But not entirely. Some of these last-named were influenced by European art, outgrew the teaching of their forerunners, and in middle life rather forsook their early love and faith. Yet it would be idle to contend that they had not received an inclination, even an inspiration, from contact with the older men. Short-lived though it was, and shallow as were its teachings, the Hudson River school, nevertheless, had weight with its followers. Even error is often helpful in establishing truth, and a feeble precedent is perhaps better than none at all. Some of the pupils--F. E. Church and Sandford Gifford, for examples--never outgrew their basic teaching. To the end they carried on the Cole-Durand tradition, improving and bettering it. They bettered it because they could add to their own view-point the observation and teaching of their masters. Three generations at least are supposed to be necessary to the making of the thorough gentleman. Is it possible to make the thorough artist in one? But the Hudson River school was too frail inherently to carry great weight. Men like Inness, Wyant, and Martin soon began to see its weaknesses. Even before they went to Europe they had doubted and after their return to America they were openly heretical. They held allegiance only in the matter of the Catskill-Adirondack subject, and even that became modified to a virtual disappearance toward the end of their careers. Both aim and method changed with them. They saw deeper and painted freer, until finally they were wholly out of sympathy not only with the thin technique of the school but with its panoramic conception of nature. So it was that in 1876 when the United States held its first national art exhibition--the Centennial, at Philadelphia--the painting of the country was in something of an anomalous condition. The Hudson River school was practically at the end of its rope. The older portrait-painters had been succeeded by Harding, Alexander, Neagle, Elliott, Inman, Page, Healy--each of them more or less going his own way. The German Leutze had been here and had blazed a brimstone trail of Düsseldorf method, along which some painters followed. Hicks and Hunt at Boston had introduced the French art of Couture and Millet, and they also had a following. Quite apart from all of them stood some independent personalities like La Farge and Winslow Homer, who seemed to say, “a plague on all your houses.” And they, too, went their own ways. There was no school unity.