tion as a painter had he continued to seek it, and some regret at his loss to the arts may be permitted, even in view of what the world at large owes to his scientific studies in the priceless gift of the Magnetic Telegraph. Professor Morse died in New York, April 2, 1872. Charles C. Ingham, an eminent portrait painter, born in Dublin, 1797, died in New York, Dec. 10, 1863. He was an earnest co-laborer with Morse in the establishment of our National Academy, which has always owed and still owes much in its exhibitions to the productions of his easel-his exquisite pictures of fair women and brave men. He filled for some years the office of vicepresident of the academy. Robert W. Weir, who has been for many years, as now, professor of drawing at the Military Academy at West Point, holds a distinguished place among the older of our living artists. He was born on the 18th of January, 1803, at New Rochelle, in the state of New York. It is to his pencil that we owe that best of the pictures in the Capitol at Washington, the Embarkation of the Pilgrims, a work eminently illustrative of the thoughtfulness and conscientiousness of his genius. He has painted numerous historical compositions, genre subjects, landscapes, and portraits of great excellence. Thomas S. Cummings, another of the founders of the Academy, and always one of its officers, held high rank at this period in the department of miniature painting. Mr. Cummings was born in Bath, England, in 1804, and became a resident of the United States in early childhood. John G. Chapman, born in Alexandria, Virginia, on the 11th of August, 1808, now residing in Italy, is well known as the painter of the Baptism of Pocahontas, in the Capitol at Washington, and as the author of innumerable designs in our illustrated books. William S. Mount, born in Setauket, L. I., Nov. 1807, died there, Nov.19, 1868, was the first American artist who achieved success in subjects of a purely national character, in a series of pictures of the humbler features of our country life. His Bargaining for a Horse, Haymaker's Dance, the Power of Music, and other light themes, have been often engraved, and are familiar to everybody. Francis W. Edmonds, born 1806, died 1860, produced many pleasant pictures in the same vein of quiet humor with Mount. Wiliam Page, born in Albany, Jan. 23, 1811, has distinguished himself, at home and abroad, in the field of portraiture. IIe painted, also, many excellent classic themes, among them two Venuses, which were greatly admired. Mr. Page has been President of the Academy since May, 1871. Henry Inman, born in Utica, N. Y., Oct. 20, 1801, died Jan. 17, 1846, was one of the most eminent of American artists. He was a pupil of Jarvis, whom he soon surpassed, excellent as Jarvis was. He was a man of remarkable versatility, and worked with equal facility in portraiture, landscape, and history. He was a guest of Wordsworth, during a visit to England in 1844, at which time he painted a characteristic picture of the great poet, and that charming illustration of the scenery of his region, the Rydal Water. While in England, he painted, also, portraits of Dr. Chalmers, Macaulay, and other eminent people. The exhibition which was made, after his death, of his works, was one of the most interesting and varied ever seen in New York. With the advent of Asher Brown Durand as a landscape painter, about 1828, begins the development of high art in the department of landscape painting in this country. The few artists who had attempted landscapes before him, had drawn, not from nature so much as from those conventional rules which, both in Europe and America, had supplanted nature. Mr. Durand, already a skilful artist, had from the beginning gone to the forest, the mountain, the lake, and the glen, for his inspiration, and his one thought was to reproduce in all its beauty of form, position, variety, and color, nature as its perfection gladdened his eyes. Mr. Durand was born in Jefferson, N. J., Aug. 21, 1796. His father was a watchmaker and in a small way an engraver of cyphers, coats of arms, and designs upon silver and gold. The son had from early childhood an insatiable taste for the arts of design, and when a mere lad, was remarkable for the felicity of his designs for the plate, &c., of his father's customers, and for his deftness and skill in transferring them to the metal. He had also tried his hand at engraving and printing watch papers and other little sketches which he traced on thin sheets of copper hammered out from spare pennies. He acquired a very thorough knowledge of every branch of the engraver's art under Mr. Maverick, whose partner he afterwards became, and attained the reputa tion of being the finest engraver of the New to embody it in those grand allegorical pic Though cut off in his prime, Cole has left a reputation which in some respects has never been surpassed in this country. Thos. Doughty, the third of the trio of our founders of the American School of landscape art, (born in Philadelphia July 19, 1793, and died in New York, July 24, 1856) was not the peer of either Durand or Cole. The influence of the old conventional school which thought nature needed to be improved before she was presentable, and perhaps, too, the lack of that lofty genius which enabled the others to overleap conventional rules, kept him in bondage throughout his career. Still his landscapes possess a large