immediately began to give out to many pupils.
Gradually the influence of the young men from Munich and Paris spread.
The Art Students' League, founded in 1875, was incorporated in 1878,
and the Society of American Artists was established in the same year.
Societies and painters began to spring up all over the country, and as
a result there is in the United States to-day an artist body
technically as well trained and in spirit as progressive as in almost
any country of Europe. The late influence shown in painting has been
largely a French influence, and the American artists have been accused
from time to time of echoing French methods. The accusation is true in
part. Paris is the centre of all art-teaching to-day, and the
Americans, in common with the European nations, accept French methods,
not because they are French, but because they are the best extant. In
subjects and motives, however, the American school is as original as
any school can be in this cosmopolitan age.

PORTRAIT, FIGURE, AND GENRE PAINTERS (1878-1894): It must not be
inferred that the painters now prominent in American art are all young
men schooled since 1876. On the contrary, some of the best of them are
men past middle life who began painting long before 1876, and have by
dint of observation and prolonged study continued with the modern
spirit. For example, Winslow Homer (1836-) is one of the strongest and
most original of all the American artists, a man who never had the
advantage of the highest technical training, yet possesses a feeling
for color, a dash and verve in execution, an originality in subject,
and an individuality of conception that are unsurpassed. Eastman
Johnson (1824-) is one of the older portrait and figure-painters who
stands among the younger generations without jostling, because he has
in measure kept himself informed with modern thought and method. He is
a good, conservative painter, possessed of taste, judgment, and
technical ability. Elihu Vedder (1836-) is more of a draughtsman than
a brushman. His color-sense is not acute nor his handling free, but he
has an imagination which, if somewhat more literary than pictorial, is
nevertheless very effective. John La Farge (1835-) and Albert Ryder
(1847-) are both colorists, and La Farge in artistic feeling is a man
of much power. Almost all of his pictures have fine decorative quality
in line and color and are thoroughly pictorial.

[Illustration: FIG. 107.--WINSLOW HOMER. UNDERT