Just before our Centennial exposition, the scholarly John Fiske, admitting that “the classical picture and the undraped statue” have “a high place in our esteem,” ruefully adds that “it will probably be some time before genuine art ceases to be an exotic among us, and becomes a plant of unhindered native growth.” The Centennial showed us the truth of just that. The Centennial was a glory, and a profound disturbance. To our sculpture, this disturbance was its great gain. For the first time, the American sculptor saw his work side by side with that of Europeans. He was dismayed. He had had his doubts, his forebodings. He now perceived for a certainty that in spite of half a century spent in the pursuit of all the best that Italian pseudo-classicism could offer, our apprentice days in sculpture, far from being well over, were scarcely begun. Perhaps a fresh start was needed. At a time when Munich, as well as Paris, was calling to the young painter, Paris, rather than Rome or Florence, beckoned to the sculptor. New forces were abroad in art, and American sculpture of the next generation profited eagerly from the vigorous new French school. II The lesson taught by the Columbian exposition of 1893 was just as important as that learned from the Centennial, though far less sobering. A holiday spirit, not without dignity, spoke from those pleasure-domes and lagoons and abounding sculptural forms of the White City. The progress made by our art during seventeen years packed with artistic adventure and endeavor was blown abroad in triumph. On the whole, we were justified in our joy. As the Centennial by its dismaying jolt had enlarged the outlook of our artists, so the Columbian, by its varied harmonies, liberated the imagination of the public, of the art-lover. To a marked extent, it created anew the art-lover, a personage already made possible by the prosperity following the conclusion of the Civil War. In the World’s Fair of 1893, the apparently inexhaustible advantages of a sympathetic collaboration between architect, painter, sculptor, and landscape architect were for the first time sketched out large for the American vision. Our many succeeding expositions have of course emphasized and amplified the suggestions so gallantly given and so eagerly noted in 1893. Not that our whole broad land is to-day the dwelling-place of beauty. Far from it. Great reaches of time and great strivings of the spirit must match our great stretches of space before art is everywhere at home here. And collaboration at its best is jointly and severally a striving of the spirit.