Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art

Conclusion

One windy winter afternoon following a snowstorm in early February 1895, Hovenden gave a lecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts titled “What Is the Purpose of Art?” It followed a series of lectures given there by John La Farge, extravagantly hailed in advance publicity as being “the most important delivered on Art since the Ruskin lectures at Oxford.”1 In the large Exhibition Gallery, surrounded by paintings that a Philadelphia newspaper art critic called “impressionistic bits,” Hovenden delivered a paper in which he expounded his belief in the moral value of art and of the role of the artist.2 Hovenden’s thoughts echoed those of Joseph Hodges Choate, an incorporator and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who explained in 1880 that the museum’s founders “believed that the diffusion of a knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate and refine a practical and laborious people.”3 Similarly, Hovenden conceived his purpose as an artist to be that of an advantaged interpreter with a moral responsibility: “If I can give pleasure, if I can give comfort, if I can give strength to those around me by any word or act of mine, what manner of man am I if I do not do it? For what object was power given?”4 Hovenden further articulated his aesthetic position in the lecture—that sentiment, as well as beauty, should be the goal of art—defending it against “art for art’s sake.” To Hovenden, this doctrine meant that technical skill was “the end and sole aim of art,” while he was convinced that sentiment, as well as beauty, should be the goal of art. He pointed out that “all the great figure painters of the past tried in some form to say something” and stated his own belief: The practice of art for art’s sake to the exclusion of art’s highest mission tends to narrow the practicers. It becomes self-centered, and tends to self-worship; and has not only bewildered the minds of the public, but the minds of the artist. . . . I hold that artists only can judge of our skill as artists, and that the public is the only one unprejudiced judge of the best use of that skill. . . . I think also that the very highest (which are the deepest) feelings in us can be touched [by art] . . . in a way as powerful as an orator’s or poet’s touch. . . .To say, as to-day so many men do, that art should not occupy itself with anything that appeals to the heart is, to me, so silly, so contemptible even, so short-sighted, so narrow , so small, that all the manhood in me revolts against it.5 According to one reporter, a number of those attending the lecture disagreed with Hovenden’s Conclusion CONCLUSION  opinions.Yet his views were similar to those expressed by the art critic S. R. Koehler in his American Art published in 1886. Koehler wrote that the artist should “awaken an echo in those whom he addresses” and deplored the denigrating of art as literary whenver it manifested “deeper thought.” He believed, as Hovenden did, that “technique for technique’s sake, and as a last aim, is fatal. True art, like love, must have an object outside of itself.”6 Hovenden began writing down some of his ideas about art after theWorld’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.7 Only a handwritten draft remains and probably dates from 1894–95. The tenor of this draft corresponds with that of Hovenden’s lecture, although only a few phrases were actually incorporated. The following excerpts from the draft express Hovenden’s commitment to an art for the public and his defensiveness against the elitism of “art for art’s sake”: The best art . . . appeals alike to the great public and at the same time commends itself to the trained artist. . . .Are we to paint for artists and leave the public out of the question[?] It is very evident that the tendency of many of the best men of today is in this direction. But I am positive that it is a grand error to go so far as they have gone. I fully believe they have belittled our art by so doing and they have narrowed themselves by denouncing and sneering at the presentation of noble thoughts. . . . Is not he the greatest artist who has great ideas that seek...