view toward art or toward nature.
They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the
inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in the way of
interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to
keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more
practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself.
Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with
market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to
the last in expressing them.

You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when,
as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they
did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which
"Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the
Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in
their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know
the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a
conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once;
and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each
picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be
pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of
Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and
poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great
difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his
first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no
one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a
picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity,
as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in
Fuller.

They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical
force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we
shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the
sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort
will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who
profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about
sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that.
It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from
choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and
Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which
places them out of association