artists who at a later period than this borrowed their colors from the
Indians and manufactured their pencils of the furs of wild beasts.
Perhaps, if he could have revoked his life and prearranged his
destiny, he might have chosen to belong to that school without a
master in the hope of being at least original, since there were no
works of art to imitate nor rules to follow. But he had been born and
educated in Europe. People said that he had studied the grandeur or
beauty of conception and every touch of the master-hand in all the
most famous pictures in cabinets and galleries and on the walls of
churches till there was nothing more for his powerful mind to learn.
Art could add nothing to its lessons, but Nature might. He had,
therefore, visited a world whither none of his professional brethren
had preceded him, to feast his eyes on visible images that were noble
and picturesque, yet had never been transferred to canvas. America was
too poor to afford other temptations to an artist of eminence, though
many of the colonial gentry on the painter's arrival had expressed a
wish to transmit their lineaments to posterity by moans of his skill.
Whenever such proposals were made, he fixed his piercing eyes on the
applicant and seemed to look him through and through. If he beheld
only a sleek and comfortable visage, though there were a gold-laced
coat to adorn the picture and golden guineas to pay for it, he civilly
rejected the task and the reward; but if the face were the index of
anything uncommon in thought, sentiment or experience, or if he met a
beggar in the street with a white beard and a furrowed brow, or if
sometimes a child happened to look up and smile, he would exhaust all
the art on them that he denied to wealth.

Pictorial skill being so rare in the colonies, the painter became an
object of general curiosity. If few or none could appreciate the
technical merit of his productions, yet there were points in regard to