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In America the unparalleled increase of Free Libraries has brought, not books alone, but collections of photographs and other reproductions of the best Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in the world, as well as medals, book-plates, artistic bindings, etc., within reach of students of art.

Art Academies and Museums have also been greatly multiplied.  It is often a surprise to find, in a comparatively small town, a fine Art Gallery, rich in a variety of precious objects.  Such an one is the Art Museum of Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Me.  The edifice itself is the most beautiful of the works by McKim that I have seen.  The frescoes by La Farge and Vedder are most satisfactory, and one exhibit, among many of interest—­that of original drawings by famous Old Masters—­would make this Museum a worthy place of pilgrimage.  Can one doubt that such a Museum must be an element of artistic development in those who are in contact with it?

I cannot omit saying that this splendid monument to the appreciation of art and to great generosity was the gift of women, while the artists who perfected its architecture and decorations are Americans; it is an impressive expression of the expansion of American Art in the nineteenth century.

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The advantages for the study of Art have been largely improved and increased in this period.  In numberless studios small classes of pupils are received; in schools of Design, schools of National Academies, and in those of individual enterprise, all possible advantages for study under the direction of the best artists are provided, and these are supplemented by scholarships which relieve the student of limited means from providing for daily needs.

All these opportunities are shared by men and women alike.  Every advantage is as freely at the command of one as of the other, and we equal, in this regard, the centuries of the Renaissance, when women were Artists, Students, and Professors of Letters and of Law, filling these positions with honor, as women do in these days.

In 1859 T. Adolphus Trollope, in his “Decade of Italian Women,” in which he wrote of the scholarly women of the Renaissance, says:  “The degree in which any social system has succeeded in ascertaining woman’s proper position, and in putting her into it, will be a very accurate test of the progress it has made in civilization.  And the very general and growing conviction that our own social arrangements, as they exist at present, have not attained any satisfactory measure of success in this respect, would seem, therefore, to indicate that England in her nineteenth century has not yet reached years of discretion after all.”

Speaking of Elisabetta Sirani he says:  “The humbly born artist, admirable for her successful combination in perfect compatibility of all the duties of home and studio.”  Of how many woman artists we can now say this.