It takes imagination and enthusiasm and the superb confidence of youth to attempt such colossal things, and it takes an unusual technical facility to “get away” with the attempt.
Winslow Homer’s name has been mentioned and mentioned with the respect due one of the greatest painters this country has produced, but the besetting weakness of picture buyers is undue reverence for the man who has “arrived,” above all for the master who is dead.
Better pictures are being painted in America today than Homer painted, and he would be the first to say so if living.
Since he painted his best pictures the art of painting has advanced, painters have improved their technic and broadened their outlook.
There are pictures being painted today by young Americans that will be worth far more than Homer’s, and that is said with the full realization that no lover of what is big and strong in art could ask for more virile impressions of nature than those of Homer at his best.
When the Morgan pictures were hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, acclaimed in parrot phrases by critics and visited by multitudes, it was a delight, a veritable refreshing of the soul, to get away from the smell of the dead into the living atmosphere of the Hearn collection and see pictures that belong to us, to our own times, that are flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.
Every picture in the Morgan collection had its vital relation
