Of these Wyant holds closest to the traditions of the school. He had a larger sense of composition, a completer mastery of technic, a freer handling, and a finer draftsmanship. He represented with infinite refinement the heaped up summer clouds and the smooth, delicate tree trunk beyond which the widespread landscape was seen; but on the whole it was only a culmination of the qualities of the school and awoke no opposition. With Martin and Inness it was different. They succeeded in giving to their landscapes a deeper note of personal emotion and feeling than any of their predecessors. Both were men of exceptional spiritual and mental endowment. Their characters were formed not in a conventional model imposed by their surroundings, but by much solitary meditation. Both had begun by painting in the general style of the Hudson River School, and both found the result unsatisfactory. Martin’s desertion of the old traditions consisted largely in a change of workmanship. Instead of the thin, smooth coating of pigment general at the time, which he himself had practised in the beginning, he used a thick impasto, laid on with a heavily loaded brush or even the palette knife. The color, too, was not used in unbroken tones, but drawn and blended together in streaks and spots, which gave it quiver and vitality. Apart from the method of painting, the manner changed also. Detail, so admired by the public of the day, was more and more simplified. The composition resolved itself into a few strong masses of light and dark, the relations between which became more and more balanced and subtle as the little incidents disappeared. His pictures in this latter manner are not very numerous, for he could not paint when he was not in the mood; but the best of them make a profound impression by their strong simplicity. THE ART OF INNESS [Illustration: SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON, BY GEORGE INNESS] [Illustration: GEORGE INNESS]