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4. Winslow Homer's painting is a perfect projection of the best in New England males, austere, sensitive & manly without assertion. Eakins is no less american but aside from his charm & his subjects his work points to the weakness of certain american characteristics, particularly the mental ambition damaged by technical inadequacy. Eakins did some of the poorest painting that could occur in important pictures. Albert Pinkenham Ryder closes somberly & poignantly the era in which american art was in the main let alone. As I said before there were always cries for & exposition of american art but european art was considered better taste. One woman, Mary Cassatt, left Philadelphia with valiant american pioneer spirit & became one of the most important French impressionists. My admiration for her makes me long to find more then her vigorous clarity that could be called american, but that is/not limited to us & she is in the meantime abundantly french. Thwactman was lonely & nostalgic which admits him. Philosophic-romantic Ryder painted the loneliness that Rockwell Kent has since commercialised & Kent has made money from the thing that grew out of Ryder's failure. This is probably an unfair conjunction because loneliness was an american trait long before Ryder & there is no reason to suppose that Kent got his sense of it from Ryder's work. Loneliness [STRIKEOUT] was brought to America by some of its settlers & since its establishment has become a national instinct from other encouragements. The loneliness grew out of compulsion, the compulsion of democracy, of freedom to make oneself all that he could. And this compulsion of success increased headily toward the end of the 19th century until no success was real unless it was material. Other nations were interested in success but class distinctions gave [STRIKEOUT] their [[?]] either a comprehension, a solace, or an impetus & there were routes laid out. Here one could be anything [STRIKEOUT]. America has with her daily evi-