Robert Gilder: Renaissance Man
A MONA Moment |
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Nebraska artist Robert Gilder was the quintessential, 20th Century version of the Renaissance man. Born in Flushing, New York, in 1856, he was educated in Newark, New Jersey, and studied art in New York City. After his arrival in Omaha in 1887, he pursued a career as a printer. He later served as the chief archaeologist of the University of Nebraska, while actively pursuing a parallel career as an artist.
Gilder received instruction from Omaha artist J. Laurie Wallace. Wallace was a well-known student of Thomas Eakins, practicing Eakin's aesthetic of a dark palette of colors and intensely realized realism in portraiture. However, Gilder's style of painting was far closer to that of his friend, Omaha artist Augustus Dunbier: landscapes saturated in intense color, and an Impressionist's interest in the effects of light interacting with color.
Gilder produced numerous landscapes in the Fontenelle forest area of Bellevue, Nebraska, working out of his studio he named Wake Robin. He painted these wooded areas in all seasons, and in all times of the day. The colors of his autumn landscapes are deep hued, intense and slightly spectral, even otherworldly. They seem slightly off. Yet a closer examination suggests a precise understanding of the subtle, complex range of colors as they appear in a specific moment of time, in a certain hue of light.
This understanding and feeling for light and its subtle relationships with the landscape is realized in the quiet, evocative color tones of his undated oil painting Road Through the Woods. Gilder provides lyric rhythm in the composition through the device of the path through the woods. The path begins where the viewer stands, just outside the foreground-a gliding S curve carries the eye into the forest and up a small embankment in the background, lined with a border of glowing yellow is brown brush, the color lightened as it catches the long, fingers of light divided by the shadows of the trees.
It is best to view a Gilder landscape from a distance of six feet or so, to allow its brushstrokes to blend the subtle, tonal ranges of color. This winter landscape is late in the day and the patches of light on the snow in the foreground have an achingly subtle, peach hue, understood by our eyes only through its contrast with the pale blue shadows surrounding these islands of light.
There is a clear, pleasing sense of movement and rhythm toward the left and back into the forest which begins with the path and is taken up by these fingers of light on the land leading us inward. In the distance, in the middleground, to those fingers of peach light he adds the subtlest pink highlights. These muted, rich colors, the rhythm of design, combine to create a quiet, even soothing sense of place.
We are alone, walking
quietly in the forest; we hear the crackle of snow underfoot, light leading
us into the serene heart of nature.
