Old World was of incalculable value to him in the method of painting
which he afterward made his own, and, in point of fact, gave him his
first decided inclination toward it. Its best influence, however, was in
giving him confidence in himself, and assurance of the reasonableness of
the views which he had already begun to entertain. He had been led
before to regard the old masters as superior to rivalry and incapable of
weakness, superhuman characters, indeed, whose works should discourage
effort. Instead of this, however, he found them to be men like himself,
with their share of defect and error, yet made grand by inspiration and
idea, and this knowledge greatly encouraged him, a man who of all
painters was at once the most modest and devoted. Most painters who
resort to Europe to study the old art find there one or two men whose
works make the strongest appeals to their liking, and, devoting their
attention chiefly to these, they show ever after the marks of an
influence that is easily traced to its source; Fuller, however, observed
with broader and more penetrating view, and, as his works show, seems to
have studied men less than principles, and to have been filled with
admiration, not so much for particular practices as for the common and
lofty spirit in which the greatest of the world's painters labored. The
colorists and chiaroscurists, such as Titian on the one hand and
Rembrandt on the other, seem to have impressed him particularly, and of
all men Titian the most strongly, as many of his pictures testify, and
as such glowing works as the Arethusa and the Boy and Bird unmistakably
show. Yet it was not in matter or in manner, but in the expression of a
great truth, that the old masters most strongly affected him. He felt at
once, and grew to admire greatly, their repose and modesty, calm
strength and undisturbed temper, and drew from them the important
principle that true genius may be known by its confessing neither pride
nor self-distrust. The serenity of their style he sought at once to
appropriate, and thereafter worked as much as possible in imitation of