Beginning with the landscape artists who are the earliest of the modern Americans to be looked on as our possible contribution to art, one’s most impersonal observation is that in point of time, they, like their successors in this country, follow the Europeans of the school to which they belong by something like a generation. Now, art-ideas moved very rapidly in the 19th century, and--however mechanical an indication it may appear at first sight--it is almost a sure condemnation of a European painter to find him in one period trying to work with the formula of the generation before him. In America this test does not apply so well, for we must allow for the effect of distance and compare the American with his immediate contemporaries abroad only in proportion to the advance of time--which is to say in proportion to the convenience of travel to Europe and the possibility of seeing contemporary work here. Thus when we consider that Inness, Wyant, and Martin were born about a generation after the Barbizon men and very nearly at the time of the French Impressionists, we shall not say that it was to the latter school that the Americans should have belonged. Whereas the European followers of Corot and Rousseau were merely _retardataires_ who had not the intellectual power to seize on the ideas of their own day, the Americans could feel a little of the joy of discoverers through having themselves worked out some of the ideas of naturalism in their evolution from the earlier landscape painting in this country. And so if they add nothing to what the Frenchmen had done already--with an incomparably greater tradition to uphold them--our trio of nature-lovers expressed genuine sentiment, and Homer Martin pushed on to a quality of painting that often places him within hailing distance of the classic line which, in France, kept out of the swamps of sentimentality that engulfed the followers of Wyant and Inness here. The cases of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder have an interest aside from the actual works of the two painters. They are doubtless the strongest Americans of their time--and the ones who owe the least to Europe. It must be men of such a breed who will make real American art when we are ready to produce it. In any case their work must rank among our permanently valuable achievements: Homer’s for the renewal of the sturdy self-reliance that we noted in Copley, Ryder’s for the really noble design he so often obtained and for the grand and moving fidelity to a vision.