In pursuit of a higher truth: the landscape paintings of Charles Morris Young

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And yet, Young was too ambitious and too versatile to be pigeonholed. Just as he was receiving awards and praise for his snow scenes, he was seeking fresh material. He visited Florence Griswold's boardinghouse in Old Lyme, Connecticut (where, in 1907, he was among the few artists asked to contribute a painted panel to the famous dining room), and the artists' colony at Cos Cob. A few years later he was in Falls Village, Connecticut, where he came across Willard Metcalf (1858-1925) and Robert Reid (1862-1929). (22) After An April Shower (Pl. VII) may be a result of this trip. The serene composition--a gently sloping valley with trees touched by the pale greens, golds, and russets of emerging vegetation--is brought to life by the geometric patterns created by the stone walls. Metcalf had mastered this theme prior to 1910, and Young may have recalled any number of Metcalf's spring paintings when he chose this particular motif. (23)

With The Red Mill (Pl. IV) of 1910, Young embraced an entirely different set of challenges. From a high vantage point in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, he looked down onto a picturesque group of farm and mill buildings flanking a bridge over a stream. This dynamic theme is enhanced by receding and intersecting diagonals and a rich color scheme evoking a brisk autumn day in the Connecticut hills. A New York Times critic called it "A quiet and delightful version of deep country peace." (24)

On a return trip to Old Lyme in 1911 Young painted The River Dock (Pl. V). Unlike Metcalf, who had painted a version of this scene in 1905, Young overlooked the busy site to capture the mise-en-scene. (25) He lightly sketched in details, sustaining a sense of vigorous spontaneity entirely different from the muted effect sought by Metcalf.

Young had a series of solo exhibitions at prominent museums between 1906 and 1947. An exhibition at the Copley Gallery in Boston in the fall of 1911 was followed that December by a major retrospective of sixty-three canvases held at the Pennsylvania Academy. In the catalogue essay, Helen W. Henderson observed,

Of that variety of landscape painter known to the French as "paysage
intime," we have no more apt exponent than Charles Morris Young. His
work has essentially that touch which brings the beholder at once under
the atmospheric spell of its locality. (26)

The River Dock was one of two images illustrated in a prominent review of the retrospective in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The author, quite probably Henderson, expanded on themes introduced in the catalogue, stating:

The painter never searches for a bizarre effect of light nor an
eccentric arrangement, and his work, which above all is personal, is
very little mannered. He gives again and in a way very much his own all
the deep feeling with which the varying moods of nature have inspired
and touched him. (27)

The reviewer went on to claim that of the generation of artists trained at the academy in the early 1890s, "Young was among the first, if not the first, to adopt landscape painting, and especially snow painting as a metier."