Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/308

LANDSCAPE PAINTING full height of their powers, but who were established at home on this side of the Atlantic—it will be seen that the French were not mistaken in announcing the appearance on the Western horizon of a new and original school of art. Since the date above mentioned, art in America has made such rapid strides that a roll-call of American artists of the first class taken to-day would have to include three or four times as many names as could have been mustered in 1885. And it is a significant fact that this increase in the number of American artists, and in the quality of their output, has been coincident with a phenomenal decrease in the number of really great artists at present practising abroad. This decrease has been particularly marked in France, which, during the larger part of the nineteenth [242]