Abroad strokes

PMA puts travel works on display

By Jenna Russell

META-PAINTING: Homer’s travels take him to the White Mountains — a popular destination.

It’s hard not to drool over Richard Ormond’s biographical sketch of John Singer Sargent, written for the show that came to Boston in 1999. “His usual practice was to spend August in the Alps, September in Venice,” Ormond wrote, “and then to wander further afield in the late autumn.” A nice life, even without embarrassing artistic talent. A few of Sargent’s watercolor sketches are included in “American Artists Afield,” at the Portland Museum of Art through September 16, and they’re worth the walk to the third floor all by themselves.

The PMA show explores the role of travel in American art at the turn of the last century. It’s a fitting theme for summer, when a fair share of visitors to the museum are themselves travelers from distant regions. The intended response is not envy of the artists’ itineraries, of course, but revelation in their discoveries, which range from desert to mountain to palace. There are a fair number of oil paintings, but more watercolors and portable pastel and pencil sketches. These are immediate reactions, notes taken to fix a memory, and their energy derives from the coincidence of train and satchel, the flux of travel.

Sargent’s parents “belonged to that American expatriate generation obsessed with Europe and things European,” according to Ormond, and for his first 18 years, the family spent winters in Nice, Rome, or Florence, and summers in Switzerland, France, or Germany. He developed his astonishing facility for watercolors early on, for the medium traveled easily. In this way he painted olive trees in Corfu, soldiers in Spain, Florida alligators, and war scenes in France. The Portland show has an impressionistic sketch of mules in Spain that’s all hovering atmosphere, tea-colored heat, and shimmer, from 1902-1903, and a distorted, watery 1891 oil of a cemetery in Constantinople in drained sunset colors.

“The Deck” is hectic, almost abstract, a bright and busy study of moving masts and sails on the Italian waterfront, while “Venice, Side Canal” marks the quieter exchange of worn stone walls and oscillating water. Both are fresh and watercolor-spontaneous. Many artists have been inspired by Venice (others shown here include exuberant Maurice Prendergast and the more subdued Albert Flanagan); none have described its surreal seduction any better than Sargent.

Sargent made a good living from his portraits, and enjoyed a degree of freedom not afforded most artists. But painters and writers with more limited incomes have always managed to travel, driven by the desire for new inspiration, the hunger for unfamiliar vistas. There is a different way of looking at a world not seen before, an attentiveness to detail and a rush to take it all in.

Sometimes the results are supercharged with appreciation, as in Samuel Colman’s undated “Lake Near Banff,” where the gouache and pastel rock glows in sun-kissed pink and purple. Elsewhere, when the Portland artist draws the Coliseum in Rome, its surface is also lush and luminous, autumn gold against the mellow blue of winter sky. There’s a sense of expectation to the light, as if the structure were not a ruin but a concert hall on opening night. The mood is optimistic, like that of the traveler, rewarded by surprises at every turn.

The tourist doesn’t understand everything she passes; there is a strangeness to much of what is encountered that contributes to an alertness. Jane Peterson’s “The Fete” (1907) can be seen as a landscape of disorientation: overwhelmed by dense trees all around, two figures move up a dark road past scattered orange lights toward a black and gray-green house. The dark gouache-and-watercolor scene is mesmerizing and ominous; the reason for the night’s gathering is unknown, but the figures’ movement toward it feels inevitable.

Not much is provided in the way of artists’ biography, though many of the names in the show are unfamiliar, and their works provoke curiosity. There’s a thrill in finding two watercolor and graphite drawings done by Wanda Norstrom in Africa in 1937. “Man and Cattle” has a bold, blocky woodcut style that reflects the strength and intensity of the African experience. “African Women Washing” shows a hub of activity beside a river, with the busy, elongated figures in ink and the background in pale paint. The sharp vitality of the sketches reminds us how a change of scenery jolts the blood.

A long, distinguished line of painters has sought that blood jolt in Maine, and no Portland travel show would be complete without a few homegrown examples. They include a stark and snowy Edward Hopper watercolor of Pemaquid Light and two Robert Henri oil studies of waves and rocks, done, he wrote, in “30 minutes to two hours” and “never touched afterwards.” There’s a small oil panel by Winslow Homer, of artists sketching in the White Mountains, and a box of Homer’s watercolor paints is also displayed. It’s crusty and stained, and it seems amazing he could have conjured any beauty from the dried, blackened chunks in the cramped metal container. A number of artists’ sketchbooks are also here in glass cases. They enhance our practical understanding of the way art was made on the go.

Also in the show, Marsden Hartley’s untitled painting of a mountain in the south of France is a prismatic, Cezanne-like pink and purple mass, notable not for any revolutionary approach but for looking much like his paintings of Katahdin. The point of travel is not to spice up the sketchbook with souvenir canals or camels, but to revel in the unfamiliar and its best lesson — that new experience is always possible, even in a well-known place. The same Maine mountain might be rediscovered every day.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.