er, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, the
two Smillies, Childe Hassam, Keller, Murphy, Nicoll, Potthast, the
late Henry Smith, etc., etc.

These are but a haphazard choice of the men whose work shows the
widest ranges in selection, composition, mass, and technic, and who,
in the world of water-color painting, are masters of the medium.

As to our progenitors, the English water-color school--and I make the
statement with every respect for their high accomplishments--while I
believe we are indebted to them for the very existence of the art
itself, I must say that our own men and art-lovers the world over
would have been vastly benefited had these Englishmen allowed
themselves a little more freedom in their methods and not followed so
blindly the traditions of their past.

That we broke away so early is as much a question of race as of
training. The last idea that enters the heads of our own men is that
they want either to paint or to draw like somebody else. They all want
to paint like themselves, or they do not want to paint at all. They
are so many art sponges. They go abroad, wander about the Grosvenor
and the exhibitions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon and shops,
and so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a
new idea of grouping or mass or color scheme there, and then, having
thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them;
but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German
master--never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do
not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form of
flattery--imitation.

Nor do many of them find their subjects abroad--a habit practised
these many years by your humble speaker, whose only excuse is that he
_must_ paint, no matter where he is, and that his life in the
summer-time is dominated by his two children, both exiles, and more
exactingly still in late years by two little grandboys who have not as
yet crossed the ocean. No, these young American painters, with hardly
an exception, find their subjects at home, and they choose wisely.

And just here it can be said that if we are ever to have a school that
will leave its impress on the art of the world, the task will be the
easier if our men find their subjects at home--if they will show our
own people the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of the material that lies
under their very eyes, and also teach those fellows on the other side
to respect us, both be