s the object I had set before me was concerned, I had wasted the
years and blunted the edge of my enthusiasms. In preparation for
the career which I proposed to myself I had, however, been in
correspondence with Thomas Cole, then the leading painter of landscape
in America, and an artist to this day unrivaled in certain poetic and
imaginative gifts by any American painter. He was a curious result
of the influence of the old masters on a strongly individual English
mind, inclined to nature worship, born in England in the epoch of the
poetic English school to which Girtin, Turner, and their colleagues
belonged, and migrating to America in boyhood, early enough to become
impressed by the influence of primitive nature as a subject of art.
Self-taught in technique and isolated in his development, he became
inevitably devoted to the element of subject rather than to technical
attainment, and in the purely literary quality of art he has perhaps
been surpassed by no landscape painter of any time. His indifference
to technical qualities has left him in neglect at present, but in the
influence he had on American art, and for his part in the history of
it, he remains an important individuality now much underrated. It was
settled that I should become his pupil in the winter following my
graduation, but a few months before that he died.

At that moment there was not in the United States a single school of
art, and except Cole, who had one or two pupils when he died, there
was no competent landscape painter who accepted pupils, nor perhaps
one who was capable of teaching. Drawing masters there were here and
there, mostly in the conventional style adapted to the seminaries for
young ladies. Inman, the leading portrait painter of the day, had
taken pupils, but his powers did not extend to the treatment of
landscape, and my sympathies did not go beyond it. I applied to A.B.
Durand, then the president of our Academy, the only rival of Cole,
though in a purely naturalistic vein, and a painter of real power in
a manner quite his own, which borrowed, however, more from the Dutch
than from the Italian feeling, to which Cole inclined. Durand was
originally an engraver of the first order, and afterwards a portrait
painter, but his careful painting from nature and a sunny serenity in
his rendering of her marked him, even in the absence of imaginative
feeling, as a specialist in landscape, to which he later gave himself
entirely. His was a seren