Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/304

LANDSCAPE PAINTING is so intensely "Dutch" that we may know the characteristics of the Dutch people as well by studying their art as by reading all that has been written about them. Now, it is a curious thing that, while we in America have, for the past twenty years, been discussing the question of whether any such thing as a national school of art exists here, in Paris "l'Ecole Américaine" has for fully as long a time been recognized as a distinct school, with a marked personal note of its own. And it must be remembered that this verdict was based upon a very partial and imperfect knowledge of American art even as it then existed; for the "American School," as it was known to the French writers of 1885, embraced only a certain number of young American artists who were living in France, and whose whole art training had been [240]