Almost for the first time this question appeared to be asked with a real interest in the answer. Foreigners had long been acquainted with painters from America, who came over in increasing numbers, and showed a remarkable faculty of quickly assimilating the teaching and influences of Europe. But were there any distinctively American painters? Those students who remained in Europe, though many of them were individual and forceful men, merged themselves more or less completely in their new environment. What, then, became of those who returned to America? Presumably they carried back with them the Europeanisms they had acquired. So far as could be judged from the showing made by American painters at previous expositions, they were but reflecting the influences of Paris or of German and English painting. Was there, in fact, as distinguished from art in America, any American art? And with a languid interest in a matter so far detached from their personal knowledge, the foreigners had answered the question for themselves, negatively. However, the Exposition of 1900 contained an American section which revealed a great deal of motive and character that could not be lightly dismissed as but a reflex of Europe. It might have been made even more representative of the difference which the American environment is steadily impressing upon the work of Americans who live and paint at home; but notwithstanding its shortcomings in this respect, the exhibition undoubtedly gave evidence that such difference already existed. The evidence was largely of the circumstantial kind, to be gathered not from any patent fact so much as from a collating of various hints of motive and character, and from a comparison of them with those exhibited in the pictures of other countries. Then one gradually became conscious of more sobriety, earnestness, and simplicity; in fact, of a more obvious conviction, in the American work [Illustration: From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. THE LOOKOUT--“ALL’S WELL.” BY WINSLOW HOMER.] [Illustration: From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq. THE WEST WIND. BY WINSLOW HOMER.]