The old and the new overlap in this gallery by the inclusion of some of Remington’s paintings and also of a few pieces of sculpture.  Remington’s paintings will never be classified as anything but very good illustrations, and in the company of easel pictures they look much out of place.  Their interest is only of a passing kind.  His sculpture is lacking in repose and looks wild and ill-mannered in the presence of the older things.  Homer Martin’s appeal, in two big landscapes on the same wall, may not be very immediate, but a serious contemplation of these big and noble landscapes will make them reassuringly sympathetic.  Martin’s pictures are not exhibition pictures.  They suffer in an exhibition which is after all as much of a specimen show of conflicting varieties as a display of canned goods in the Food Palace.  Martin, while never having enjoyed the popularity of an Inness, will always rank as high as any of our best interpreters of the Barbizon school.

Gallery 54.

We have to go over into this gallery in order to get the full meaning of that great company of men who had something which is so difficult to discover in many artists, namely, style.  Inness and Wyant above everything have style, a quality which carried their otherwise not very original work above that of their fellow-painters.  We shall never tire of such canvases as “The Coming Storm,” “The Clouded Sun,” and the limpid pastorals by Wyant.  They maintain their position as classics.  Winslow Homer occupies a position all by himself.  An entire wall full of specimens by him shows the evolution of the man, his struggle with the problem of the choice of subjects, and his technical development, culminating in that one really great theme in the center, showing his studio in an afternoon fog.  Homer’s colour is always disappointing, even in his best, but his sense of design and a certain simple restriction to a few essentials make up his chief claim upon distinction.  Dennis Bunker’s “Lady with a Mirror” would scarcely be believed to belong to the older period of American art.  One of the finest pictures ever produced by an American painter, it yields a most unusual degree of artistic pleasure.  There is real distinction about this picture, not only in the graceful idealization of the lady, but also in the refined colour scheme.  Currier’s art is very much like Duveneck’s, an observation which is made emphatic by the fact that each one’s masterpiece is a whistling boy, of great simplicity.  After a discussion of Duveneck’s work, Currier’s artistic antecedents will easily be established, so no more need be said of his work.

Gallery 85.