EARLY SPRING, NEW ENGLAND. BY DWIGHT W. TRYON.] however, the spirit of strength is lacking. They are the work of men who mean strongly, but are not themselves strong men. So surely does personal character, or lack of it, show in a painter’s work, not the mere robustiousness of personal force, but the settled, earnest, habitual convictions that are the elements of character. And quite as evident to our experience in pictures is the distinction between the real and the false in refinement. Mere subtlety of brush work, while it may create for a while an illusion of refinement, will not satisfy us in the long run. Many of Tryon’s landscapes reach a pitch of delicate suggestion in the rendering of soft air, caressing atmosphere, and shrouded light that is unsurpassed by any painter in this country; for the impression is much deeper than that of an entrancing skill in the management of the pigments. The spirit of the landscape stole into his heart when a boy, and has abided with him in his manhood; he is so much a child of New England, sweetened by its tenderer influences as well as nurtured on its hardihood, that, sharing its strength and refinement, he gives expression to himself when he reproduces these qualities in his pictures. Hence, in both directions, their complete convincingness. A fact, too, which helps to justify this appreciation is that his pictures show an interest in so many moods of the landscape, and the degree of force or of subtlety with which he renders each is regulated by the demand of the occasion. You cannot divide the past twenty years of his productiveness into special periods of style; any attempt to do so will bring you up against the insurmountable objection of finding that two canvases of very different feeling and manner of painting are dated the same year. Development, necessarily, there has been in style; increased acquisition of facility and the power to render more penetratingly the mood of nature he is studying. But evolution of motive you will scarcely find. That from the first has been realistic; in the sense that the landscape, as it appears to him to be, affords primarily sufficient incentive to his study.