big in composition, it compels great respect.

We have now reached the middle of the last century, when the influence
of the Barbizon school asserted itself and caused increasing interest in
landscape painting, a field which up to that time had been mixed up with
historical motives, as in a typical composite canvas by Cole (Thomas),
who generally ranks as the most important of the Hudson River School of
landscape painters. There is really not enough artistic moment to this
American group to dignify it by the name of a school. For historical
reasons, however, this classification is very convenient. Cole's four
sketches for the "Voyage of Life" show strong imagination, giving the
impression, however, that he was more interested in mythology than in
the art of painting.

The first intimation of a really original step in American outdoor
painting, as based on the discoveries of the school of 1825, the
Barbizon school, one receives in this gallery in a number of small
canvases by some of the men we have chosen to classify as the painters
of the Great West. Into this group are put Thomas Moran, Thomas Hill,
and Albert Bierstadt. They are so very closely identified with the West
that they are of particular interest to us. Their artistic careers were
as spectacular as their subjects. Stirred by the marvelous tales of the
great scenic wonders of the West, they heroically threw themselves into
a task that no artist could possibly master. They approached their
gigantic subjects with correspondingly large canvases, without ever
giving the essential element, of their huge motives, namely, a certain
feeling of scale, of monumentality, as compared to the pigmy size of the
human figure. Really great pictures of the Yellowstone, the Grand Cañon,
and the lofty mountain-tops still remain to be painted. The daring and
courage of these men has benefited our art very much in a technical