Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 July 1894 — ART IN AMERICA. [ARTICLE]

ART IN AMERICA.

Ths Younger Painter Arouted to the Meeesalty of Individuality. John C. Van Dyke gives a careful review of “Painting at the Fair" in the Century. Owing to the fact that art education had to be obtained abroad, we are at the start influenced by foreign elements, he says. The influence is to our gain in craftsmanship, but it is to our loss iu originality. Parisian ideas and notions of art may be better than our own, but the point is, they are not our own, and, if we repeat them, we are playing the parrot—imitating, and not creating. American painters are not disposed to followers. On the contrary, the effort is toward being distinctly and individually themselves, but artistically they are hampered by many Gallicisms or worldisms, just as politically a good piece of American legislation is checked by forced consideration for some foreign vote. In both casts there is a compromise not altogether pleasing to either party. We come nearer to having an American school of art in landscape than elsewhere. There is a decisive note even from the younger men. In fact, there is much hope to be placed in the large band of young landscape painters at present working in this country. They have skill, and as they grow older they will gain the conviction that our pictorial view is the only one for them. It might be added, without national pride, that, as regards landscape, it is the best one now extant in the schools, and that it has little or nothing to gain from the view of others. Policy as well as patriotism should induce au American to be an American, for there is little advantage in trying to be anything else. The chief value of a nation’s art, aside from its being good art, lies in its nationality, its peculiar point of view, its representation of a time, a clime, and a people. We shall never have any great art in America unless it is done in our own way and is distinctly American. We.shall never be accounted great because of our doing something like some other people, nor by fashioning that which is best in others into an electric cosmopolir tanism.

Happily our younger painters are rousing to the necessity of individuality in their work. Year by year their styles deepen, one in refined color, another in pure line, another in brush work, another in largeness of conception, another in delicacy of sentiment. It is these added individualities that produce nationality in art when there Is homogeneity in fundamental thought and aim. We have not just now so much of the latter as could be wished for, but we are likely to come to it by degrees. That there is to be great production in painting in this country during the next quarter of a century is almost a foregone conclusion, and it cannot be doubted that our painters will find American life their strongest inspiration.