He worried a good deal over many of his pictures. When Inness came in to see him he relieved the strain in his impetuous way by taking up Wyant’s palette and brushes to add a touch here and there. The result usually was that the canvas grew into an Inness before the acquiescent Wyant’s eyes. There was so much of this that Mrs. Wyant finally forbade Inness her husband’s studio--at least that is the story told by the Inness family. But Wyant would do anything, submit to anything, for the love of painting. Bruce Crane writes me: “How that man did love to paint! I often thought he worked too hard, sometimes failing to get his breath between canvases. He wished always to be alone so that he could paint, paint, not for praise nor emolument; never with the thought of reward. I recall Z. visiting the studio one day and remarking that he, Z, would like to be considered the best landscape-painter in America. After he left, Wyant said: “What a h---- of an ambition!” Loving the mountains and the forests as he did, it was to be expected that he would use them in art. It was his earliest inheritance and his latest love. Any one at all familiar with the Adirondacks or the Catskills will recognize in Wyant’s landscapes not their topography, perhaps, but their characteristics. The valleys, the side-hills with outcropping rock, the pines, beeches, and birches, the little streams and pools, the clearings with their brush-edgings, are all there. Wyant arranged them in his pictures with the skill of a Japanese placing flowers in a pot. He made not so much of a bouquet as an arabesque of trees and foliage, illuminated by sunlight filtered through thin clouds at the back and warmed with golden-gray colors. Atmosphere--the silvery-blue air of the mountains--held the pattern together, lent it sentiment, sometimes (with shadow masses) gave it mystery. Perhaps the best illustration of this in any public gallery is the “Broad Silent Valley” in the Metropolitan Museum. It is doubtful if Wyant ever expressed himself better or more completely than in this picture. It is a large upright canvas, the very shape of which adds to the dignity and loftiness of the composition placed upon it. At the left are half a dozen large trees, at the right a rocky hillside, in the central plane a reflecting pool of water, at the back a high, clouded sky, radiant with the light beyond it. Simple in materials, not brilliant in color but rather sombre in tones of golden gray, devoid of any classic or romantic interest, it is nevertheless profoundly impressive in its fine sentiment of light, air, and color. It is as strong almost as a Rousseau in its foreground and trees, and as charming as a Corot in its light and air. But you cannot detect either Corot or Rousseau in it. When it was painted, Wyant was greatly taken with those painters, but he did not imitate or follow them. His pictures were always his own--the “Broad Silent Valley” not excepted.