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THE DELAWARE VALLEY
Bought in 1899 for $8,100 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

one before him so well expressed. In
other words, he brings our own familiar
landscape home to us with truth and
beauty. This, it may be presumed, is the
function of the poet and painter in any
land. It was the quality that made Dante
and Goethe great, and may account for the
fame of Hobbema, Constable, Daubigny-
yes, and Inness.

He was no follower of tradition in this. What he had to say was distinctly personal; and even his technique was largely of his own invention. When he was young, there were traditions of the Hudson River school in the air. The "mappy" landscapes of Cole and F. E. Church, with their crude color and theatrical composition, held the place of honor. Inness may have been overawed by their size at first, but he soon discovered their emptiness. They had no basis in nature, they were not the landscapes we see and know. The Heart of the Andes" and the "Course of Empire" were only names for studio fabrications. The truly poetic landscape lay nearer home. Inness all his life painted it from his studio window or from his dooryard. This was what he called the "civilized landscape," the paysage

intime, the familiar landscape-the one we all see and know because it has always been before us. Perhaps its very nearness has blinded us to its beauty. It is difficult for us to believe that the true poetry of the world lies close about us. We keep fancying that the romance of life is not in our native village, but in Rome or Venice or Cairo; and that the poetic landscape is not that of the wood-lot behind the house, but that of the snowy Andes or some Hesperidean Garden far removed from us. Emerson has noted that at sea every ship looks romantic but the one we sail in. Yes, but there is plenty of romance in our own ship if we have but the insight to see it; and there is abundance of poetry in the wood-lot if we have the intentness of purpose to study it out and understand it. Any one can admire the "view" from a mountain top, but it takes some imagination to see beauty in the quiet meadow. And after you have seen it, it takes a great deal of labor and skill to tell what you have seen. Wordsworth and Constable made more failures with it than successes. Just so with Inness. He shot wide of the mark innumerable times; but when he hit, it was with very decided effect.

The love for the familiar landscape was with Inness from his boyhood. To be sure, there was a period when he coquetted with the classic. When in Italy, he saw much of Claude, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa; but it is difficult to see any trace of them in his pictures. He was, possibly, impressed, but he did not wish to follow. In 1854, when he first saw the Fontainebleau-Barbizon pictures, he was decidedly enthusiastic. Millet he thought a demigod, Daubigny and Rousseau were the perfect recorders of the impression, and Corot he believed the epitome of fine sentiment. How did it happen that Inness was so taken with these French painters? Because they were painters of the paysage intime; they had done in France just what he had sought to do in America; they had abandoned the grandiloquent classic landscape and put in its place the familiar landscape of Fontainebleau forest and the plain of Barbizon. Naturally enough, there was affinity between the American and the Frenchmen. They were striving for similar results. Had Inness been born in France, no doubt he would have been a member of the Rousseau-Dupré group.

But the point is worth emphasizing that he did not belong to that group, that he did not follow them or copy them in any way. The aim was a common one, in that they all opposed the spectacular landscape in favor of "the civilized landscape;" but Inness, for his part, did not work after the French formulas. His manner was not that of Rousseau or Corot or

Daubigny, but of Inness. The theme, the work, and the worker were all original, all of the soil, and all sufficient unto the designed purpose.

We are now, perhaps, in a position to answer that oft-asked question, "What does Inness stand for in American art?" The answers to it have been many and various. Some painters, perhaps, think him great because he composed or handled in a certain way, or used certain colors or canvases or brushes; others may think he holds high rank because they have heard him called "the master," and fancy he was an exceptionally fine technician; but possibly those who come hereafter may think of him as a leader, the one man who painted and established the paysage intime, the familiar landscape, here in America. This was the supreme service that Rousseau, Dupré, and Daubigny did for France and French landscape. And as they are ranked there as the discoverers of Fontainebleau and a new world in landscape, so Inness must be ranked here as the discoverer of the American meadow and woodland-a new realm of beauty. It is possibly his most lasting title to fame.

And, in flat contradiction of theories about the cosmopolitan quality of modern art, all the Fontainebleau men were really provincial in what they produced. Corot painted Ville d'Avray, Rousseau and Diaz did Fontainebleau, and Daubigny the Seine and the Marne. None of their work will stand for the south or east of France, none of it will travel beyond France. It

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is localized about Paris. Just so with the work of Inness. It is emphatically American, but limited to the North Atlantic States. The moods and appearances of nature which he portrayed are peculiar to the region lying east of the Alleghanies. In his pictures the light and coloring, the forms and drifts of clouds, the appearances of air, mists, hazes, the trees and hills, the swamps and meadows, may be recognized as belonging to New Jersey or New York or New England; but none of them belongs to Minnesota or Louisiana or California. He pictured the American landscape more completely, perhaps, than any other painter before or since his time; but his paysage

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intime is, nevertheless, limited as regards its range of subject.

All

Nor would we have it otherwise. the masters of art have been provincial so far as subject goes. Titian and Velasquez, Homer and Boccaccio, Burns and Wordsworth, never cared to go beyond their own bailiwicks for material. And Innessthough he may not rank with those just mentioned-found all the material he needed within fifty miles of New York. It was the original discovery of this material, his point of view regarding it, what he did with it, and what he made us see in it, that gives him high rank in the history of American art.

Rules the World

By J. F. Farrell

'ATURE was never a finical housekeeper; and when she was setting the continent in order for the family to move in, she forgot to clear up a great windrow of refuse swept aside by one of her brooms, which extended in a long ridge of boulders and gravelly drift from nobody knew where, across the Mason farm and into the Ten-Mile Woods farther than the three Mason boys had ever followed it.

All the gravel, clay, and small stones had been washed out where the ridge crossed the river, and only the large boulders remained tumbled together in the river-bed. The river talked pleasantly as it flowed among these rocks; and the Masons could tell just what kind of weather was coming by the sound of its voice, and ever so many other things. When the water was low in summer-time, it was easy enough for an active boy with a jumping-stick to cross the river on the boulders at the upper edge of the rapids; and who was going to walk a mile and a half down to the bridge and a mile and three-quarters back again on the other side when you could skip straight over in five minutes?

Of course it was dangerous; but it was not Mrs. Mason's way to worry about the boys and lay grievous commands on them that they would be cruelly tempted to disobey. Even if she had felt afraid of the shadow of imaginary dangers, she

would not have engaged in a perpetual struggle to maintain her authority. But instead of an enemy the river appeared to her a valuable friend and ally. Before the boys could walk she tied them to the end of the clothes-line and threw them in the river every day, when the water was not freezing cold, and laughingly encouraged them to splash and paddle to their heart's content; and when they were old enough to stray away from the dooryard they were as much at home in the water as on the land.

It was the same with guns and shooting. Living on the edge of the Great North Woods, where all sorts of small game still abounded, the boys wanted guns long before it was safe for them to handle deadly weapons or to stray into the wilderness, where one could travel a hundred miles in some directions without seeing a house.

So she set up a target, and kept the score for them; and when Enoch Smith and Johnny Hill and Billy Thompson heard the Mason boys banging away against the face of the ridge, they would rush wildly for such firearms as they were allowed to use and come over on the run. If there were disputes, Mrs. Mason settled them so justly according to the law and the evidence that all six of the boys were satisfied, and this led to the establishment of a sort of primitive court of appeals.

"Well, I don't care what you say, I'm

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