In his first endeavors when he painted from the model he recited the beauty of the facts and perhaps thought they would be sufficient to carry the picture. Nature was beautiful in itself; if faithfully transcribed on canvas why would not the beauty carry on into the transcription? He found later on that it would not and could not, that the counterfeit presentment remained only a counterfeit presentment. Then he began to simplify his matter and broaden his method, seeking not to reproduce the original but to give merely the feeling or impression that the original had made upon him. The result was that peculiarly poetic quality of light, air, and color that we associate with such pictures as the “Broad Silent Valley.” Of its kind no finer quality of pictorial poetry was ever produced than is shown in Wyant’s later landscapes. It is not exactly epic, though it has wonderful descriptive passages, sustained effect, and often very positive strength of utterance. Lyric is the term that describes it better. For it is a song rather than a recitation--a wood theme worthy of a Pan’s piping, though it gives no hint of the Old World, and belongs emphatically in this new Western land with its unbroken soil and virgin forests. In aim and effect it is not unlike the pæan in praise of light by Corot. They were both painter-poets--the one painting on the outskirts of Paris, the other gathering his material on the outskirts of civilization here in America. Inness, Wyant, Homer Martin, Winslow Homer--no one ever questioned the Americanism of their art. They are our very own--the product of this new soil. Even their limitations recite our history. As for their aspirations, with their passionate love for the beauty of our own American landscape, may it not be fairly claimed that in these they are representative of the American people? In a large sense have they not been our pictorial spokesmen, saying in art what many of us have always felt but could not well express? And Wyant--Wyant with the wood-thrush note--well, we shall not look upon his like again! For he and Martin were perhaps rarer spirits, finer souls, than either Inness or Homer. Their charm of mood, the serenity of their outlook, the loveliness of their vision will hardly be repeated in our art. They marked an epoch and belonged to a past that unfortunately is leaving no decided teaching or sequence in its wake. The trend in art to-day is not toward serenity but turbulence. IV HOMER MARTIN