I cannot omit saying that this splendid monument to the appreciation of art and to great generosity was the gift of women, while the artists who perfected its architecture and decorations are Americans; it is an impressive expression of the expansion of American Art in the nineteenth century.
The advantages for the study of Art have been largely improved and increased in this period. In numberless studios small classes of pupils are received; in schools of Design, schools of National Academies, and in those of individual enterprise, all possible advantages for study under the direction of the best artists are provided, and these are supplemented by scholarships which relieve the student of limited means from providing for daily needs.
All these opportunities are shared by men and women alike. Every advantage is as freely at the command of one as of the other, and we equal, in this regard, the centuries of the Renaissance, when women were Artists, Students, and Professors of Letters and of Law, filling these positions with honor, as women do in these days.
In 1859 T. Adolphus Trollope, in his "Decade of Italian Women," in which he wrote of the scholarly women of the Renaissance, says: "The degree in which any social system has succeeded in ascertaining woman's proper position, and in putting her into it, will be a very accurate test of the progress it has made in civilization. And the very general and growing conviction that our own social arrangements, as they exist at present, have not attained any satisfactory measure of success in this respect, would seem, therefore, to indicate that England in her nineteenth century has not yet reached years of discretion after all."
Speaking of Elisabetta Sirani he says: "The humbly born artist, admirable for her successful combination in perfect compatibility of all the duties of home and studio." Of how many woman artists we can now say this.
Trollope's estimate of the position of women in England, which was not unlike that in America, forty-five years ago, when contrasted with that of the present day, affords another striking example of the expansion of the nineteenth century.
Although no important changes occur without some preparation, this may be so gradual and unobtrusive in its work that the result appears to have a Minerva-like birth. Doubtless there were influences leading up to the remarkable landscape painting of this century. The "Norwich School," which took shape in 1805, was founded by Crome, among whose associates were Cotman, Stark, and Vincent. Crome exhibited his works at the Royal Academy in 1806, and the twelve following years, and died in 1821 when the pictures of Constable were attracting unusual attention; indeed, it may be said that by his exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Constable inaugurated modern landscape painting, which is a most important feature of art in this century.
Not forgetting the splendid landscapes of the Dutch masters, of the early Italians, of Claude and Wilson, the claim that landscape painting was perfected only in the nineteenth century, and then largely as the result of the works of English artists, seems to me to be well founded. To this excellence Turner, contemporary with Constable, David Cox, De Wint, Bonington, and numerous others gloriously contributed.