Among the most prominent of the landscape-painters who succeeded the founders of the art among us, and were, like them, inspired by a reverent spirit and lofty poetic impulses, John F. Kensett holds a commanding position. Like Durand, he began his career with the burin, and after working for the American Bank-note Company, drifted into painting. Circumstances seem to have favored him beyond many of his compeers, and he was early permitted to visit England and the Continent, and spent seven years abroad. Notwithstanding so long an association with foreign schools, especially the Italian, we find very little evidence of foreign art in the style of Kensett. He was fully as original as Durand, and saw and represented nature in his own language. His methods of rendering a bit of landscape were tender and harmonious, and entirely free from any attempt at sensationalism. So marked was the latter characteristic especially, that before the great modern question of the values began to arouse much attention in the ateliers of Paris, Kensett had already grasped the perception of a theory of art practice which has since become so prominent in foreign art; although, naturally, it is not in all his canvases that this attempt to interpret the true relations of objects in nature is equally evident. We see it brought out most prominently in some of his quiet, dreamy coast scenes, in which it is not so much things as feelings that he tries to render or suggest. In them also is most apparent an endeavor after breadth of effect, which is a sign of mastery when successfully carried out. Mr. Kensett's art consisted in a certain inimitably winning tenderness of tone--a subtle poetic suggestiveness. His small compositions, as a rule, are more satisfying than his larger pictures, in which the thinness of his technique is sometimes too prominent. The career of Kensett, who died but a few years ago, is one of the most complete and symmetrical in our art history. [Illustration: "ALTORF, BIRTH-PLACE OF WILLIAM TELL."--[GEORGE L. BROWN.]]