III. Water-Colors 07 That we broke away so early is as much

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. oil paintings for sale
Nor do many of them find their subjects abroad—a habit practised these many years by your humble speaker, whose only excuse is that hemust 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. oil painting reproductions

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 because we can paint and because we have the things to paint from. With a mountain and river scenery unrivalled on the globe; modern abstract art oil painting with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean; with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height the trees of all other lands are but toothpicks; with plains ending in films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls; with every type of the human race blended in our own, or distinct as are the woodman of Maine and the soft-eyed mulatto of Louisiana; with a history filled with traditions most romantic—Aztec, Indian, and negro; with women who move like Greek goddesses and children whose faces are divine, why go away from home to find something to paint? Winslow Homer never did, and that's why his work will live when the painters of Egyptian harems, Spanish dancers, and Dutch and Venetian boats and palaces are forgotten. frames for oil paintings