Among the first serious efforts to draw were the Egyptian square and
pointed things, animals and men. The most that artists of that day
succeeded in doing was to preserve the fashions of the time. Their
drawings tell us that men wore their beards in bags. They show us,
also, many peculiar head-dresses and strange agricultural
implements. Artists of that day put down what they saw, and they saw
with an untrained eye and made the record with an untrained hand; but
they did not put in false details for the sake of glorifying the
subject. One can distinguish a man from a mountain in their work, but
the arms and legs embroidered upon Mathilde's tapestry, or the figures
representing family history on an Oriental rug, are quite as correct
in drawing and as little of a puzzle. As men became more intelligent,
hence spiritualised, they began to express themselves in ideal ways;
to glorify the commonplace; and thus they passed from Egyptian
geometry to gracious lines and beautiful colouring.

Indian pottery was the first development of art in America and it led
to the working of metals, followed by drawing and portraiture. Among
the Americans, as soon as that term ceased to mean Indians, art took a
most distracting turn. Europe was old in pictures, great and
beautiful, when America was worshipping at the shrine of the chromo;
but the chromo served a good turn, bad as it was. It was a link
between the black and white of the admirable wood-cut and the true
colour picture.

Some of the Colonists brought over here the portraits of their
ancestors, but those paintings could not be considered "American" art,
nor were those early settlers Americans; but the generation that
followed gave to the world Benjamin West. He left his Mother Country
for England, where he found a knighthood and honours of every kind