The best known of these followers was F. E. Church, who was a pupil of Cole--and the only pupil that he could properly be said to have had; for Church lived and studied in his house for years. While he showed no desire to imitate the mystic subjects of his master, Church cared little for the common world immediately around him. He seems to have thought that the nobler the subject the nobler the picture, and he ransacked the whole earth for its beautiful, strange, or impressive scenes. The luxurious vegetation of the tropics, the isles of the Ægean Sea, the Parthenon, icebergs, volcanos,--he painted them all, set off by sunset, clouds, thunderstorms, rainbows, or whatever else would enhance their beauty, and he painted them well. He was the best artist of his school; much better than Cole, whose careful studies of real scenes are often well done, but whose workmanship degenerated rapidly when, leaving nature, he entered into the realm of pure imagination. The succeeding men who took Church’s viewpoint and sought subjects for their exceptional beauty or majesty had an additional impulse given to their imagination by the discovery of such subjects in their own country. Church painted no important picture of his own land; but when exploring parties began to enter the great West they were accompanied by artists eager to set down marvels no less striking than those of the tropics or of Europe. ALBERT BIERSTADT [Illustration: Metropolitan Museum of Art THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, BY ALBERT BIERSTADT] [Illustration: ALBERT BIERSTADT] The foremost of these artists was Albert Bierstadt, who gave to the public its first impressions of the vastness of the Rockies and all their strange fauna, the buffalo, the big trees, and the rest. The public, both educated and uneducated, enjoyed and admired the pictures which offered it a new impression of the grandeur of its country and flattered the somewhat uncouth but real pride of the time. Other men besides Bierstadt accompanied the explorers of the West,--Whittredge, Wyant, Samuel Colman, and others,--but though they painted the plains and the Rockies they soon deserted them for other subjects. One man, however, now a veteran of his profession, has remained faithful to his early ideals. THOMAS MORAN [Illustration: LAKE OF THE WOODS, BY THOMAS MORAN] [Illustration: THOMAS MORAN]