painting is
being done in this country. I do not see how any one can deny the name
of pictures to the genre paintings of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Paxton unless
he is prepared to deny pictorial quality to the whole Dutch school of
the seventeenth century; and the example of these men is influencing a
number of others toward the production of thoroughly thought-out and
executed genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure-painters
as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting
figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows
an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either the
naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects
intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern
and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and
harmoniously colored as well as admirably painted.

The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters or
students learning technic and indifferent to anything else. They are a
school producing work differing in character from that of other schools
and at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day.

If so much may be taken as proved, the question remains for
consideration: What are the characteristics of the American school of
painting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considered
a fault or a virtue according to the point of view and the
prepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic that has
certainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American work
at recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among the
schools of to-day, singularly old-fashioned. This characteristic has,
undoubtedly, puzzled and repelled the foreigner. It is a time when the
madness for novelty seems to be carrying everything before it, when
anything may be accepted so long as it is or seems new, when the effort
of all artists is to get rid of conventions and to shake off the
"shackles of tradition." Here is a new people in the blessed state of
having no traditions to shake off and from whom, therefore, some peppery
wildness might be expected for the tickling of jaded palates. Behold,
they are sturdily setting themselves to recover for art the things the
others have thrown away! They are trying to revive the old fashion of
thoughtful composition, the old fashion of good drawing, the old fashion
of lovely color, and the old