The names of Trumbull, Vanderlyn, Frothingham, etc., alone would act as magic on a discriminating public, provided fair specimens of their talents be judiciously arranged for public inspection. Boston has done wonders this year in her Athenæum. Why, then, should we, equally blessed with native talent, despair, and sit down in sack-cloth and ashes, when a single effort can make us her equal and rival? Gentlemen, I am enthusiastic, and yet have maturely weighed each and every reason against your regeneration, and boldly assert more is for you than against you. The three preceding mentioned gentlemen are equal to, if not superior in talent to, any Boston can produce. Our portrait-painters generally bid fair to excel. All that is wanted is your help as a body corporate, your co-operation as lovers of the Fine Arts. Where, if you become extinct, shall we go to study the models of antiquity? Alas! we know of no other place wherein the experience of ages is collected, en masse, no place wherein to receive that instruction so essential to a knowledge of our profession. Mr. Bowen, the proprietor, has offered to you through Colonel Trumbull, the room alluded to at a fair compensation; it now rests with you to say for once and for all, “We will,” or, “we will not continue the patrons of art.” Wishing to yourselves individually, and collectively as a body corporate, health and peace, I remain, Gentlemen, truly your Friend in the Fine Arts, JOHN H. I. BROWERE. No formal action is known to have been taken upon this communication; but the antagonism plainly evident as existing between the new Academy of Design and the old Academy of the Fine Arts, forms a lively chapter in the history of American art. Full particulars of the strife are given in Dunlap’s book and in Cummings’s “Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design.” But these accounts are from biased adherents of the new institution and bitter opponents of the old, so that, for a brief but philosophical and judicial consideration of the subject, one must turn to John Durand’s sketch of Colonel Trumbull in the “American Art Review” for 1880.