a pen--we shall have
all the fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all
modern water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the
color into the grain of the paper. A fifth--a supplementary one--is
scratching out. Last is the ignominy of the stipple--the wetting of
the brush in the mouth, a technic entirely dependent upon the quantity
of saliva the student can spare for his work. Almost every early wash
water-color in existence can be classified according to the employment
in its making of some or all of these means.

In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century,
we have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings,
the detail of his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington,
really a great man; Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Roberts;
James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood and whose
intimates were Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the
men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual
exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color
Societies.

* * * * *

As for our own progress in the art, the subject, of course, is too
well known for long discussion. Our oldest society, the American Water
Color Society, held its first public exhibition in the National
Academy of Design in New York in 1867, a date always remembered by me
with infinite pride and pleasure, for upon the walls of the smallest
room close up under the roof was hung my first exhibited
water-color--the only one of my three the hanging committee were good
enough to accept. Two years later--I am happy to say--in 1869, I was
elected a member, and I am further happy to say that I am still in
good standing and in high-hanging, and have so continued from that day
down to the present time--a trifle of some forty-six years.

As to my compatriots, I can truthfully say that its membership covers
some of the great water-colorists of our own or any other time, both
here and abroad--men entirely free to do as they pleased, working in
anything and all things so long as, to use their own expression, they
"get there," handling body color, in a veil of silver-gray as an
overwash or squeezed in chunks from a tube; undertones of charcoal
gray, overtones of pastel--anything for _quality_.

Their names are legion: the late E. A. Abbey, Walter Palmer, Chase,
the late Robert Blum, F. S. Church, Coop