Tryon had hardly ventured beyond the outskirts of his birthplace when he went to France in 1876 to pursue an education in art. In Paris he received formal training under the supervision of Jacquesson de la Chevreuse (1839–1903), a former pupil of J.-A.-D. Ingres (1780–1867), but he soon tired of the academic discipline and longed for escape to the countryside. For inspiration he turned to the art of the Barbizon School, which he considered "unquestionably the most important epoch in the history of landscape-painting which the world has yet known."² The only exponent of the first-generation Barbizon painters still alive in 1876 was Charles-François Daubigny, with whom Tryon studied briefly, painting the countryside near Auvers (Wg. 23).

On his return to the United States in 1881, Tryon settled in New York, intending to practice his art and teach the lessons he had learned abroad. He became acquainted with several other artists recently returned from Europe. Many were members of the Society of American Artists, founded in 1877 as an alternative to the National Academy of Design, the official New York exhibition venue. Tryon himself became a member in 1882, but even with sympathetic friends and professional associations in the city, he was eager to find a country home and a landscape to portray. From the Barbizon painters he had acquired the conviction that any scene’s natural beauty would be disclosed only to the constant observer. "The trouble with most artists," Tryon reflected, "is that they do not live long enough with any location to become a part and parcel of it—A painter ought to be like an enraptured swain—who sees more in his girl than is visible to any one else."³

Tryon finally found a landscape to love all his life at South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, a fishing village near New Bedford. He and his wife, Alice, built a cottage on the harbor where they lived six months of every year until 1925. Arriving each spring in time to glimpse the structure of the trees through the budding branches, Tryon always delayed his departure in the autumn until the leaves had fallen, wanting to observe once again the "wonderful anatomy of the trees."⁴ Like James McNeill Whistler (cat. 28), whose works he admired, Tryon found inspiration for many paintings in the early hours of the day or evening, when the contours and colors of the landscape were subdued by silvery shadows.

The First Leaves was conceived one morning in early May 1889, when Tryon was taking his customary walk through the fields and suddenly seized an artistic impression of something he had seen a hundred times before: a verdant meadow bordered by a line of silver birches, their upper branches silhouetted against an opalescent sky.⁵ The very ordinariness of the scene may account for its charm in Tryon’s eyes, for as his student and biographer Henry C. White remarked, Tryon assiduously avoided "the obvious subject."⁶ Indeed, he adopted the aestheticist attitude propagated by Whistler and illustrated in his "nocturnes"—the belief that subjects for landscape paintings were not confined to the conventionally picturesque and that the instincts and training of the true artist permitted him to find beauty where others might fail and to truly represent it. Whistler’s ambition, however, was to display his sense of superiority to nature, while Tryon’s was to reveal the wonder of the world as he found it.

According to Tryon’s own account, The First Leaves was executed "entirely from memory."⁷ An avid sailor and fisherman who spent most of the summer on the water, Tryon had learned to memorize the features of the landscape to paint later, in the studio. Unlike the Barbizon artists and French Impressionists, who worked en plein air, Tryon preferred to paint indoors. The practice may have arisen from necessity, since until 1894 he had no studio in South Dartmouth, and the one he built then was used primarily for storing sailing gear and fishing tackle. Moreover, Tryon hated to miss even an hour of the outdoor season. It suited him best to carry out his work in New York during the dreary winter months, relying on his fading recollections to distill nature into art. His paintings "came direct from the fountain head of suggestion, Nature," he once assured a collector, adding that all of them passed through the alembic of his mind "before they were ‘writ on canvas.’⁸

Tryon’s mature paintings were executed over many months, sometimes even years, in a protracted process of modulating the color scheme and composition with transparent veils of pigment, as in Sunrise: April (Wg. 24). These works make wistfulness apparent: had he never lived in the city, Tryon remarked, he would not have felt the need to create an "ideal country."⁹ The First Leaves, however, was painted rapidly and completed in two days,¹⁰ which accounts for its comparative naturalism and uncomplicated surface. If the picture was in fact produced early in May 1889, as Tryon recollected, the paint must have been barely dry when he submitted it to the Society of American Artists for that year’s exhibition, which opened May 13. Tryon’s determination to have The First Leaves immediately displayed in public suggests that he recognized it as a milestone in his career. He fleetingly considered naming it "The Resurrection," presumably to express his wonder at the annual renewal of the landscape, but perhaps also to imply that his own art had been reborn. In the end he decided that this was too dramatic for his understated picture. The more mundane title he chose captures the simplicity of the theme while fixing the painting’s primacy in the long series of landscapes to follow.¹¹

The First Leaves was awarded the third annual Webb Prize in the eleventh exhibition of the Society of American Artists in 1889 for the most promising landscape by an American artist under forty, previous winners having been J. Francis Murphy (1853–1921) and John Twachtman (1853–1902). Tryon felt especially proud to receive the Webb Prize as it came from the group of painters, he said, that he most respected.¹² The First Leaves also appears to have attracted the attention of the Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), for it was while the painting was on exhibition that Freer called at Tryon’s studio and purchased The Rising Moon: Autumn (Wg. 25) straight off the easel. That acquisition signaled the start of a dedicated friendship. Over the next thirty years Freer acquired seventy-two of Tryon’s paintings and pastels, creating the largest single collection of his works. Freer also attempted to ensure Tryon’s immortality by consecrating to his works alone an exhibition gallery in the museum he pledged to build and endow for the nation, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.

After its debut in New York, The First Leaves was bought by L. Clark Seelye for Smith College. Tryon had taught at Smith since 1886, visiting once a month during the winters to critique student work (he retired in 1924), and he was also assisting Seelye in selecting works of contemporary American art for the college. The First Leaves, lately lauded by the New York art world, made a distinguished addition to the collection.  It was shown at the Inter-State Industrial Exposition in Chicago, where to Tryon’s delighted surprise it proved a popular picture. "Painting as I do without reference to public exhibition I expect little in this line," he wrote to Freer, "but am always pleased that a few appreciate it."¹³

1. Hartmann 1902, vol. 1, p. 128
2. Dwight W. Tryon, "Charles-François Daubigny," in Van Dyke 1896, p. 157
3. Tryon to Beulah Strong, associate professor of art, Smith College, July 15, 1923, Alfred Vance Churchill Papers, Smith College Archives.
4. Tryon to Charles Lang Freer, Apr. 18, 1897, Charles Lang
   Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of
   Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Tryon to Beulah Strong, Sept. 29, 1910, Dwight William Tryon Papers, Smith College Archives (typescript copy).
5. Tryon to Beulah Strong, Apr. 12, 1912, Churchill Papers, Smith College Archives
6. White 1930, p. 150.
7. Tryon to Strong, Apr. 12, 1912 (see note 6 above).
8. Tryon to G. A. Williams, Apr. 11, 1916, Nelson C. White Papers, AAA
9. Tryon to G. A. Williams,
   Nov. 12, 1916, Nelson C. White Papers, AAA.
10. Tryon to Strong, Apr. 12, 1912 (see note 6 above).
11. Tryon to Alfred Vance Churchill, May 8, 1924, Churchill Papers, Smith College Archives; White 1930, p. 150.
12. Tryon to Charles Lang Freer, May 20, 1889, Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art.
13. Tryon to Charles Lang Freer, Sept. 18, 1889, Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art.