An indication of the close personal relationship between Dow and Kenyon is a series of paintings by Kenyon that can speculatively be assigned to the 1890s. They depict Ipswich, the Ipswich River, and the nearby landscape. These are among the largest works Kenyon painted. Stylistically they are clearly distinct from anything else he painted and form the only clear artistic interconnection between the two artists.
In the 1890s Dow was deeply interested in Japanese prints and paintings and, while Kenyon did not study it as did Dow, he was touched by it. What Kenyon adopted was a muted tonal unity, a planar construction, and a looseness of brushwork that in places is akin to Japanese brush drawing.
HR Kenyon – all rights reserved
Kenyon’s View of Ipswich is an example of this style. It depicts the town nestled on the opposite bank from a point downriver. Although blue-gray dominates, and a soft gray is infused into everything, the painting is rich with subtle coloristic complexities. The range of greens from the foliage of the tree in the left foreground through the band of buildings to the lone moored boat at the right is richly varied. Dominating the town is the purple steeple of the church that once stood on a hill at the center of town. Touches of this purple tint are to be found here and there in the band that is the town but also in a softened tone in the sky and in the reflections. The mass of ochre grasses in the lower foreground become progressively individualized as they reach out into the river and in their fresh simplicity reveal his awareness of Japanese painting.
Kenyon’s sureness of composition, structural unity, painterly freshness, and tonal harmony is quietly modern. Thus, like so many of his generation, Kenyon sought to be modern and developed a unique style.
The striking difference in these paintings from his other smaller plein-air studies is that these are, for all their freshness and topographic faithfulness, studio productions in which he sought an aesthetic unity less dependent upon direct observation. Although clearly successful, these paintings did not satisfy Kenyon’s need for direct involvement with the motif, and he let it die.
It was a sophisticated, successful manner, with just the right degree of artifice, that well might have made Kenyon well known had he pursued it. Instead, he chose to understand what was before him and built on his own sensitivity. He delighted in the intimate scale of the sketch, which allowed him to paint in a curiously un-selfconscious and direct way.
Kenyon’s desire for direct contact drew him to the Ipswich area’s fascinating expansive salt marshes veined with black tidal streams. In the nineteenth century these flats were used for the cultivation of marsh hay, which was harvested and collected in stacks that rose like great domes from an otherwise uninterrupted horizontal world.
HR Kenyon – all rights reserved
Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) had painted such haystacks some years earlier with a romantic eye. Kenyon’s exhibits nothing of the crepuscular mood of Heade’s paintings. Ochre is the basic color for the expanse of grasses, but as the stream cuts its serpentine path through the flats that here and there reflect the blue of the sky, it creates areas that Kenyon defines by subtle additions of other colors to the basic ochre. The eye is pulled back and forth across the expanse by both linear movements and color modulations. It all ultimately serves to focus the eye upon the emphatic point of the haystack sitting on its timber pallet. Even the distant horizon with its strip of bright sandy beach points to it while the cotton ball-like clouds above echo its lone.