All great composers, of an originality more composite than genitive, have these infatuations.

Maitland was at his easel, dressed with that correct elegance which is the almost certain mark of Anglo-Saxon artists.  With his little varnished shoes, his fine black socks, spotted with red, his coat of quilted silk, his light cravat and the purity of his linen, he had the air of a gentleman who applied himself to an amateur effort, and not of the patient and laborious worker he really was.  But his canvases and his studies, hung on all sides, among tapestries, arms and trinkets, bespoke patient labor.  It was the history of an energy bent upon the, acquisition of a personality constantly fleeting.  Maitland manifested in a supreme degree the trait common to almost all his compatriots, even those who came in early youth to Europe, that intense desire not to lack civilization, which is explained by the fact that the American is a being entirely new, endowed with an activity incomparable, and deprived of traditional saturation.  He is not born cultivated, matured, already fashioned virtually, if one may say so, like a child of the Old World.  He can create himself at his will.  With superior gifts, but gifts entirely physical, Maitland was a self-made man of art, as his grand father had been a self-made man of money, as his father had been a self-made man of war.  He had in his eye and in his hand two marvellous implements for painting, and in his perseverence in developing a still more marvellous one.  He lacked constantly the something necessary and local which gives to certain very inferior painters the inexpressible superiority of a savor of soil.  It could not be said that he was not inventive and new, yet one experienced on seeing no matter which one of his paintings that he was a creature of culture and of acquisition.  The scattered studies in the atelier first of all displayed the influence of his first master, of solid and simple Bonnat.  Then he had been tempted by the English pre-Raphaelites, and a fine copy of the famous ‘Song of Love’, by Burne-Jones, attested that reaction on the side of an art more subtle, more impressed by that poetry which professional painters treat scornfully as literary.  But Lincoln was too vigorous for the languors of such an ideal, and he quickly turned to other teachings.  Spain conquered him, and Velasquez, the colorist of so peculiar a fancy that, after a visit to the Museum of the Prado, one carries away the idea that one has just seen the only painting worthy of the name.

The spirit of the great Spaniard, that despotic stroke of the brush which seems to draw the color in the groundwork of the picture, to make it stand out in almost solid lights, his absolute absence of abstract intentions and his newness which affects entirely to ignore the past, all in that formula of art, suited Maitland’s temperament.  To him, too, he owed his masterpiece, the ‘Femme en violet et en jaune’, but the restless seeker did not adhere to that style.  Italy and the Florentines next influenced him, just those the most opposed to Velasquez; the Pollajuoli, Andrea del Castagna, Paolo Uccello and Pier delta Francesca.  Never would one have believed that the same hand which had wielded with so free a brush the color of the ‘Femme en violet...’ could be that which sketched the contour of the portrait of Alba with so severe, so rigid a drawing.