er in the chapter on inventors.

* * * * *

The passing of Washington Allston and his group marked the end of
Benjamin West's influence, and, in a way, of English influence, on
American painting. It marked, too, a lapse in interest, for it was a
long time before it found for itself an adequate mode of expression.
There are, however, two or three men of the period whom we must mention,
not so much because of their achievements, which had little
significance, as because of their remarkable and inspiring lives.

Chester Harding, reared on the New York frontier, a typical
back-woodsman, by turns a peddler, a tavern-keeper, and house-painter,
and a failure at all of them, got so deeply in debt that he ran away to
Pittsburgh to escape his creditors, and there, to his amazement, one day
saw an itinerant painter painting a portrait. Before that, he had
secured work of some sort, and his wife had joined him. Filled with
admiration for the artist's work, he procured a board and some paint,
and sat down to paint a portrait of his wife. He actually did produce a
likeness, and, delighted at the result, practiced a while longer, and
then, proceeding to Paris, Kentucky--perhaps through some association of
the name with the great art centre of Europe--boldly announced himself
as a portrait painter, and got about a hundred people to pay him
twenty-five dollars apiece to paint them.

He spent some time at Cincinnati, and got as far west as St. Louis,
where he journeyed nearly a hundred miles to find Daniel Boone living in
his log cabin on his Missouri land, and painted the portrait of that old
pioneer which is reproduced in "Men of Action." Boone was at that time
ninety years of age, and Harding found him living almost alone, roasting
a piece of venison on the end of his ramrod, as had been his custom all
his life.

One of the most surprising things in the history of American art is the
facility with which men of all trades turned to portrait painting,
apparently as a last resort, and managed to make a living at it. During
the first half of the last century, the country seems to have been
overrun with wandering portrait painters, whose only equipment for the
art was some paint and a bundle of brushes. They had, for the most part,
no training, and that anyone, in a time when money was scarce and hardly
earned, should have paid it out for the wretched daubs these men
produced is a great mystery. But they