Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself. It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field. His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact, dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in their living appreciation of reality. He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique. And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary by virtue of the limitations of the medium. Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet, and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination. Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life. Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of his personality. He succeeded admirably.