Hunt’s “Talks on Art” were taken down by his scholar, Miss Knowlton, as he flung them out, walking about the studio and criticizing his pupil’s work. The first volume opens thus:
“Drawing?”
“Yes, or trying.”
“All anybody can do is to try! Nobody ever does anything! They only try!”
Boston was proud of Hunt, declared him one of the greatest, if not the first, living artist. Did not William James, when he decided to become a painter, turn his back upon Paris and return to America to study with William Hunt? Yet it sticks in my memory that Hunt did not realize how much he was beloved and admired. He felt a certain impatience at Boston, expressed in such phrases as:
“When anybody in Boston sees a picture he likes, instead of buying it, he goes home and tries to paint one like it.”
The “Talks on Art” close with this paragraph:
“I was thinking of this subject of Eternity the other night, when I looked at the moon, and saw before it a church spire, a finger pointed upward into space. Next the spire, the moon. Beyond the moon a fixed star. Next,—what? Eternity. A ripple closes over us.”
The words were prophetic.
Unlike William Hunt, George Fuller had to die before Boston accepted him at his real worth. Everybody knows to-day that Fuller was a true artist, that his pictures have the unique quality called originality. This was not so when Lucy Derby took me to his Tremont Street studio, where I saw for the only time our Deerfield genius. He had a great head with a shock of iron-gray hair, ruddy complexion, and eyes at once shy and kind. He had just finished his masterpiece, “Winifred Dysart”, a lovely picture of a young girl standing in the sort of glorified mist with which he envelops his figures. Soon after, Mr. Montgomery Sears went with Miss Derby to the studio and bought the picture; it hung for many years in his Arlington Street house.