measure of poetic beauty. He did not enter on his profession till he was nearly twenty-eight years of age. Without losing at any time his fondness for nature, his poetic temperament led him Daniel Huntington, born in New York, Oct. 14, 1816, a pupil of Morse, and Elliott, is one of the most versatile and accomplished of American artists. He has painted, and with eminent success in every case, portraits, historical, allegorical, and genre pieces, and landscapes of wonderful beauty. His "Mercy's Dream," "Christiana and her Children," "The Shepherd's Boy," "The Marys at the Sepulchre," "The Good Samaritan," "Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel," "The Republican Court," Chocurua Peak,” “Sowing the Word," and his numerous portraits of the highest style of art, all give evidence of the great scope of his powers. Mr. Huntington was President of the National Academy from 1862 to 1870. Charles Loring Elliott, born in Scipio, N. Y., in Dec. 1812, died at Albany, Aug. 25, 1868, was for more than twenty years before his death regarded as the most eminent portrait painter in this country, succeeding almost without any interval to the great reputation of Inman. Some of his male heads have never been surpassed in vigor and thorough soulfulness. George A. Baker, of New York, is equally distinguished for his heads of women and children. Henry Peters Gray, born in New York in 1819, holds a high position as a painter of portraits, and of small pictures his domestic passages of negro and other of genre and history. His "Pride of the humble life; Healy and Lang for brilliant Village," "Building of the Ship," "Venus portraiture; James Hamilton for marine and Paris," etc., are admirable. Mr. Gray views; Wenzler and Stone for their female was President of the Academy 1870-1871. heads, and May in historical subjects. Thomas P. Rossiter, born in Sept. 1818, died in 1871, was a man of rare gifts in art, and had painted many large historical and scriptural pieces of great merit. Arthur F. Tait is particularly happy in pictures of game and sporting life, a branch successfully followed by the late William Ranney. Thos. Hicks, born Oct. 18, 1823, is among the most popular of the present group of portrait painters in New York. He completed" in 1865, a large picture of the authors of the United States. Edwin White's great picture of "Washington Resigning his Commission," painted for the legislature of Maryland, is a fair example of this artist's style and class of subjects. Emanuel Leutze, born in Wurtemburg, May 24, 1816, died in Washington, D. C., July 18, 1868, was, perhaps, the best of our historical painters. From his 15th to his 28th year, he resided in Philadelphia, but then went abroad to study art, and remained eighteen years. He returned to the United States in 1859, and painted many pictures on topics connected with American Revolutionary and later history. Among the eminent artists of a somewhat younger class, the first place as a landscape painter must, we think, be given to Frederic E. Church, born at Hartford, May, 1826. A pupil of Thomas Cole, he has all his master's genius, with an equally careful industry in thoroughly finishing his work. His "Niagara Falls" achieved for him the highest reputation, and his "Heart of the Andes," Cotopaxi," "The Icebergs," and "Rainy Season in the Tropics," have maintained it. J. F. Cropsey, born in Staten Island, Feb. 18, 1823, has also an excellent reputation, both in Europe and America, as a landscape artist. He resided in England from 1856 to 1863. J. F. Kensett is a little older, having been born in 1818. He was at first a bank note engraver. His first scenes and mountain views are greatly admired. L. R. Mignot, whose tropical atmospheres and vegetation are wonderfully faithful, now resides abroad, as does F. R. Gignoux, a native of France, but resident for nearly thirty years in the United States, and first President of the Brooklyn Art Academy. His "Niagara by Moonlight," and "Niagara in Winter," are both very beautiful. The Hart brothers, William and James M., of Scotch birth, have won high fame by their landscapes. Albert Bierstadt has immortalized himself by his large paintings of Rocky Mountain Scenery, his views in the YoF. O. C. Darley has achieved a world- Semite, etc. He has a very high reputation wide fame, by his designs and book illustra- abroad. Our list would be incomplete withtions. Nothing can surpass, in beauty of out the names of Gifford, Casilear, Hubconception, his charming outline drawings bard, Webber, Gay, Brown, Shattuck, Inness, from Irving's Rip Van Winkle” and Colman, and the lamented T. Buchanan Read. Sleepy Hollow," or his compositions from We pass now to a brief glance at the reJudd's novel, "Margaret." He has illus-markable performance of our young land in trated a fine edition of Cooper's works in thirty-two volumes, and Dickens' works in fifty-six volumes, as well as numerous minor works. John W. Ehninger has been most successful in the same walk with Darley, besides which he has made many happy genre pictures in oil. E. D. E. Green is justly famous for the classic beauty of his female heads; J. T. Peele for his dainty pictures of childhood; Rowse and Colyer for their charming heads in crayon; W. J. Hays for his animal subjects; Eastman Johnson for P. F. Rothermel, born July 8, 1817, of Philadelphia, is eminent in historical subjects. The Lambdins, of Philadelphia, father and son, hold a distinguished place in the art, the elder as portrait painter, the latter as painter of poetical and dramatic scenes. 