WILLIAM DUNLAP (1766--1839), finally, may also be mentioned here on account of his portrait of _Washington_--painted when the artist was only seventeen years old--although he belongs more properly to the next period, and is of more importance as a writer than a painter. He published, in 1834, a "History of the Arts of Design in the United States," a book now quite scarce and much sought after. A group of himself and his parents, painted in 1788, is in the collection of the New York Historical Society. THIRD PERIOD, OR PERIOD OF INNER DEVELOPMENT. The example of Trumbull found no followers. The only other American painter who made a specialty of his country's history seems to have been JOHN BLAKE WHITE (1782--1859), a native of Charleston, S.C., who painted such subjects as _Mrs. Motte presenting the Arrows_, _Marion inviting the British Officer to Dinner_, and the Battles of _New Orleans_ and _Eutaw_, placed in the State House of South Carolina. White's fame is quite local, however, and it is impossible, therefore, to judge of his qualities accurately. Had there been more painters of similar subjects, a national school might have resulted; but neither the people nor the Government took any interest in Colonel Trumbull's plans. It was necessary to employ all sorts of manoeuvring to induce Congress to give a commission to the artist, and the result was disappointment to all concerned; and when, later, the further decoration of the Capitol at Washington, the seat of government, was resolved upon, the artist selected for the work was CARLO BRUMIDI (1811--1880), an Italian artist of the old school. The healthy impetus towards realistic historic painting given by Trumbull thus died out, and what there is of historic and figure painting in the period now under consideration is mainly dominated by a false idealism, of which Washington Allston is the leading representative. To rival the old masters, to do what had been done before, to flee from the actual and the near to the unreal and the distant, to look upon monks and knights and robbers and Venetian senators as the embodiment of the poetic, in spite of the poet's warning to the contrary, was now the order of the day; and hence it was but natural that quite a number of the artists who then went to Europe turned to Italy. It was in this period, also, that the first attempts were made to establish Academies of Art in Philadelphia and New York--attempts which, while they were laudable enough in themselves, inasmuch as these institutions were intended to provide instruction at home for the rising generation, still pointed in the same direction of simple imitation of the expiring phases of European Art. [Illustration: JEREMIAH AND THE SCRIBE. _By_ WASHINGTON ALLSTON. _At Yale College_. _Copyright_, 1879, _by Harper and Brothers_.]