them which is given them from battle with the elemental
facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of
Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him
original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England
sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his
place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and
such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that
distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical
painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast,
excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.

It was Florida that produced the chef d'oeuvre in him. It was Maine
that taught him the force of the southern aspect. Romancer among the
realistic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did not merely
copy nature. He did invest things with their own suggestive reality,
and he surmounted his earlier gifts for exact illustration by this
other finer gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an excellent
narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf Stream" picture in the
Metropolitan Museum. It has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in
it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. If he was harsh in his
characteristics, he was one who knew the worth of economy in emotion.
He was one with his idea and his metier, and that is sufficient.

AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING

There are certain painters who join themselves together in a kind of
grouping, which, whether they wish to think of themselves in this light
or not, have become in the matter of American values in painting, a
fixed associative aspect of painting in America. When we speak of
American painting, the choice is small, but definite as to the number of
artists, and the type of art they wished themselves to be considered
for. From the Hudson River grouping, which up to Inness is not more
marked than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous fidelity to
detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a
picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the
American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned
with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art--men like
William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston--we may turn to that other
group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean
artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryde