n remaining in Schenectady, moved to New York, and I, finally
liberated for the study of art, gave myself seriously to that end.

CHAPTER V

ART STUDY IN AMERICA

During the time of my preparation for entry to college, a wandering
artist had happened to find his way to Schenectady, one of the
restless victims of his temperament, to whose unrest fate had given
other motives for change than his occupation. He was an Englishman by
the name of John Wilson, a pupil of the brothers Alfred and Edward
Chalons, fashionable London miniature painters of the early part of
the century. In years long gone by he had established himself at
St. Petersburg as a portrait painter, but, losing his wife and two
children by a flood of the Neva, which occurred during his momentary
absence in England, he abandoned Russia and went to one of the Western
States of America and gave himself up to agriculture. Here fate found
him again, and, after losing another wife and other children, he
became a wanderer, interested in everything new and strange. He had
been taken by Pitman's then new phonography, and his chief occupation
at that time was teaching it wherever at any school he could form a
class. He came to Union College, to this end, and had been recommended
to my mother for board and lodging, and she gladly availed herself of
the opportunity to get for me lessons in drawing in return for his
board. He was a constitutional reformer, a radical as radicalism was
then possible, had become an atheist with Robert Dale Owen, indignant
at the treatment accorded him by destiny, and was _au fond_ an honest
and philanthropic man. He taught me the simplest rudiments of portrait
and landscape in water-color, and of perspective, of which he was
master, and, as he failed to find a field for his phonographic
mission, I got up a small class in drawing for him, and after our
dozen lessons he went his way to new regions and I never heard from
him again. What he taught me I soon lost, except the perspective.

A little later, and while at work in my father's shop, there came in
for a piece of ironwork our local artist, a man of curious artistic
faculties, a shoemaker by trade, who had taught himself painting and
had made himself a certain position as the portrait painter of the
region. He desired to make for himself a lay-figure, and for the
articulations had conceived a new form of universal joint, which he
desired my father to put into shape. My father