ory
of mere sketches and studies even his slighter and more rapid
productions. And our landscape-painters of to-day are equally painters
of pictures. Some of them might be thought, by a modern taste, too
conventionally painters of pictures--too much occupied with composition
and tone and other pictorial qualities at the expense of freshness of
observation--while our briskest and most original observers have, many
of them, a power of design and a manner of casting even their freshest
observations into pictorial form that is as admirable as it is
remarkable.

No one could enter one of our exhibitions without feeling the definitely
pictorial quality of American landscape-painting, but these exhibitions
do less justice to the achievement of our figure-painters. The principal
reason for this is that many of our most serious figure-painters have
been so much occupied with mural decoration that their work seldom
appears in the exhibitions at all, while the work that they have done is
so scattered over our vast country that we rather forget its existence
and, assuredly, have little realization of its amount. It is one of the
defects of our exhibition system that work of this kind, while it is, of
course, on permanent exhibition in the place for which it is painted, is
hardly ever "exhibited," in the ordinary sense, in the centres where it
is produced. The regular visitor to the Paris salons might know almost
all that has been done in France in the way of mural painting. The
public of our American exhibitions knows only vaguely and by hearsay
what our mural painters have done and are doing. It is true that such
work is infinitely better seen in place, but it is a pity it cannot be
seen, even imperfectly, by the people who attend our exhibitions--people
who can rarely have the necessary knowledge to read such collections of
sketches, studies, and photographs as are shown at the exhibitions of
the Architectural League, where, alone, our mural painters can show
anything. If it were seen it would surely alter the estimation in which
American figure-painting is held. Such work as was done by the late John
La Farge, such work as is being done by Blashfield and Mowbray and
Simmons and a dozen others, if not, in the most limited sense of the
word, pictorial, is even further removed from the mere sketch or
study--the mere bit of good painting--than is the finest easel picture.

But it is not only in mural decoration that serious figure-