66 the noble art of Sculpture, a performance confessedly surpassed by no modern school. Sculpture, as the more costly art, and as the less intelligible to the popular eye, of course followed painting in its progress among us as elsewhere. The surprise is that it should have followed so speedily and with such grand strides. It is possible that this happy result may have sprung in a measure from the circumstance that our first foreign visitors and instructors in marble art were men of the highest genius, instead of Another noble statue of Washington, by Canova, adorned the Capitol of North Carolina, at Raleigh, until that edifice was unhappily destroyed, and the statue with it, the third-rate talent only which our early painters brought to us. It is seldom amiss to make a good start, and much is saved where there is nothing left to be unlearned. One of our first heralds of the chisel ap-by fire, in 1831. peared in 1791, when Ceracchi, an eminent Of our native sculptors, perhaps the first Italian sculptor, arrived at Philadelphia. He who gave indications of talent above the was scarcely less celebrated as a revolution-humblest mediocrity, was John Frasee, born ist than as an artist, and leaving France when in Rockaway, in New Jersey, July 18th, 1790. the dangers there grew too thick around A bust which he executed in 1824 of John him, he marched over to the New World, Wells, now in Grace Church, in New York, with a scheme for building us a grand mar-was, says Dunlap in his "Arts of Design, ble monument to Liberty. His project was the first portrait in marble ever attempted in submitted to Congress, which was then in the United States. Ceracchi's works were session, but that body supposed that the probably only modelled here, and were afterpublic funds could be employed, at the mo- ward put into stone at home. Frasee made ment, more advantageously in the cause of excellent busts of Chief Justice Marshall, of Liberty, than in honoring her with sculptured Daniel Webster, and others. "He had adshrines. Washington, however, gave his vanced," adds Dunlap in 1834, "to a perpersonal assent to the idea, and headed a fection which leaves him without a rival at private subscription, by means of which it present in this country." To those who was hoped the required thirty thousand dol- know any thing of our sculptors of this day lars could be procured. Not an inch, though, we hardly need say, that Dunlap lived too of the proposed hundred feet of stone ever long ago to witness the real beginning of its rose from the ground. Instead of the mon- brilliant history, and that the talent of Frasee, ument, the sculptor employed his chisel upon excellent as it was, did not even indicate the busts; and, among others, executed fine por- high rank the art now holds. traits of the commander-in-chief, of Alexander Hamilton, of Thomas Jefferson, Geo. Clinton, John Jay, and Paul Jones. On returning to France, Ceracchi's red republicanism reappeared in a madder form than ever, and he plotted to take the hated life of Napoleon, then first consul, even in the sanctity of his own studio, and while he should be sitting for his bust. He was afterward guillotined on a charge of complicity in the famous scheme of the "infernal machine." Yet earlier than the time of Ceracchi's residence in the United States, Houdon, a celebrated French sculptor, was invited to visit this country for the express purpose of perpetuating in marble the form and features of Washington. The result of his visit was the full-length statue which now adorns the vestibule of the Capitol at Richmond, in Virginia. The sculptor's legend on this work reads thus: "Fait par Houdon, Citoyen Français, 1788." The Father of his country is here represented of life size, and in the military style of the Revolution. The figure stands, resting on the right foot, having the left somewhat advanced, with the knee bent. The left hand rests on a bundle of fasces, on which hang a military cloak and a small sword, a plough leaning near. Shobal Vail Clevenger, who was born at Middleton, Ohio, in 1812, and died at sea in 1843, left behind him admirable busts of Webster, Clay, Allston, Van Buren, and others. His early death interrupted a progress which might have extended far toward the point which our sculptors have since reached. In the year 1805, on the 6th of September, Horatio Greenough was born in Boston, to fill a distinguished place in the annals of American sculpture. He received his earliest instruction from a resident French artist named Binon, and at the age of twenty went abroad. After modelling busts of John Quincy Adams, Chief Justice Marshall, and many others, he executed, at the order of Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, his Chanting Cherubs, which was the first original group from the chisel of an American artist. This work was made in Florence, where he had permanently established his studio at this time. In 1831 he went to Paris to model the bust of Lafayette, and thenceforward received liberal commissions, especially from his countrymen abroad. Through the influence of his generous friend, Cooper, he received a commission from Congress for the colossal statue of Washington, which now stands so grandly on the great lawn opposite the east front of |