In 1867 he went to France and spent ten months in Paris, but what he did there can only be guessed at. He evidently attended no schools, haunted no galleries, made no friends among painters. He did some drawings of people copying in the Louvre and dancing in the Students Quarter--that is about all. The inclination of the illustrator was with him rather than the prying instincts of an art student. What cared he about Titian’s nobles or Watteau’s gallants or Chardin’s cooks! They were not themes for him to conjure with. What to him was the _Ecole des Beaux Arts_ or the _atelier_ of Couture! He was well past the student age. He might have thought highly of the works of Millet or Courbet had he studied them, but there is no hint in his work that he had even seen them, though John La Farge said that Homer was largely made by studying the lithographs of the men of 1830. He came back to America and continued painting American subjects in his own hard, dry, and hot manner. He did some shore themes at Gloucester showing a first interest in the sea, some pictures of girls picking berries or grouped in a country store, some sketches of boys swimming, and men in the hay-fields--all of them showing an interest in country life. But none of them was in any way remarkable. His “Sand Swallow Colony,” with boys robbing the nests under the bank’s edge, is the best type of his illustrations done at this time. It appeared in _Harper’s Weekly_, served its purpose, and went its way without making any perceptible impression upon American art. In 1874 Homer made a first trip to the Adirondacks, as though searching new magazine material. He found it in the Adirondack guides and in hunting-scenes. In 1876 he went to Virginia, once more looking for painter’s “copy,” and finding it in the American negro. Such pictures as “The Carnival” and a “Visit from the Old Mistress” were the result. It was a _genre_ interesting only in theme, for Homer’s workmanship was still without any great merit or impressiveness. He flung back to the American farmer for a subject, and then once more went to Gloucester to do schooners and ships. In 1873, while staying on Ten Point Island, in Gloucester Harbor, he had drawn some water-colors notable for their high light and their absence of shadow. They seemed to have some purely pictorial quality about them, but the illustrative motive was still behind them. He did not give up work for _Harper’s Weekly_ until 1875, and it was 1880 before he finally abandoned all work for reproduction.