LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE
[HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS. By John S. Sargent][Frontispiece]
[THE BERKSHIRE HILLS. By George Inness][4]
[SUNSHINE AND CLOUDS. By George Inness][5]
[MIDSUMMER. By George Inness][14]
[ATHENS. By John La Farge][22]
Decorative painting in the Walker Art Gallery, Bowdoin College.
[ALTAR PIECE. By John La Farge][23]
Church of the Ascension, New York.
[THE ANGEL OF THE SUN. By John La Farge][32]
Decoration in the Church of the Paulist Fathers, New York.
[PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER. By James A. McNeill Whistler][42]
[THE MUSIC ROOM. By James A. McNeill Whistler][43]
[NOCTURNE—BOGNOR. By James A. McNeill Whistler][46]
[THE BALCONY. By James A. McNeill Whistler][47]
[CARMENCITA. By John S. Sargent][56]
[PORTRAIT OF MR. MARQUAND. By John S. Sargent][57]
[THE LOOKOUT—“ALL’S WELL.” By Winslow Homer][72]
[THE WEST WIND. By Winslow Homer][73]
[THE MAINE COAST. By Winslow Homer][78]
[THE PENANCE OF ELEANOR, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.
By Edwin A. Abbey]		[86]
[PAVANE. By Edwin A. Abbey][87]
Painted in 1895 to occupy a special place in the room where it now is.
[THE SIMPLE GATHERER. By George Fuller][106]
[WESTCHESTER HILLS. By Homer D. Martin][120]
[THE SUN WORSHIPPERS. By Homer D. Martin][121]
[OLD CHURCH IN NORMANDY. By Homer D. Martin][124]
[THE SCULPTOR AND THE KING. By George de Forest Brush][136]
[MOTHER AND CHILD. By George de Forest Brush][137]
[THE MOHAWK VALLEY. By Alexander H. Wyant][146]
[THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY. By Alexander H. Wyant][147]
[MOONLIGHT AND FROST. By Alexander H. Wyant][150]
[SPRING BLOSSOMS. By Dwight W. Tryon][160]
[EARLY SPRING, NEW ENGLAND. By Dwight W. Tryon][161]
[EVENING—AUTUMN. By Dwight W. Tryon][166]
[A STY. By Horatio Walker][174]
[PLOUGHING IN ACADIA. By Horatio Walker][175]

I
GEORGE INNESS

IN the record of American art three names stand out distinctly as those of innovators: Whistler, La Farge, and George Inness. While Whistler’s influence has been felt throughout the whole art world, and La Farge (to quote from the Report of the International Jury of the Exhibition of 1889) “has created in all its details an art unknown before,” Inness was a pathfinder, only within the domain of American art, and was led by instinct into ways already trodden by the great men of other countries. But this does not make him less an innovator. Nor does the fact that he was certainly influenced by “the men of 1830,” when he came to know their works. The point is that throughout his life his evolution was from within.

His father, a retired New York grocer, would have had him enter business, and even opened a small store for him in Newark, N.J., whither the family had moved from Newburg. But the son’s mind was set on art. Like Durand, Kensett, and Casilear, he was apprenticed for a short time to an engraver, and subsequently studied painting for a little while with Regis Gignoux, a pupil of Delaroche. For the rest he was self-taught. His contemporary, Frederick E. Church, younger than himself by a year, was seeking instruction from Thomas Cole, the founder of the “Hudson River School,” whose grand topographical landscapes the pupil was to follow in his studies of the Andes, of Niagara, and of other impressive regions. The young Inness, meanwhile, was independently studying the individual forms of nature. That he should be insensible to the influence of Cole was out of the question, and so late as 1865, when he was forty years old, and had returned from his first visit to Europe deeply impressed with the work of the Barbizon painters, we can detect in at least two pictures, “Delaware Valley” and the large “Peace and Plenty” of the Metropolitan Museum, that fondness for grandeur of distance and extent so characteristic of Cole. But we can also detect the expression of a fuller intimacy with the scene than Cole could give. Inness’s own penetrating study of natural phenomena, indorsed for himself, no doubt, by the corresponding aim of the Barbizon painters to reach the inwardness of the landscape, had enabled him more thoroughly to comprehend the vastness; to collate