Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/307

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ART received in Paris under exclusively French influences. In spite of this fact, the French critics felt in the work of Sargent, of John Alexander, of Melchers, of Alexander Harrison and of Saint-Gaudens, an exotic note, anew [sic] point of view, whose chief characteristic was an unusual directness and clarity of vision, coupled with a corresponding simplicity of statement. A great French painter once said to me: 'You Americans have one advantage over all others. You have no traditions. You can look straight at nature out of your own eyes, while our vision is clouded and obscured by the inheritance of a thousand years."

If to the above list of names we add a few others—Winslow Homer, Homer Martin, John La Farge, George Inness, Alexander H. Wyant, all those of painters who were at that time at the [241]