Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/28

 Art, be it remembered, is a thing of infinitely slow growth, each school building upon the foundations prepared by its forerunners, each generation adding its mite to the general store of knowledge and experience.

The English portrait men of the same period, for instance, although fine painters, simply followed in the tracks of the old masters. There is nothing especially original in the canvases of Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Romney. But this little band of landscapists, with no artistic parents, with no predecessors to point out the way, suddenly evolved a totally new art out of thin air. Their discoveries, it is true, were confined to the realm of color, but their achievements in that domain were sufficiently remarkable to give England a place which she could never otherwise have had among the art-producing nations of the world.