He returned to this country; not to city life, but to the wide freedom of the western territories, and found inspiration for his imagination among the Indians. I know nothing of what impelled him; whether it were a survival of a boy’s enthusiasm for the story of his country, or a suggestion received from the archæological associations of Gérôme’s studio, or some happy chance of idea, seized upon and followed out; but the significant point is that, though fresh from Paris, or, shall we say? because of it, he found motives that attracted him in America. The older men had found them too, but many of the younger generation, returning from Europe, were proclaiming, and many do so still, that the conditions of America are unfavourable to pictorial motives. May it not be that the barrenness is in themselves? I am not speaking of the landscape painters, but the figure men. One of their laments is the lack of picturesque costumes. This same word “picturesqueness” has been the bane of painting for two hundred years, implying the necessity of certain formulated qualities in a landscape or figure, rendering it suitable for the purposes of a picture. Owing to this obsession, Corot was fifty years old and had paid three visits to Italy before he, poet though he was, could feel the suggestion of loveliness in the scenery of his native country. So one must not be too hard on others who are deaf to the calling of their environment. But let us give no quarter to picturesqueness. It is a discredited, discreditable evasion of the facts. The true painter sees pictures all around him or evokes them from his imagination; the world of matter or of spirit continually presents itself to him in pictorial fashion; it is only a journeyman who hunts for picturesque jobs.