luminosity of color and have largely succeeded. The pictures of Mr.
Tarbell are far more colored than those of the European painter whose
work is, in some ways, most analogous to his, M. Joseph Bail. Mr.
Hassam's color is always sparkling and brilliant, Mr. Dewing's delicate
and charming, Mr. Weir's subtle and harmonious and sometimes very full.
Even Mr. Brush's linear arrangements are clothed in sombre but often
richly harmonious tones, and the decorative use of powerful color is the
main reliance of such painters as Hugo Ballin. But the note of color
runs through the school and one hardly needs to name individual men.
Whether our landscapists glaze and scumble with the tonalists, or use
some modification of the impressionist hatching, it is for the sake of
color; and even our most forthright and dashing wielders of the big
brush often achieve a surprising power of resonant coloring.

Power, fulness, and beauty of coloring are hardly modern qualities. Much
as impressionism has been praised for restoring color to a colorless
art, its result has been, too often, to substitute whitishness for
blackishness. Color has characterized no modern painting since that of
Delacroix and Millet as it characterizes much of the best American
painting. The love for and the success in color of our school is, after
all, a part of its conservatism.

It may seem an odd way of praising a modern school to call it the least
modern of any. It _would_ be an odd way of praising that school if its
lack of modernness were a mere matter of lagging behind or of standing
still and marking time. But if the "march of progress" has been
down-hill--if the path that is trod leads into a swamp or over a
precipice--then there may be most hopefulness for those who can 'bout
face and march the other way. I have, elsewhere in this volume, given at
some length some of my reasons for thinking that modern art has been
following a false route and is in danger of perishing in the bog or
falling over the cliff. If it is so we may congratulate ourselves that
those of our painters who are still following the rest of the world have
not so nearly reached the end of the road, and that those who are more
independent have discovered in time what that end is and have turned
back.

It is because it is least that of to-day that I believe our art may be
that of to-morrow--it is because it is, of all art now going, that which
has most connection with the past that I hope the a