sense of detail, and to strike at once to the centre, presenting the
vital idea with decision, and departing from it with increasing
vagueness of treatment, until the whole area of his work was filled with
a harmonious and carefully graduated sense of suggestion. He arrived at
his method by an original way of studying the natural world. He did not,
as most artists do, take his paint-box and easel and devote himself to
description, and from his studies work out the finished picture.
Instead, he disencumbered himself of all materials for making memoranda,
and merely stood before the scene that impressed him, looking upon it
for hours at a time. Then he betook himself to his studio, and there
worked from the impression that his mind had formed under the
guiding-hand of his fancy, the result being that nature and human
thought appeared together upon the canvas, giving a double grace and
power. The process was subtle, and not to be described clearly even by
the painter himself, who found his work so largely a matter of
inspiration that he was never able to make copies of his pictures. They
grew out of his consciousness in a strange way whose secret he could not
grasp; to the end of his life he was an inquirer, always hesitating, and
never confident in anything except that art was truth, and that he who
followed it must walk in modesty and humbleness of spirit before the
greatness of its mystery. A man of ideas and sentiment, remote from the
clamor of schools and the complaints of critics, with recollections of
the grandest art of the world in his mind, and beautiful aspects of
nature continually before his eyes, he could hardly fail to work out a
style of marked originality. The effort, however, was slow; one does not
erase on the instant the impressions that eighteen years of study and
practice have made, and Fuller found his life at Deerfield none too long
to rid him of his respect for formulas.

His experience there was a continuous round of study. He completed