ants and its appeal to personal vanity.
Who does not like to see his own face
suddenly come to life on canvas, even if
he has to pay for it? Politics was un-
friendly to public art and there were few
patrons who ordered anything but glori-
fied likenesses of their wives and daugh-
ters.

It was not until after the War of 1812,
when the American Navy was strong
enough to menace British shipping, that
a sense of separate nationality gained
strength in the States. A native land-
scape school, led by Thomas Doughty
and Thomas Cole, found in the pic-
turesque valleys of the Catskills and
Adirondacks, and along the rocky shores
of the Hudson, subjects for their paint-
ings. Even when they had been abroad
to study and had acquired the European
vernacular, something American re-
mained in their work. This was the
earliest national expression in art.

In the nineteenth century inventive-
ness was more important than creative-
ness. It is not strange, then, that Fulton

CHARLES DE ST. MEMIN The New York Historical Society
AN OSAGE WARRIOR

and Morse, who were trained in West's
studio, should have achieved fame as
the inventors of the steamboat and the
telegraph rather than as painters. Even
in the more enlightened eighteenth cen-
tury creativeness was far more satisfac-
torily expressed and the artist's stomach
better filled in the practice of the crafts,
the making of silver and pewter, the
manufacture of glass and the building
arts, than in the fine arts.

American architecture passed through
the fashionable European phases of Pal-
ladian classicism, inspired by Wren and
Chambers and the Brothers Adam in
England. Then came the Roman and
Greek revivals, disseminated by Thomas
Jefferson, who found time from his du-
ties as statesman to be a gentleman archi-
tect. Then the fantastic Gothic revival.
All were importations. All derived from
European models.

In the years preceding the Civil War
young American artists flocked to Euro-
pean studios for their training and in-
spiration, an exodus that has ceased only
in recent years, when we are coming to a
truer consciousness of an American ex-
pression in the arts; when, perhaps for
the first time in our history, we have be-
come a race apart. To Italy and France,
to Diisseldorf and Munich they went.

The young sculptors, Greenough and
Powers, set up shop in Florence and sent
home heroic marbles in the pseudo-
classic tradition of Canova. Some expa-
triated themselves altogether, as Whistler
did. Others, denying the foreign endorse-
ment, stayed at home with Eakins and
Homer and laid the way for a truly
American art.

Not that art is essentially nationalistic:
it is international and beyond all mili-
tary boundaries and custom's barriers.
But each nation should put its individual
stamp on a world-movement, as Italy,
England, and Russia converted the clas-
sicism of the eighteenth century, which
emanated from the court of France, to
their own uses. Today the American
artist is creating in the universal vernacu-
lar, but he is trying to speak in an Ameri-
can dialect. He is no longer slavishly
imitating Europe.

The story of the artist in America has
always been one of struggle. There has
been little public patronage for him to
depend upon and private patronage has
been sporadic and seldom sympathetic.
Unless he turned to portraiture, as Stuart
wisely did, or to the quicker returns of
illustration in the heyday of the maga-
zines, or to advertising in modern times,
the artist remained in the dreary but pic-
turesque attic studio, where one finds
him in plays and books and in the popu-
lar imagination.

Collecting was directed to the foreign
import even a hundred years ago, and
the manufacture of old masters, smoked
to give the required look of age, flour-
ished in Italy to supply the growing
American art trade. A few looked upon
painting not as a superior kind of wall
paper, bought along with the furniture
and rugs to provide a proper background
for a newly made fortune, but appreci-
ated the artists of their time, bought
their works, kept American art alive.

Appreciation and criticism have been
slow to develop in the American mind,
which usually knows good from bad, but
seldom the finer gradations. We are not
a critical people. We accept what we are
told to like. It is easier to praise a
product from Europe than to appreciate
something near at home. But there is a
growing, if uncritical, interest in our
own artists, and a widespread yearning
for the arts in every part of America.

That we may develop a better ap-
preciation, a critical approach to paint-

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