character, and animated by the noblest of sentiments, we feel before his greatest works, through all the imperfections of his art, through all the faltering methods with which his genius sought to express itself, that a vast mind here sought feebly to utter great thoughts (which he has doubtless already learned to utter with more truth in another world); we see that unmistakable sign of all minds of a high order, the evidence that the man was greater than his works. It is not dexterity, technique, knowledge, that impresses us in studying the works of Cole, so much as character. One feels that in them is seen the handwriting of one of the greatest men who have ever trod this continent. Thomas Cole, the first artist who ever painted landscape professionally in America, was born in England, but he was of American ancestry, and his parents returned to this country in his childhood. The difficulties with which he had to contend at the outset of his art career form an affecting picture. From infancy he had been fond of the pencil, and the tinting of wall-paper in his father's factory at Steubenville, Ohio, gave him a slight practice in the harmony of colors. the mean time he took up engraving, but was diverted from this pursuit by a travelling German portrait painter, who gave him a few lessons in the use of oil-colors. He began with portraiture, and resolved In to be an artist, although the failure of his father's business brought the whole family on him for support. The struggles through which the youth now passed make a long and painful story. Through it all he retained his bias for art, and at twenty-two began to draw scenery, from nature, along the banks of the Monongahela. Dunlap has well said, "To me the struggles of a virtuous man endeavoring to buffet fortune, steeped to the very lips in poverty, yet never despairing, or a moment ceasing his exertions, is one of the most sublime objects of contemplation." After several years of this severe hardship, Cole finally drifted to New York, and eventually attracted notice. When the National Academy of Design was founded in 1828, Cole and Doughty were simultaneously winning success and giving a permanent character to the art which for half a century was destined to be most prominent on the walls of the Academy. So far as foreign technical influences can be traced in the compositions of Cole, they are those of Claude and Salvator Rosa. He revisited England at the time when Turner and Constable were establishing their fame and producing such an influence on the great school of French landscape art which has since succeeded. It is interesting to think what would have been the character of our landscape art if landscape, and expressed himself with warmth regarding the extravagancies of Turner. The art of Cole was, however, largely biassed by the literature of England. The influence of both Bunyan and Walter Scott can be traced in his works, while the serious turn of his mind gave a solemn majesty and a religious fervor to his compositions, which command our deep respect even when we fail altogether to accept the art results of his life. For this reason Cole has wielded, more than most many-sidedness of his genius that brought him into contact with widely varied sympathies that Cole's chief power consisted, for if we look at his work from the art point of view alone, we are impressed with its inequality, the lack of early art influences it exhibits, and an attempt sometimes at dramatic force which occasionally lapses into mere sensationalism. But in all his compositions there are evident a rapturous love of nature, and the energy and yearning of a mind seeking to find expression for a vast ideal. Cole was what very few of our artists have been-an idealist. The work by which Cole will be longest and best remembered in the art of his country is the noble series called the "Course of Empire," consisting of five paintings, representing a nation's rise, progress, decline, and fall, and the change which comes over the abandoned scenery as the once superb capital returns to the wildness and solitude of nature. The last of the series, entitled "Desolation"- -a gray si lent waste, haunted by the bittern, with here and there a crumbling column reflected in the deserted harbor, where gleaming fleets once floated, and imperial pageants were seen in the pavilions along the marble piers-is one of the most remarkable productions of American art. But with all the enthusiasm which Cole aroused among his contemporaries, his influence seems to have been to give dignity to landscape art rather than to impress his thoughts and methods on other artists. It is true that he seized the characteristics of our scenery with a truth which came not only from close study, but also from deep affection for the land whose mountains and lakes he painted, and thus led our first landscapists to observe the great variety and beauty of their own country. But, on the other hand, a certain hardness in his technique probably rendered him less influential as a leader than Doughty and Durand. The former, if inferior in general capacity to Cole, was more emphatically the artist by nature. Thomas Doughty was in the leather business until his twenty-eighth year, when, without any previous training, he threw up the trade, and adopted the profession of landscape painter. There is an audacity, a self-confidence, in the way our early painters entered on the art career, without instruction in the theory and practice of their art, which is charming for the simplicity it shows, but would tend to bring the efforts of these artists into contempt if the results had not often justified their audacity, for they were sometimes men of