Twenty or even ten years ago there may have been some
truth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had no
foreign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of a
particular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it would
be difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to a
catalogue. They have, through long work in America and under American
conditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverable
resemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specific
examples, who would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or the
decorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either had
been a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes or
delicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name of
Gerome? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters we
have who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work which
still marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishable
to-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified by
John Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolus
simply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painters
who have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified its
technic to suit their own purposes and are at least as different from the
Impressionists of France as are the Impressionists of Scandinavia.
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