is space to recall only a few names at random,—Whittredge, McEntee, Bristol, Sandford R. Gifford, Cropsey, and the rest. They were mostly sincere, hard-working painters, and very charming, worthy men personally. They won for themselves a social position in the old New York of the ’60’s and ’70’s greater and more important than any other artistic group has enjoyed in this country. Their paintings were also admired and bought for handsome prices, and as a whole they were prosperous. Time has dealt rather hardly with their fame. Though all of the men whose names have just been cited left works that may still be seen with pleasure, yet as a rule the pictures of the school were thin, laborious, and timid. There was no rich, strong handling of the pigment, no decorative quality to the composition, no massing of light and shade, and no revelation of individual temperament and emotion.

WYANT, MARTIN, AND INNESS

Approaches to these qualities were occasionally made; but to find them the general rule we must go to the men who are now conceded to be the culminating masters of the school,—Wyant, Homer Martin, and Inness.

HOMER D. MARTIN

Of these Wyant holds closest to the traditions of the school. He had a larger sense of composition, a completer mastery of technic, a freer handling, and a finer draftsmanship. He represented with infinite refinement the heaped up summer clouds and the smooth, delicate tree trunk beyond which the widespread landscape was seen; but on the whole it was only a culmination of the qualities of the school and awoke no opposition. With Martin and Inness it was different. They succeeded in giving to their landscapes a deeper note of personal emotion and feeling than any of their predecessors. Both were men of exceptional spiritual and mental endowment. Their characters were formed not in a conventional model imposed by their surroundings, but by much solitary meditation. Both had begun by painting in the general style of the Hudson River School, and both found the result unsatisfactory.

Martin’s desertion of the old traditions consisted largely in a change of workmanship. Instead of the thin, smooth coating of pigment general at the time, which he himself had practised in the beginning, he used a thick impasto, laid on with a heavily loaded brush or even the palette knife. The color, too, was not used in unbroken tones, but drawn and blended together in streaks and spots, which gave it quiver and vitality. Apart from the method of painting, the manner changed also. Detail, so admired by the public of the day, was more and more simplified. The composition resolved itself into a few strong masses of light and dark, the relations between which became more and more balanced and subtle as the little incidents disappeared. His pictures in this latter manner are not very numerous, for he could not paint when he was not in the mood; but the best of them make a profound impression by their strong simplicity.

THE ART OF INNESS

SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON, BY GEORGE INNESS

GEORGE INNESS

Inness was a much more prolific painter, and his work shows greater variety. He early felt the monotony of the old school, its lack of certain qualities that he found in engravings of European landscapes, and he used to take the prints with him when he went sketching, to try to discover wherein their merit consisted. He studied nature continually, living with it, so that at last he knew its moods and