Tonalism

Tonalism was not confined to oil painting. As seen in this exhibition, artists also worked in pastels, watercolors, printmaking, and photography, and the style reached across all media. The soft quality of pastels was conducive to subtle Tonalist effects in the work of Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925) or Walter Launt Palmer, for example. Charles Warren Eaton (1857–1937) explored the delicate washes of watercolor. The etchings of Margery Ryerson (1886–1989) relate to those of Whistler in the suggestive play between dark ink and light paper. Bolton Brown, who became known as the father of American lithography for his experiments in that medium, produced a body of work that includes evocative landscapes of subdued tonal ranges. Likewise, the soft-focus approach in photography, called Pictorialism, explored similar principles, as seen in moody images by Horatio Hendrickson (c.1866–1941) or George Seeley (1880–1955), among others.