Other names now confront us, among them two men, David Cox and Peter DeWint, who in their day were considered masters of the medium. These last struck a new note in water-color, or rather a new technic in its handling. What Ruskin, the realist, in his "Modern Painters" describes as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon by both teachers and students as the one and only means by which white paper could be properly stained. This method, to quote from a loyal believer in the English transparent school, and whose enthusiasm is delightful, was the laying on of the color in washes which filled certain definite spaces indicated by a pen-and-ink outline.
These washes would indicate, say, a distant tree with a preliminary tint and a subsequent elaboration; he would do it all in one process, giving his blot an irregular edge and allowing the color to accumulate where the shadows required it. His elaborative touches elsewhere were of the same nature. They were brush blots as distinct from washes. To this, I think, we may attribute on analysis the freedom of handling which—though each man has his distinctive method—is characteristic of both Cox and DeWint. If we add to these two methods of using the brush a third—its manipulation as though it were a pen—we shall have all the fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all modern water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the color into the grain of the paper. A fifth—a supplementary one—is scratching out. Last is the ignominy of the stipple—the wetting of the brush in the mouth, a technic entirely dependent upon the quantity of saliva the student can spare for his work. Almost every early wash water-color in existence can be classified according to the employment in its making of some or all of these means.
In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century, we have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings, the detail of his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington, really a great man; Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Roberts; James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood and whose intimates were Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color Societies.
As for our own progress in the art, the subject, of course, is too well known for long discussion. Our oldest society, the American Water Color Society, held its first public exhibition in the National Academy of Design in New York in 1867, a date always remembered by me with infinite pride and pleasure, for upon the walls of the smallest room close up under the roof was hung my first exhibited water-color—the only one of my three the hanging committee were good enough to accept. Two years later—I am happy to say—in 1869, I was elected a member, and I am further happy to say that I am still in good standing and in high-hanging, and have so continued from that day down to the present time—a trifle of some forty-six years.
As to my compatriots, I can truthfully say that its membership covers some of the great water-colorists of our own or any other time, both here and abroad—men entirely free to do as they pleased, working in anything and all things so long as, to use their own expression, they "get there," handling body color, in a veil of silver-gray as an overwash or squeezed in chunks from a tube; undertones of charcoal gray, overtones of pastel—anything for quality.
Their names are legion: the late E. A. Abbey, Walter Palmer, Chase, the late Robert Blum, F. S. Church, Cooper, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, the two Smillies, Childe Hassam, Keller, Murphy, Nicoll, Potthast, the late Henry Smith, etc., etc.
These are but a haphazard choice of the men whose work shows the widest ranges in selection, composition, mass, and technic, and who, in the world of water-color painting, are masters of the medium.
As to our progenitors, the English water-color school—and I make the statement with every respect for their high accomplishments—while I believe we are indebted to them for the very existence of the art itself, I must say that our own men and art-lovers the world over would have been vastly benefited had these Englishmen allowed themselves a little more freedom in their methods and not followed so blindly the traditions of their past.
That we broke away so early is as much a question of race as of training. The last idea that enters the heads of our own men is that they want either to paint or to draw like somebody else. They all want to paint like themselves, or they do not want to paint at all. They are so many art sponges. They go abroad, wander about the Grosvenor and the exhibitions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon and shops, and so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a new idea of grouping or mass or color scheme there, and then, having thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them; but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German master—never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form of flattery—imitation.