So let us recognize the value of the master’s influence upon Brush. There was much that he had to unlearn as he pursued his own evolution, notably the sleek, hard, and dispassionate method of Gérôme’s painting. But his brush work every painter of distinguished character must acquire gradually for himself, just as a writer, if he is an honest craftsman, will discover his own fashion of words, adjusting his method of expression to what he is trying to express; the main thing, both for painter and writer, being to have something to say: something which is a part of the man’s self and convictions. The method will grow to it. Leaving Gérôme’s studio, Brush, like other students, stood at the dividing ways. He might have cast his eye around him, noted what seemed to be the tendencies of the day in art, the “latest style,” as the fashion-makers call it, and set to work to reproduce in New York the impressions aroused in Paris. Then, in time, he would have been among those who excuse their own lack of initiative with the lament that in our city there is no “art atmosphere.” In the sense they seem to mean it, the absence is not an unmitigated evil, for what is this “art atmosphere,” when you search it closely? A little, perhaps, like Scotland, as characterized by a Scotchman, “The most beautiful country in the world to live out of.” So it is well to know there are places where the art atmosphere abounds, that one may visit for a time with pleasure and profit; yet it is remarkable how the great painters, the men of force and character, whose minds push them on continually, live either outside of it or within it behind closed doors. The smallness inseparable from an art atmosphere, the mutual admiration and amiable reciprocity of patting of backs, or worse, the “Bully, my boy!” to his face, and the “How he’s missed it!” behind his back; the petty rivalries of little cliques that clutter of themselves across a café table, setting up little standards and gaining brief conspicuousness by repeating one another’s efforts--this is not the sort of atmosphere that strong painters need to breathe. They would be stifled in it. They need, like Delacroix or Puvis de Chavannes, the ample privacy of their own inner life, or, like the Barbizon men, the large seclusion of nature. For such an atmosphere a painter of Brush’s calibre would have no use.