true master and inhabitant!


April 22d.--We have been recently to the studio of Mr. Brown [now dead],
the American landscape-painter, and were altogether surprised and
delighted with his pictures. He is a plain, homely Yankee, quite
unpolished by his many years' residence in Italy; he talks
ungrammatically, and in Yankee idioms; walks with a strange, awkward gait
and stooping shoulders; is altogether unpicturesque; but wins one's
confidence by his very lack of grace. It is not often that we see an
artist so entirely free from affectation in his aspect and deportment.
His pictures were views of Swiss and Italian scenery, and were most
beautiful and true. One of them, a moonlight picture, was really
magical,-- the moon shining so brightly that it seemed to throw a light
even beyond the limits of the picture,--and yet his sunrises and sunsets,
and noontides too, were nowise inferior to this, although their
excellence required somewhat longer study, to be fully appreciated. I
seemed to receive more pleasure front Mr. Brown's pictures than from any
of the landscapes by the old masters; and the fact serves to strengthen
me in the belief that the most delicate if not the highest charm of a
picture is evanescent, and that we continue to admire pictures
prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities that first won
them their fame have vanished. I suppose Claude was a greater
landscape-painter than Brown; but for my own pleasure I would prefer one
of the latter artist's pictures,--those of the former being quite changed
from what he intended them to be by the effect of time on his pigments.
Mr. Brown showed us some drawings from nature, done with incredible care
and minuteness of detail, as studies for his paintings. We complimented
him on his patience; but he said, "O, it's not patience,--it's love!" In
fact, it was a patient and most successful wooing of a beloved object,