Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/309

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ART century, certainly led the world in all matters connected with art. Yet in France to-day we will search in vain for any such body of painters as made up the wonderful school of Barbizon, which, in the fifty years beginning with 1830 and ending with 1880, gave the world the greatest art it has seen since the Italian, Dutch, and Spanish Renaissance of the sixteenth century.

It could hardly be expected, I suppose, that this glorious time of blossom and fruitage should repeat itself in France during our own time. Indeed, all history has shown that things do not so happen in the domain of art. Art is a plant whose seed germinates only under certain special and favoring conditions. These conditions are really epochal in their character, and they rarely recur in the life of any one nation; or, if by some specially happy chance they do [243]