Before France cared very much for Velasquez, before it so much as knew there was an island called Japan on the art map, Whistler was playing with the blacks and grays of the master of Madrid and with the blues and silvery whites of the porcelains of the Orient.
And it was he,—Whistler,—the American, who turned the face of France towards the East, and made her see things in line and color her most vagrant fancy had never before conceived.
Searching the shops of Amsterdam, he found the blue-and-white china which gave him inspiration to do those things beside which the finest art of France is crude and barbaric.
Not very long ago a French writer said, “There is not, as yet, an American school of painting, but there are already many American painters, and great ones, who will in time form a school.”
Let us hope not.
A friend—a painter—once called Whistler’s attention to several very good things by Alfred Stevens. Whistler looked at them a moment, then said, “School, school, school,” and turned away.
In that, or any other restrictive or regulative sense of the word, let us hope there will be no “American school;” but so long as there are American painters there will be American paintings; and the greater the work the more completely will it reflect the man, and the greater the man the more surely and subtly will it reflect his nationality.
The phrase “American painters” means something more than Americans who paint, and “American paintings” implies the transmission to the work of something of the painter’s individuality, which includes as an important element his racial and national characteristics.
In other words, American painters, regardless of where they are trained, where they work, and what they paint, must produce American paintings; they cannot wholly eliminate their individuality and nationality; they cannot become so completely French or English as to absolutely obliterate every trace of their American origin, and their works, though English, French, or Italian to the last degree, will still exhibit traces of American origin. So true is this, that the paintings of men who have lived longest abroad and tried hardest to paint after the manner of others find their most congenial surroundings amidst American art.
So long as we have American paintings we shall have an American “school” in the sense that all American paintings taken together, whether few or many, whether good or bad, will be distinguished and distinguishable from the paintings of every other country. In that sense America has, and always has had, a “school” of painting, though for a long time the school was little more than a kindergarten.