California Tonalism

California Tonalism was art movement that existed in California from circa 1890 to 1920. Tonalist are usually intimate works, painted with a limited palette. Tonalist paintings are softly expressive, suggestive rather than detailed, often depicting the landscape at twilight or evening, when there is an absence of contrast. Tonalist paintings could also be figurative, but in them, the figure was usually out of doors or in an interior in a low-key setting with little detail.

Tonalism had its origins in the works of the French Barbizon school and in the works of American painters who were influenced by them. California Tonalism was born when the emphasis in California landscape painting passed from the grand landscapes of works like those of Thomas Hill and William Keith's early career, to more intimate views of a domesticated landscape. At the same time, the parallel Pictorialist Photography movement was born with gauzy landscapes and figurative photographs that bore a strong resemblance to Tonalist Paintings.

In the years after the American Civil War, hundreds of American artists went to Europe to study. During this era, the 1870s and 1880s, the French Barbizon school was at the height of its popularity in France and French Impressionism was just beginning to emerge. In the annual Salons, the American painters were exposed to the soft, simple, muted Barbizon landscapes of forests and ponds painted by artists like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Rosseau and Diaz de la Pena. They also saw the roughly painted peasant scenes by Jean-François Millet, who lived in the tiny village of Barbizon, south of Paris. Some of the Americans became enthusiastic acolytes of the French movement and actually moved to the Village of Barbizon. The Bostonian William Morris Hunt (1824–1879) studied under Millet for several years after the conclusion of his Parisian studies. Hunt was responsible for popularizing the works of the French painters with American patrons of the Gilded Age and by the 1880s, their works were highly sought after and extremely valuable, from New York and Boston to San Francisco. Hunt's student John La Farge (1835–1910) also carried the Barbizon torch and developed his own, expressive versions of the French works. Other painters who were similarly influenced were Alexander Wyant (1836–1892), Henry Ward Ranger (1858–1916), Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925) and Charles Warren Eaton (1857–1937). The established landscape painter George Inness, who began his career when the Hudson River School was at its zenith, began to simplify his works and adopt what is now known as the Tonalist style, but then it could be referred to as Quietism. As American artists who had traveled or studied abroad brought the Barbizon style back with them, even homegrown talents were influenced. By the 1890s, dozens of Eastern American painters, in the American Barbizon school, were painting muted, intimate landscapes with a narrow range of colors and some of them were even exhibiting works of French peasants.

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