KENSETT’S IMPRESSIONS OF LANDSCAPE

The dog days of summer are upon us like a soggy hot blanket. City-locked citizens seek substitutes for a serene stretch of beach. Well, it may be a tossup as to whether or not a new exhibition at the County Museum of Art is just a satisfactory stopgap or in fact superior to a real vacation.

In either case, nobody who loves either good painting or the American sensibility will want to miss visiting the show before it closes Sept. 15. Its subject is 70 landscapes by John Frederick Kensett, a leading 19th-Century native artist whose faded reputation has been polished up in an ongoing revival of traditional art.

The effect of his work is a suffusion of calm insight that will certainly rank it among the finest exhibitions of the year. It is not an intolerable strain upon the point to see it as an American version of last summer’s French Impressionist delight, “A Day in the Country.”

“You know,” said one visitor, “I always take the train between Boston and New York because the landscape looks exactly like this. People say it is boring, but I don’t find it a bit boring.”

Kensett was born in Cheshire, Conn., in 1816 and trained to be an engraver like his father. In youth he spent seven years in Europe evolving into a painter. He absorbed the classical composition of Poussin and Claude in the Louvre, admired Gainsborough, Constable and Turner and the English countryside they painted. He loved Rome. In those days it was the epicenter of the art world, less because it was a great museum town than because of its picturesque vistas and its position as an international magnet for foreign artists.

The young artist absorbed this heavy infusion of European influence without a trace. Kensett returned home in 1847 to what a friend described as “a series of noiseless victories.” Kensett’s paintings had preceded him and built a reputation that he would only augment as his style evolved evermore toward a distinctive and unmistakable Yankee-type art.

The earliest painting on view is the 1847 “The Shrine--A Scene in Italy.” Its honeyed Claudian structure combined with group of “picturesque” figures blends into hints of sentimental kitsch. It was a mistake Kensett didn’t make twice. Subsequent early paintings confine themselves to pure landscape in the general style of the Hudson River School.

That does not, of course, make them devoid of human content. The fascination of landscape painting--an attraction that may grow with the viewer’s age--is that it is the visual equivalent of philosophy or world view.

In pictures from the early 1850s such as “Adirondack Scenery,” Kensett sees nature pretty much in the Romantic-Transcendental mode of Bryant, Emerson or his Hudson River mentors Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand. Nature, as in “The White Mountains--North Conway,” is at once vast and intimate but always ultimately benign. Nature, in short, is God as the Great Mother. The vision is so touching you can almost hear John Denver warbling “Country Road.”

In the mid 1850s, Kensett’s art moved toward a sparer, more monumental style that tends to be interpreted in at least two ways. It is possible to see growing leanings to the Sublime as participating in America’s bravado Manifest Destiny period. Its imperialistic optimism spawned the grandiose styles of Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt with their spectacular Technicolor panoramas of the Rockies, Andes and Niagara Falls.

Yet while Kensett has some of their sweep in, say, “View of the Shrewsbury River,” his composition and increasing attraction to marine subjects were so much sparer and restrained and pearlescent in color that he has been bracketed with recently revived “Luminist” painters like the introspective Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade with their still, moony light.

Both comparisons are stylistically useful. So is the thought that Kensett, like Monet, took to making series of near-identical variations on such subjects as “Beacon Rock, Newport Harbor.” The danger in such associative appreciation is that we will miss Kensett’s individuality in the shuffle.

What is finally clearest about Kensett is that he was neither a pre-abstract painterly investigator like Monet or an emotional panoramic projectile or a delicate eccentric. When he tried for overt drama, as in “Storm, Western Colorado,” he looked anxious instead of grand. When he leaned to the enervated lassitude of the Luminists, he lapsed into stiff folk art self-consciousness.

His real individuality puts him virtually out of time at least until the 20th Century. Kensett was that rare artist who could put down what was in front of him without projecting into it. A work like “Eaton’s Neck, Long Island” evokes moments of epiphany when one is alone on a quiet stretch of beach. The day is clear, achingly beautiful and suddenly you realize that all this effulgence doesn’t mean anything. It is just pure phenomenon. Nature doesn’t mind if you are there. She is equally content if you are not. One is overcome with a feeling of cosmic abandonment accompanied by a grateful exhilaration at simply being sensate.

Kensett is characterized in excellent catalogue essays as being a typical pantheist of the time, believing that landscape conveyed positive religious values about the presence of God (and His particular fondness for the United States). But the artist is also quoted saying: “Things are nothing but what the mind constitutes them.”

The slight agitation of his middle period seems to represent the shock of realizing the implications of his own insight. Things are just out there . The astonishing objectivity of Kensett’s painting begins to look as if he was some sort of precursor of modern existential empiricism, a proto-phenomenologist about to be struck with a tidal wave of Kierkegaardian angst .

Forget it. Kensett just wasn’t like that. He was attractive, personally popular, even-tempered and thoroughly housebroken. He belonged to the the right art societies, served on official committees and was modest and generous at the height of his very considerable success. His vices were a moderate liking of cigars and whiskey punch.

He never married and dismissed the question jocularly saying: “I have long set myself down as a confirmed old bachelor, beyond the hope of redemption--I am wedded to the arts and they must be my bride, and a more charming mistress I could not hope to win.”

Anybody who thinks that might have been the casual cover-up of a misogynist should be reminded that Kensett died untimely in 1872 at age 56 from illness contracted when he heroically tried to save a drowned woman.

Just before his death he executed nearly 40 breathtaking paintings now known as the “Last Summer’s Work.” (With poignant poetic aptness, they were painted from his Connecticut studio on a place called Contentment Island.)

They are such accurate depictions of the Northeast coast that even a Californian instantly recognizes their austere structure and modulated summer moods. The lady in the galleries was right. New England landscape isn’t boring and Kensett let us see that it is profoundly solid and infinitely subtle. At the same time these valedictory paintings are so formally excellent they have been seen as spiritual precursors of such a modern artist as Mark Rothko.

Philosophically they look like a testament of sublime faith from an artist who had realized there is nothing out there but magnificent vastness.

“Do you suppose there might be a trend back to this kind of thing?” one visitor asked hopefully of no one in particular.

Kensett’s painting makes us feel better about more than having to wait for a vacation. It makes us feel good about crisp, frank Yankee values that believe the plain truth is always enough. It makes us feel better about the prospects of a Post-Modern contemporary art world that is presently as bogged down as a clogged drain.

Artists, feeling they have to be scruffy and intransigent, battle the public over official commissions. The shade of Kensett seems to say, “Wait a minute fellows, you do not have to be a permanent juvenile delinquent to make good art. It is possible to achieve excellence and get on with people.”

When you know what to make. At the moment we are drowning in a heaving sea of paint that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The smiling shade of J.F.K. says: “Ask not what art can do for you, but what you can do for art. Go out and try to paint some good pictures. Works out pretty well.”