound of his father's mill-race, where he is buried. Before The Long Prairie, upon any public day, the visitor may verify the judgment of this article at his leisure: the Gallery hangs no picture emptier, and none that the young men of the Western Provinces stand longer before. (R. Q.)