ho would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or the
decorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either had
been a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes or
delicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name of
Gerome? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters we
have who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work which
still marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishable
to-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified by
John Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolus
simply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painters
who have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified its
technic to suit their own purposes and are at least as different from the
Impressionists of France as are the Impressionists of Scandinavia. We have
painters who are undeniably influenced by Whistler, but so have other
countries--the school of Whistler is international--and, after all, Whistler
was an American. In short, the resemblances between American painting and
the painting of other countries are to-day no greater than the resemblances
between the painting of any two of those countries. And I think the
differences between American painting and that of other countries are quite
as great as, if not greater than, the differences between the paintings of
any two of those countries.

Another accusation that used to be heard against our painters has been
out-lived. We used to be told, with some truth, that we had learned to
paint but had nothing to say with our painting, that we produced
admirable studies but no pictures. The accusation never was true of our
landscape-painting. Whatever may be the final estimation of the works of
Inness and Wyant, there can be no doubt that they produced
pictures--things conceived and worked out to give one definite and
complete impression; things in which what was presented and what was
eliminated were equally determined by a definite purpose; things in
which accident and the immediate dominance of nature had little or no
part. As for Winslow Homer, whether in landscape or figure painting, his
work was unfailingly pictorial, whatever else it might be. He was a
great and original designer, and every canvas of his was completely and
definitely composed--a quality which at once removes from the categ