convey. But the question occurs: Have we an American school in
a more specific sense than this? Have we a body of painters with certain
traits in common and certain differences from the painters of other
countries? Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity and
sufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name of
American school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a French
school and an English school?

Under the conditions of to-day there are no longer anywhere such
distinctive local schools as existed in the Renaissance. In Italy, in
those days, there were not only such great schools as the Venetian, the
Florentine, and the Umbrian, differing widely in their point of view,
their manner of seeing, and their technical traditions--each little town
had a school with something characteristic that separated its painters
from those of other schools in the surrounding towns. To-day every one
knows and is influenced by the work of every one else, and it is only
broad national characteristics that still subsist. Modern pictures are
singularly alike, but, on the whole, it is still possible to tell an
English picture from a French one, and a German or Italian picture from
either. We may still speak of a Dutch school or a Spanish school with
some reasonableness. Is it similarly and equally reasonable to speak of
an American school? Does a room full of American pictures have a
different look from a room full of pictures by artists of any other
nationality? Does one feel that the pictures in such a room have a
something in common that makes them kin and a something different that
distinguishes them from the pictures of all other countries? I think the
answer must be in the affirmative.

We have already passed the stage of mere apprenticeship, and it can no
longer be said that our American painters are mere reflections of their
European masters. Twenty or even ten years ago there may have been some
truth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had no
foreign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of a
particular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it would
be difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to a
catalogue. They have, through long work in America and under American
conditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverable
resemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specific
examples, w