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2. american nor ruin the simplicity of my ideas. The primitives can be left out of this. They are safe as they are an intuitive crystalisation of what one wants to prove about self-sonscious art. Primitive art is immediately national & it can no more be considered with self-conscious art than the apt observation of a child can be pitched against adult reasoning although the final essence may be the same. I say this truism to show I am not slighting the primitives, nor do I want to hint that they are the only bbhe pure american painting. Nationalism always gets a rise just as we always stand for the anthem &, as with the anthem, not very many know the words. Even in the colonial days when there was comparatively little mind for art & it was almost compulsory for an artist to study abroad there were ardent advocates for american expression. The newspapers & townsmen declared a lively interest if someone turned out a vigorous, albeit clumsy, work that had a homely character, but there was little done then except the fashionable portraits & the fashionable always demand something more worldly than local. There is scant reason why they should not & in the work that was done for them we have to content ourselves, for american spirit, in a certain vigor, a frequent rigidity & a lack of imagination, imagination having been waylaid by a charming earnestness. This is particularly true of Samuel F.B. Morse who reached a zenith of doggedness & in him we have one of the clearest statements of the intrinsic american. Morse went Benjamin West but he came back bitterly disappointed with the realisation ground into him that allegory & classicism did not fit his country in spite of the educational & cultural leanings that way. At least they did not fit done on a large scale by one whose every instinct denied his ambition. And Morse turned, naturally through finshcial necessity, to portraits where he brought the frankly searching quality, the conspicuous