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As the United States of America is the youngest of the
great
nations of the world, but recently come to full rank among them,
so the development of the arts within it has been short and has
not yet reached completeness. The whole course of American
painting from its beginnings down to the present extends over no
great space of time, and a few long artist-lives span it in a
surprising
manner. One does not have to be beyond middle age to remember
Professor S. F. B. Morse, yet Morse was a student under West, the
almost legendary founder of the craft, who got his first colors from
the painted savages of the forest; and West, moreover, was still
living
when Daniel Huntington, even now painting among us, was born.
Yet the course of our art though short has not been unbroken. It
has not the interest of organic growth, of logical development, but
has continually deserted one set of models to follow another,
retaining
at each change hardly any tradition of its former ideals. In general,
however, it divides itself with sufficient distinctness into three
periods,
which may be characterized as the Colonial, the Provincial, and the
Cosmopolitan.
At first such art as the struggling colonies possessed came
from
visiting English craftsmen usually of the most unskilful type. Soon,
however, they had disciples and rivals among the native-born, of
whom some of the most promising and enterprising went to Eng-
land to perfect themselves. Two or three of these were men of
quite unexpected ability. A recent critic has said that the best were
but second-rate English painters; but they were second-rate only if
Reynolds and Gainsborough be placed in a class by themselves as
alone first-rate. With the best of the others Copley and Stuart are
substantially on an equality, and West, though now antiquated, was
an important influence in the art of his time. That they were
Eng-
lish painters, however, cannot be well
denied. Copley and West
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