Viewing page 215 of 519

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

186

✓

-2-

I appreciate the object of your proposed exhibition and fully sympathize with your endeavor to encourage and advance American art, but I feel that if the rule in question remains in force your exhibition will not accomplish the desired result. Prizes, of course, always go to the painters, not to the caretakers, and our greatest American painters I am sure are influenced in a very small degree by awards. Their finest work is controlled and produced by other motives, and I am very confident that neither Messrs. Thayer, Dewing or Tryon, if they exhibited, would care a rap whether they were prize winners or not. The principle, not the prize is now at issue and if it is your intention to continue the rule I shall have to be asked to be excused from participating in the exhibition.

Believe me,

Yours very sincerely,
Charles L. Freer