Of course he cannot be held responsible for their paint pretenses. His rank as a painter will be made up from his own works. By them he will be judged and they will surely stand critical estimate. For nothing more virile, more positive, more wholesome has ever been turned out in American art. He had something to say worth listening to. And he said it about our things and in our way. No one will question for an instant the Americanism of his art. The very rudeness of it proclaims its place of origin. Reflecting a civilization as yet quite new to art, a people as yet very close to the soil, what truer tale has been told! The fortitude of the pioneer, with the tang of the unbroken forest and the unbeaten sea are in it. Homer was not the Leonardo but the Mantegna of American art. He came too early for perfect expression, but, like many of the rude forefathers, he had the fine virtue of sincerity. You cannot help but admire his frankness, his honesty, even his brutality. There is no pretense about him; he makes no apology, offers no preface or explanation. He presents a point of view, and in the very brusqueness of his presentation seems to say: “Take it or let it alone.” He must have known his expression was incomplete. Did he realize that art was too long and life too short to round the whole circle? The majority of painters move over only a small segment of the span. At sixty, Homer had no more than found his theme. It would have taken another lifetime to have given him style and method. And even then, grace of accomplishment might have weakened force of conception. He had his errors, but perhaps they emphasized his fundamental truths. So perhaps we should be thankful that he was just what he was--a great American painter who was sufficient unto himself in both thought and expression. VI JOHN LA FARGE La Farge is an exceptional man in American painting--the exception that will perhaps prove the value of tradition and education in the craft. More than any other in our history he was born to art. He did not live through a barefoot stage on a farm and then by chance come to a speaking acquaintance with painting at twenty or thereabouts; he could not boast of a struggle against adverse circumstances in an uncongenial environment. On the contrary, he was rather luxuriously raised in a city, and as a child found art in the family circle and a part of the family life. He had begun to see, hear, and think about it at six years of age. At thirty, when he definitely decided to accept painting as a vocation, he knew the tale quite well, was highly endowed intellectually, and had the insight and the imagination to see things in significant aspects. What wonder that he made an impression and left a body of work that voiced authority! He himself became a master, caught up the torch and carried on the light, spreading it and diffusing it in this new world. He was an inheritor and transmitter of art as well as a creator of it.