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3.

attempt to delve the subject, that is a hallmark of americanism. This self-conscious honesty which seldom allows grace in its ardor is certainly one of the truest american characteristics. Honest grace, if you believe there is such, had a hard fight & never fared better than captive.

Scarcely anything in the Hudson River School is american except the Hudson & even that would have been more american by Courbet. Aestheticly this country needed foreign strength. There was small interest in art & most of that was mediocre & naieve, barely curious. A highly ambitious talent must have found itself embarrassed & without stimulous. The country not could give a response vital enough to fortify such a talent, neither the associative nor technical knowledges were at hand & the cultured drew from a deeper well in Europe. An artist wanting to succeed found Europe necessary & the resulting wonder is not that they were so european but that the american essences came through from time to time.

Usually they did not, but the usual in painting is for a man to find a technic that suits him & produce with it "pictures" which do not concern themselves with anything more than the superficial attributes of the subject. Americans with a technic learned in Europe came home & painted their scene in that manner, sometimes advancing enough to disguise the gracelessness. A few though were large & mature, they concerned themselves with more & knew more of their own natures. They could copy foreign styles entirely but the philosophy & approach remained american.

Whistler was the best of these though few tried harder to be european. He smoothed out the clumsiness that was american in Morse but his technic was more honest & solid than was customary among his facile european contemporaries. There is frank sentiment in the portraits & the predominant occupation with subject over technic ws [[was]] more american. We have a technical impatience which is evident in all we do & we are aggressive about it.