In his lifetime, John Francis Murphy (1853-1921) was known as “the American Corot.” He was renowned for his small, intimate views of nature, especially barren fields and farms, bare trees, and lonely marshland. More than a century later, the power of Murphy’s landscapes has not waned. One contemporary critic wrote, “It was Murphy’s unique accomplishment to achieve an absolute realism without a loss of that mystic, indefinable quality which transfigures realism.”
John Francis Murphy was born at Oswego, NY in 1853 but his family moved to Chicago in 1868 where he worked painting theater sets. Murphy was basically a self-taught artist; his only formal training was a few weeks of instruction at the Chicago Academy of Design.
In 1875, Murphy moved from Chicago to New York, eventually rooming with the painters Dennis Bunker and Bruce Crane above a bakery shop. Murphy’s early work was typical of the Hudson River school but he soon fell under the sway of the loose brushwork and moody style of French Barbizon painting. Moving away from realistic depictions of nature, Murphy attempted to capture the lyrical side of the landscape. His paintings from the 1880s display warm colors, softly defined shapes and strong contrasts of light and dark areas. In 1886, he made a 6-month trip to France where he deepened his knowledge of Barbizon artists and drifted further from realism. He later told an admirer of one of his paintings that it was “a ‘composition’ only, as are all my pictures.”
When he returned to the United States in 1887, Murphy built a studio in the southern Catskills at Arkville, New York. He spent his summers and autumns in the mountains and, in the winter, returned to a studio in the Chelsea area of New York City. In Arkville, Murphy founded the Pakatakan Artist Colony, which operated through the 1960s. During his lifetime, landscape artists Alexander Helwig Wyant, George Smillie, Parker Mann, and Edward Lloyd Field all worked there.
Beginning in the 1890s, Murphy followed George Inness’s lead in moving from Barbizon style to Tonalism, a movement based on free brushwork, vague, indistinct forms, and an emphasis on an intermediary season (such as late autumn) and time of the day (such as dusk). Murphy created evocative pictures of subdued meadows and still ponds. He often applied several layers of translucent glaze to create an atmospheric effect. Murphy’s serene Tonalist landscapes from this period, often painted in thin browns and grays, evoke a peaceful yet uncertain mood.
Although a gifted watercolorist, Murphy mostly abandoned the medium after 1890. Late in his career, he lightened his palette under the influence of Impressionism, but he continued to emphasize the intimate and spiritual visions of Tonalism. He died of pneumonia in New York City in 1921 and was buried in his beloved Arkville.
Murphy’s range of subject was not very wide, but he was a master at recording his own emotional responses to the landscape through an expressive use of color, surface texture, and tone. He always preferred to depict the quiet aspects of unpretentious places at tranquil moments of the day. In the twenty-first century, Murphy’s Tonalist paintings continue to capture the expressive power and lyric poetry of the landscape.