When, in 1872, Warner returned to New York it was to suffer the hard experience of disillusionment. In Paris he had found art occupying a prominent position in the public and private life of the community, artists honoured and encouraged by the State and his own ability acknowledged by some of the masters of his craft. He returned to his native country to find a prevailing ignorance concerning art; to find the trained artist competing for jobs with the commercial stonecutter and metal-worker, the competitions decided more by political favoritism and wire-pulling than by artistic merit; to find, indeed, that he was transplanting the delicate growth of his ideals from a congenial soil to what was, artistically speaking, very much of an arid and howling wilderness. These words are scarcely too strong to express the conditions of the field of art in this country more than a quarter of a century ago, before the Centennial Exhibition had sounded the tocsin of an improved taste; before the students of art had begun to return in numbers from the foreign schools, and schools of art in this country had been put upon a better basis; before the importation of all sorts of works of art from Europe and the East, and the travel of our own people abroad had become so extensive; before the spread of interest and knowledge which all these causes operated to produce. Even now the slime of politics is very apt to foul the fair working of competitions, and it is often difficult for a sculptor, unless he is at the very top of his profession, to secure a public commission without some degree of wire-pulling. But in 1872, when the factories kept on hand a stock of military statues, complete in every particular except the number of the regiment--which was riveted on to suit the requirements of the intending purchasing committee--the outlook for an unknown artist with high ideals, clean of purpose, who reverenced his profession as his life, was dark indeed. Warner held hunger and despair at arm’s length for four years, and [Illustration: BUST OF DANIEL COTTIER By Olin Levi Warner] [Illustration: CUPID AND PSYCHE By Olin Levi Warner] then decided that he had better return to his trade of telegraph operator.