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Winslow Homer and has made an important display of early American portrait paint- 

 ers. It has also shared in the development of the international projects which have 

 latterly brought new currents into the artistic atmosphere. It was an exhibition of 

 modern German art at the Metropolitan that led to the holding of a kind of return 

 exhibition of American art in Berlin. The aim of the Hispanic Museum in New York, 

 restricted in its gallery space, has been to present more especially the work of Euro- 

 peans. It has shown the paintings of the two Spaniards, Joaquin Sorolla and Ignacio 

 Zuloaga, and the sculptures of the Russian Troubetskoy. The Albright Art Gallery 

 in Buffalo brought over in the winter of 1911-12 a collection of modern French paintings 

 which was later exhibited elsewhere in the country, and since then the American- 

 Scandinavian Foundation has made in New York and other cities an exhibition of 

 150 paintings from Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In the early summer of 1912 

 Mr. Charles L. Freer of Detroit, who has given his collection of Orientalia and of works 

 by Whistler to the Federal government, showed 175 of his treasures in the National 

 Museum at Washington. 



The exhibitions of the National Academy of Design in New York and those which 

 appear with similar regularity in other large cities have testified to an excellent average 

 in American art rather than to the rise of new and original figures. It is in landscape 

 that the school is perhaps most advanced, continuing profitably to study the problems 

 of light which the French Impressionists long ago brought forward, but remaining faith- 

 ful also to the Barbizon tradition and to that established by the native pioneers and 

 masters, George Inness, Alexander H. Wyant and Homer Martin. On the basis of 

 these varied inspirations the landscape painters express a warmly individualised feel- 

 fing for nature. Looking at the mass of recent work the inevitable conclusion is that 

 the artists who interpret the sentiment of the American countryside form the contingent 

 that is most sensitive, most skilful, and most legitimately popular. The figure paint- 

 ers producing easel pictures are chiefly contented with the niorccau, painting from 

 the single model, posed in the studio, works purely decorative. in motive; but a few 

 more venturesome artists have followed a realistic trend, seeking their subjects out 

 of doors, in the country and in the streets of cities. Two names may be cited, both 

 from amongst the younger men. George Bellows (b. 1882) has found good material 

 among the ragamuffins of New York and has used it to good purpose. Charles W. 

 Hawthorne (b. 1872), painting the fisher folk of Cape Cod and types of ordinary Amer- 

 ican life, has lifted himself well above the ruck both in his technique and in the fresh 

 personal force of his work. The only really notable sensation provided by an American 

 painter in the period under review was one due, however, to a veteran, John S. Sargent. 

 The exhibition of his Italian water colours in New York in March, 1912, was a memo- 

 rable demonstration of the possibilities of the medium in the hands of a brilliant master. 



In mural decoration American figure painters have been zealous and effective, 

 rising with authority to the chances offered them by the civic developments already 

 noted. Kenyon Cox and Edwin H. Blashfield are notable amongst those who have 

 produced for public buildings handsome and workmanlike symbolical schemes, faith- 

 ful to earlier European conventions. Admirable experiments have been made by 

 Frederick D. Marsh (b. 1872) and Everett Shinn (b. 1873) in the free utilisation of 

 subjects available in everyday life. The outstanding achievement in this direction 

 is that of the late Edwin A. Abbey in the Capitol at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where 

 he has illustrated the mining and oil industries of the region in an elaborate and impres- 

 sive series of monumental compositions. It is at Harrisburg, too, against 'the facade 

 of the same building, that George Grey Barnard, in some colossal groups, has put to 

 his credit the most important of recent American designs in plastic art associated 

 with architecture. Amongst public, monuments the statue of William Cullen Bryant 

 in New York, modelled by Herbert Adams, may also be mentioned. Adolph A. Wein- 

 man (b. 1870) struck a new and promising note when, in collaboration with the archi- 

 tects, McKim, Mead & White, he produced a polychrome relief for the pediment of 

 the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York. In view of the thorough 



