ested
in a supreme degree the trait common to almost all his compatriots, even
those who came in early youth to Europe, that intense desire not to
lack civilization, which is explained by the fact that the American is a
being entirely new, endowed with an activity incomparable, and deprived
of traditional saturation. He is not born cultivated, matured, already
fashioned virtually, if one may say so, like a child of the Old World.
He can create himself at his will. With superior gifts, but gifts
entirely physical, Maitland was a self-made man of art, as his grand
father had been a self-made man of money, as his father had been a
self-made man of war. He had in his eye and in his hand two marvellous
implements for painting, and in his perseverence in developing a still
more marvellous one. He lacked constantly the something necessary and
local which gives to certain very inferior painters the inexpressible
superiority of a savor of soil. It could not be said that he was not
inventive and new, yet one experienced on seeing no matter which one of
his paintings that he was a creature of culture and of acquisition. The
scattered studies in the atelier first of all displayed the influence of
his first master, of solid and simple Bonnat. Then he had been tempted
by the English pre-Raphaelites, and a fine copy of the famous 'Song of
Love', by Burne-Jones, attested that reaction on the side of an art more
subtle, more impressed by that poetry which professional painters treat
scornfully as literary. But Lincoln was too vigorous for the languors of
such an ideal, and he quickly turned to other teachings. Spain conquered
him, and Velasquez, the colorist of so peculiar a fancy that, after a
visit to the Museum of the Prado, one carries away the idea that one has
just seen the only painting worthy of the name.

The spirit of the great Spaniard, that despotic stroke of the brush
which seems to draw the color in the groundwork of the picture, to make
it stand out in almost solid lights, his absolute absence of abstract
intentions and his newness which affects entirely to ignore the past,
all in that formula of art, suited Maitland's temperament. To him, too,
he owed his masterpiece, the 'Femme en violet et en jaune', but the
restless seeker did not adhere to that style. Italy and the Florentines
next influenced him, just those the most opposed to Velasquez; the
Pollajuoli, Andrea del Castagna, Paolo Uccello and Pier delta Francesca.
Ne