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into life by the persistent caress of his brush in spite of his disregard
of the rest of the canvas, as with the seated figure in
A Lady With Setter
Dog
(1885).
But taken all in all, Eakins remains an academician in homespun,
-a model of stubborness in the pursuit of an ideal- temperate as
that may have been. He was a high type of the hard-working art-student
of the mid-nineteenth century who returned from Paris to a native town
that was so thoroughly cut off from the living currents of art that the
ideas he brought back with him continued to be regarded dangerously
liberal for the next half century. His idols to the end of his life in 1916
were those of his school years in Paris-all academicians of that period:
Laurens, Bonnat, R egnault, and above all Gerome-"the greatest painter
of the nineteenth century," he often said. Fortuny was another. And
there is no evidence that he ever changed the opinion of Delacroix he
wrote in his notebooks during his Paris years: "Ses tableaux sont abomi–
nables et generalement d'un dessin impossible."
The greatest pitfall in ancestor-hunting is over-eagerness. There
is no cause for national embarrassment in the fact that painting in the
United States during the nineteenth century may not have produced
figures of the international stature of such American literary figures as
Melville or Henry James, or because contemporary painting in this
country may not yet have produced artists of the international impor–
tance of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or the photographer Alfred
Stieglitz. Nor is this a justification for disregarding international stan–
dards, or for a loss of sense of international proportion in judging the
virtues of artists of limited local, or regional interest. We are only too
glad to pit Melville, James, Wright and Stieglitz against all comers in
their fields; we should frankly face the importance of looking at our
lesser men in the light of a similar standard and of facing the ver–
dict. Eakins is undoubtedly a greater painter than his American fol–
lowers in somewhat the same tradition such as Duveneck, Henri and
Bellows, and his predecessors back to Copley; but we must not forget his
contemporaries abroad such as Degas or Renoir, or even the brilliant
European academicians of that period, his own French idols and others.
Nothing is gairied for contemporary American art, or for the art of the
future by closing our eyes to international standards in the fine arts,
or by seeking to blow up a minor talent to fill the lack of a major one.
But the inspiration of a sound artistic expression-even a national
flowering~need
not come from a great world figure. Frequently the
fresh and ingenuous expression of a smaller man, innocent of academic
ambitions but deeply imbued with his own passions or the emotional
life of his community, has a more stimulating power than the most
competent exponent of the academic tradition. And this was what Mex–
ico apparently found in Jose Guadalupe Posada in the early nineteen-
