leading ateliers of modern Paris.  In these men, and in the followers whom their preeminent ability drew after them, we perceive the dominant impulse to be of alien origin; Fuller alone, of all the great ones in our art, was in thought and action purely and simply American.  The influence that led others into the error of imitation, seems to have been exerted unavailingly upon his self-reliant mind.  We shall search vainly if we look elsewhere than within himself for the suggestions upon which his art was established.  Superficial resemblances to other painters are sometimes to be noted in his works, but in governing principle and habit of thought he was serenely and grandly alone.

We must regard him thus if we would study him understandingly, and gain from our observation a correct estimate of his power.  We think of our other painters as in the crowd, and amid the affairs of men, and detect in their art a certain uneasiness which the bustle about them necessarily caused.  We perceive this most in Hunt, who was emphatically a man of the world, and in Stuart, who shows in some of his later work that his position as the court painter of America, while it aided his purse and reputation, harmed his repose; least in Allston, whose tastes were literary, whose love was in retirement, and who would have been a poet had not circumstances first placed a brush and palette in his hands.  Allston, however, enjoyed popularity, and was courted by the best society of his time, and was not permitted, although he doubtless longed for it, to indulge to its full extent his chaste and dreamy fancy.  It may be said without disrespect to his undoubted powers, that he would have been less esteemed in his own day if his art had not been largely conventional, and thus easily understood by those who had studied the accepted masters of painting.  He lacked positive force of idea, as his works clearly show,—­that quality which was among the most characteristic traits of Fuller’s method, and made him at once the greatest genius, and the man most misunderstood, among contemporary American painters.

Although men who have not had “advantages” in life are naturally prone to regret their deprivation, they frequently owe their success to this seeming bar against opportunity.  We have often seen illustrated in our art the fact that favorable circumstances do not necessarily insure success, and now from the life of Fuller we gain the still more important truth, that power is never so well aroused as in the face of obstacles.  Few men endured more for art than he; none have waited more uncomplainingly for a recognition that was sure to come by-and-by, or received with greater serenity the approbation which the dull world came at last to bestow.  His history is most wholesome in its record of steadfast resting upon conviction, and teaches quite as strongly as his pictures do, the value of absorption in a lofty idea.