“Velasquez was already in the air, but Japanese art, to which Whistler afterwards allowed himself to be thought indebted, was not yet spoken of. Thus the young American artist was the precursor of movements which years afterwards came to a head, and which for the most part he has outlived. In view of this, the closing verdict of the official critic of 1867 is worth noting, the more so as it shows the reward already attributed to the American’s industry in another branch of art. ‘While waiting for M. Whistler to become a painter in the sense which old Europe still attaches to the word, he is already an etcher (_aquafortiste_), all fire and color, and very worthy of attention, even if he had only this claim to it.’” Before France cared very much for Velasquez, before it so much as knew there was an island called Japan on the art map, Whistler was playing with the blacks and grays of the master of Madrid and with the blues and silvery whites of the porcelains of the Orient. And it was he,--Whistler,--the American, who turned the face of France towards the East, and made her see things in line and color her most vagrant fancy had never before conceived. Searching the shops of Amsterdam, he found the blue-and-white china which gave him inspiration to do those things beside which the finest art of France is crude and barbaric. * * * * * Not very long ago a French writer said, “There is not, as yet, an American school of painting, but there are already many American painters, and great ones, who will in time form a school.” Let us hope not. A friend--a painter--once called Whistler’s attention to several very good things by Alfred Stevens. Whistler looked at them a moment, then said, “School, school, school,” and turned away. In that, or any other restrictive or regulative sense of the word, let us hope there will be no “American school;” but so long as there are American painters there will be American paintings; and the greater the work the more completely will it reflect the man, and the greater the man the more surely and subtly will it reflect his nationality. The phrase “American painters” means something more than Americans who paint, and “American paintings” implies the transmission to the work of something of the painter’s individuality, which includes as an important element his racial and national characteristics.