ions, were
proceeding with their own peculiarly original and significantly
personal expressions. They represent up to their arrival, and long
after as well, all there is of real originality in American painting,
and they remain for all time as fine examples of artists with purely
native imaginations, working out at great cost their own private
salvations for public discovery at a later time.

All these men were poor men with highly distinguished aristocratic
natures and powerful physiques, as to appearances, with mentalities
much beyond the average. When an exhibition of modern American
painting is given, as it surely will and must be, these men and not
the Barbizonian echoes as represented by Inness, Wyant & Co., will
represent for us the really great beginning of art in America. There
will follow naturally artists like Twachtman and Robinson, as likewise
Kenneth Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies for reasons that I think are
rather obvious: both Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies having skipped
over the direct influence of impressionism by reason of their
attachment to Renaissance ideas; having joined themselves by
conviction in perhaps slight degrees to aspects of modern painting.
Miller is, one might say, too intellectually deliberate to allow for
spontaneities which mere enthusiasms encourage. Miller is emotionally
thrilled by Renoir but he is never quite swept. His essential
conservatism hinders such violence. It would be happier for him
possibly if the leaning were still more pronounced.

The jump to modernism in Arthur B. Davies results in the same sort of
way as admixture of influence though it is more directly appreciable
in him. Davies is more willing, by reason of his elastic temper and
intellectual vivacity, to stray into the field of new ideas with a
simple though firm belief, that they are good while they last, no
matter how long they last. Davies is almost a propagandist in his
feeling for and admiration of the ultra-modern movement. Miller is a
questioner and ponders long upon every point of consequence or
inconsequence. He is a metaphysical analyst which is perhaps the
extraneous element in his painting. In his etching, that is, the
newest of it, one feels the sense of the classical and the modern
joined together and by the classical I mean the quality of Ingres,
Conjoined with modern as in Renoir, relieved of the influence of
Italian Renaissance.

But I do not wish to lose sight of these several for