In pursuit of a higher truth: the landscape paintings of Charles Morris Young.(Critical Essay)(Biography)

In the first decades of the twentieth century Charles Morris Young was considered by many to be a leading member of the Pennsylvania school of landscape painting. (1) By the end of the century, his reputation had all but vanished, owing in part to his not having lived in Bucks County, the locus and wellspring of Pennsylvania impressionism, and in part to the breadth of his subjects, which ultimately made it difficult if not impossible to categorize him as a member of any regional or stylistic school.

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Young was born on September 23, 1869, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Christopher and Anna Swisher Young. His father had left the United States Department of the Treasury in Washington, D. C., in the early 1860s for a farm near the Cemetery Ridge battlefield, where he struggled to provide for his family. (2) His four children shared the responsibilities of running the farm. Since Christopher Young also taught at a local school, Charles Morris Young's labors were mitigated by an intellectual atmosphere further enriched by his father's interest in art history. A book on the English painter John Constable (1776-1837) in his father's library sparked Young's interest in sketching the farms and countryside around Gettysburg.

In later life Young recalled the folklore and the tourist industry that arose in the area in the wake of the Civil War. As a youth he carved battle scenes on walking sticks for the tourist trade and sold watercolors and drawings of strategic sites such as the headquarters of General George Gordon Meade (1815-1872) through the gallery of a local photographer. (3)

The dual influences of farm life and the Civil War continued to affect Young. But it was his abiding love for the Gettysburg countryside and his urge to capture the fleeting effects of weather, light, and season that shaped him as an artist. Unable to afford college, Young rented a studio in Gettysburg in 1889, where he accepted students, and in his spare time continued to train himself through books and by visiting nearby museums, notably the William Walters collection (the beginnings of what is now the Walters Art Museum) in Baltimore. Income from the sale of Young's Civil War souvenirs and from his teaching proved sufficient to allow him to enroll in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia by 1891. (4)

At the academy Young followed his contemporaries Edward Willis Redfield (1869-1965) and Walter Elmer Schofield (1867-1944), who, along with Daniel Garber (1880-1958), are today recognized as among the most important landscape painters to rise from the school's ranks at this time. Young enrolled in day and night classes, receiving a conventional grounding in drawing from plaster casts and in life drawing. He studied under two influential teachers: Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912), whom Young greatly admired, and Robert William Vonnoh (1858-1933), whose academic impressionism had a transforming effect on many students at the academy, including Young. (5)