This was a time of rapid production with Wyant and he was always afire with his theme. The recognition of artists was coming to him if not the large patronage of the public. His picture of a “View on the Susquehanna” resulted in his being elected an associate of the National Academy in 1868, and he was named a full academician in 1869. But ill-health was with him, and in the hope of improving his physical condition and at the same time gathering material for his art, he joined in 1873 a government expedition to New Mexico and Arizona. There were many hardships on the trip, and Wyant’s never very robust constitution broke down under the strain. He was put on the train and sent back East. It is said that on the way East he passed his home town of Defiance, but would not get off. Ill as he was, with few friends and less money, he determined to go on to New York and fight it out. The fine courage of all that becomes more marked when we understand that the illness was so severe that it had resulted at Fort Wingate in paralysis of his right hand and arm. He was never to paint with his right hand again. It was a crippled painter coming back to New York--crippled in a vital spot--but he had determined that his left hand should be trained to service. And it was. The West not only maimed him physically but apparently taught him nothing artistically. The deserts that he crossed with their red porphyry mountains, dull-yellow sands, and gas-blue air--the most wonderful landscapes in the world in their definition of form and their quality of color--seem to have made no impression whatever upon him. This is understandable only by considering the inheritance of tradition and environment. In Wyant’s time a handsome landscape meant a mountain-valley with forests, rocks, waterfalls, and the variegated foliage of summer or autumn. The desert was unknown and remained for a later generation of painters to discover; the plains were unpainted and thought unpaintable; even the marsh and the meadow, which Corot loved, were considered too slight for art. The grand-view conception in landscape-painting died hard. In Wyant’s time it was very much alive. Naturally enough, he was impressed by it, and though in later life he did many small intimate bits of nature, he never got away entirely from the wide mountain-valley theme.