remarkable ability. There have been many greater landscape painters than Doughty, but few who have done so well with so little experience. seems to have been as successful in attracting favorable notice in England as here, although at a time when English landscape art was at its zenith. The soft, poetic traits, the tender, silvery tones, that distinguished Doughty's style were entirely original with him, and have undoubtedly had much influence in forming the style of some of the landscapists who succeeded him. He In Asher B. Durand, a Huguenot by descent, and the only one of the three founders of American landscape painting who survives to our time to enjoy a green old age, we find a nature as strong as that of Cole. The equal of that artist in the sum of his intellectual powers, we discover in him a different quality of mind. Similar as they are in high moral purpose and a profound reverence for the Creator, as represented in His works, Cole was the more imaginative and inspirational of the two, stirred more by the fire Few artists have shown greater capacity than Durand in successfully following entirely distinct branches of art. As a steel-engraver, who in this century has produced work that is much superior to his superb engraving of Vanderlyn's "Ariadne?" Who of our artists has been able both to design and to engrave such a work as his "Musidora?" After pursuing engraving so admirably, he took up portrait painting, and by such portraits as his head of Bryant placed himself in the rank of our leading portrait painters. Still unsatisfied with the success won thus far, Durand in his thirty-eighth year directed his efforts to landscape painting, and at once became not only a pioneer but a master in this department. The care he had been obliged to give to engraving was undoubtedly of great assistance to him in enabling him to render the lines of a composition with truth, while his practice of studying character in portraiture gave him insight into the individuality of trees; he invested them with a humanity like that which the ancient Greeks gave to their forests when they made jestic landscapes as "The Edge of the Forest," in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington. The art of Durand is wholly national; few of our painters owe less to foreign inspiration. Here he learned the various arts that gave him a triple fame, here he found the subjects for his compositions, and his name is destined to endure as long as American art shall endure. Among the most prominent of the landscape painters who succeeded the founders of the art among us, and were like them inspired by a reverent spirit and lofty poetic impulses, John F. Kensett holds a commanding position. Like Durand, he began his career with the burin, and after working for the American Bank-note Company, drifted into painting. Circumstances seem to have favored him beyond many of his compeers, and he was early permitted to visit England and the Continent, and spent seven years abroad. Notwithstanding so long an association with foreign schools, especially the Italian, we find very little evidence of foreign art in the style of Kensett. He was fully as original as Durand, Mr. A contemporary of Kensett, but still surviving him, George L. Brown, of Boston, struggled heroically and successfully with the early difficulties of his life, and yielding to the seductive influences of Italian scenery, devoted his art to representing it, with results that entitle him to an honorable position. The effects he has sought are luminousness and color. Brown's method of using colors was formed to a certain extent on that of the Italian landscape art of the time, and while often brilliant and poetic, reminds us sometimes of the studio rather than of the free, pure, magical opulence of the atmosphere and sunlight of the scenery he portrayed. It can be frankly conceded, however, that he has been no slavish copyist of a style, but while acknowledging the force of foreign influences, has yet given abundant evidence of a personality of his own. and saw and represented nature in his own language. His methods of rendering a bit of landscape were tender and harmonious, and entirely free from any attempt at sensationalism. So marked was the latter characteristic especially, that before the great modern question of the values began to arouse much attention in the ateliers of Paris, Kensett had already grasped the perception of a theory of art practice which has since become so prominent in foreign art, although, naturally, it is not in all his canvases that this attempt to interpret the true relations of objects in nature is equally evident. We see it brought out most prominently in some of his quiet, dreamy coast scenes, in which it is not so much things as feelings that he tries to render or suggest. In them also is most apparent an endeavor after breadth of effect which is a sign of mastery when successfully carried out. Mr. Kensett's art consisted in a certain Louis Mignot, of South Carolina, who inimitably winning tenderness of tone, died in London some eight years ago, a subtle poetic suggestiveness. His small shared with Kensett and Brown a rapturcompositions, as a rule, are more satis-ous enthusiasm alike for the tender and fying than his larger pictures, in which the thinness of his technique is sometimes too prominent. The career of Kensett, who died but a few years ago, is one of the most complete and symmetrical in our art history. the brilliant aspects of nature, and appears to us to have been one of the most remarkable artists of our country. He can be justly ranked with the pioneers who first awoke the attention of the nation to a consciousness of the beauty, |