which were the heads of ladies with strange-coloured hair; of
leather-covered flatirons bearing flowers of unnatural colour, or of
shovels decorated with "snow scenes." The whole nation began to revel
in "art." It was a low variety, yet it started toward a goal which
left the chromo at the rear end of the course, and it was a better
effort than the mottoes worked in worsted, which had till then been
the chief decoration in most homes. If the "buckeye" was
hand-painting, this was "single-hand" painting, and it did not take a
generation to bring the change about, only a season. After the
Philadelphia exhibition the daughter of the household "painted a
little" just as she played the piano "a little." To-day, much less
than a man's lifetime since then, there is in America a universal love
for refined art and a fair technical appreciation of pictures, while
already the nation has worthily contributed to the world of
artists. Sir Benjamin West, Sully, and Sargent are ours: Inness,
Inman, and Trumbull.

The curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York has declared that
portrait-painting must be the means which shall save the modern
artists from their sins. To quote him: "An artist may paint a bright
green cow, if he is so minded: the cow has no redress, the cow must
suffer and be silent; but human beings who sit for portraits seem to
lean toward portraits in which they can recognise their own features
when they have commissioned an artist to paint them. A man _will_
insist upon even the most brilliant artist painting him in trousers,
for instance, instead of in petticoats, however the artist-whim may
direct otherwise; and a woman is likely to insist that the artist who
paints her portrait shall maintain some recognised shade of brown or
blue or gray when he paints her eye, instead of indulging in a burnt
orange or maybe pink! These personal preferences certainly put a limit