erunners in
American art, Martin, Ryder and Fuller who, in their painting, may be
linked not without relativity to our artists in literary imagination,
Hawthorne and Poe. Fuller is conspicuously like Hawthorne, not by his
appreciation of witchcraft merely, but by his feeling for those eery
presences which determine the fates of men and women in their time.
Martin is the purer artist for me since he seldom or never resorted to
the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in
the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely
from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his
vaster poetic sensibility--his Homeric instincts for the drama and by
a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans
in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most
original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who
had of course one of the greatest and most perfect imaginations of his
time and possibly of all time.

But it is these several painters I speak of, Martin, Ryder, and
Fuller, who figure for us as the originators of American indigenous
painting. They will not be copied for they further nothing beyond
themselves. No influence of these painters has been notable, excepting
for a time in the early experience of one of the younger modernists
who, by reason of definite associations of birthright and relativity
of environment, essayed to claim Albert Ryder as a very definite
influence; just as Courbet and Corot must in their ways have been
powerful influences upon Ryder himself. Albert Ryder is too much of a
figure to dismiss here with group-relationship, he must be treated of
separately. So far then, there is no marked evidence that the
influence of Fuller or Martin was powerful enough to carry beyond
themselves. They had no tenets or theories other than those of
personal clarification. All three remained the hermit radicals of
life, as they remain isolated examples in American art; and all of
them essentially of New England, in that they were conspicuously
introspective, and shut in upon their own exclusive experience.

But for all these variances, we shall find Homer Martin, George Fuller,
and Albert Ryder forming the first nucleus for a definite value in
strictly American painting. They were conscious of nothing really
outside of native associations and native deductions. The temper of them
is as essentially American as the q