inted not persons merely, but
their natures and minds. It is for this reason that, although we see in
all his pictures where landscape finds a place the meadows, trees, and
skies of Deerfield, we also see much more,--the general and unlocated
spirit of New-England scenery.

This is the true impressionism--a system to which Fuller was always
constant in later life, and which he developed grandly. He was, however,
as far removed as possible from that cheap, shallow, and idealess school
of French painters whose wrongful appropriation of the name
"Impressionist" has prejudiced us against the principle that it
involves. The inherent difference between them and Fuller lies in
this--he exercised a choice, and thought the beautiful alone to be
worthy of description, while they selected nothing, but painted
indiscriminately all things, with whatever preference they indicated
lying in the direction of the strong and ugly, as being most imperative
in its demands for attention. Fuller's subjects were always sweet and
noble, and it followed as a matter of course that his treatment of them
was refined and strong. His idea was also broad; he sought for the
typical in nature and life, and grew inevitably into a continually
widening and more comprehensive style. He taught himself to lose the
sense of detail, and to strike at once to the centre, presenting the
vital idea with decision, and departing from it with increasing
vagueness of treatment, until the whole area of his work was filled with
a harmonious and carefully graduated sense of suggestion. He arrived at
his method by an original way of studying the natural world. He did not,
as most artists do, take his paint-box and easel and devote himself to
description, and from his studies work out the finished picture.
Instead, he disencumbered himself of all materials for making memoranda,
and merely stood before the scene that impressed him, looking upon it
for hours at a time. Then he betook himself to his studio, and there
worked from the impression that his mind had formed under the
guiding-hand of his fancy, the result being that nature and human
thought appeared together upon the canvas, giving a double grace and
power. The process was subtle, and not to be described clearly even by
the painter himself, who found his work so largely a matter of
inspiration that he was never able to make copies of his pictures. They
grew out of his consciousness in a strange way whose secret he co