The writer has frequently heard our artists bitterly complain of the meanness of their countrymen in patronizing everything foreign, not only at home but abroad. It is mortifying enough to them to see the palaces of many of our merchant princes _disgraced_, not _adorned_, with a multitude of modern flashy French pictures, without a single piece by a native artist. How cutting then must be the slight to those young artists, who, having gone to Italy for improvement, are visited in their studios, by their countrymen, who, desirous of bringing home some copies of favorite pictures, give their commissions to foreigners. Our young artists, during their residence abroad, are generally poor, and frequently undergo every privation to enable them to achieve the object of their ambition. Weir says that at one time during his residence at Rome, he was obliged “to live on ten cents a day for a month.” Greenough, during his second visit to Italy, was almost driven to despair. Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper found him in this deplorable state in 1829, and gave him a commission for his beautiful group of Chanting Cherubs. He had already distinguished himself by several admirable busts of John Quincy Adams, Chief Justice Marshall, Henry Clay, and others, but this was the first commission he had ever received for a group. The grateful sculptor says in a letter to Mr. Dunlap, “Mr. Fenimore Cooper saved me from despair, after my second return to Italy. He employed me as I wished to be employed; and has, up to this moment, been a father to me in kindness.” Mr. Cooper, in a letter published in the New-York American, April 30, 1831, says: “Most of our people, who come to Italy, employ the artists of the country to make copies, under the impression that they will be both cheaper and better, than those done by Americans, studying here. My own observation has led me to adopt a different course. I am well assured that few things are done for us by Europeans, under the same sense of responsibility, as when they work for customers near home. The very occupation of the copyist, infers some want of that original capacity, without which no man can impart to a work, however exact it may be in its mechanical details, the charm of expression. In the case of Mr. Greenough, I was led even to try the experiment of an original. The difference in value between an original and a copy is so greatly in favor of the former, with anything like approach to success, that I am surprised that more of our amateurs are not induced to command them. The little group I have sent home, (the Chanting Cherubs) will always have an interest that can belong to no other work of the same character. It is the first effort of a young artist who bids fair to build for himself a name, and whose life will be connected with the history of the art in that country which is so soon to occupy such a place in the world. It is more; it is probably the first group ever completed by an American sculptor.”