A DEFINiTIO^ WANTED.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 88, 15 April 1911, Page 10

A DEFINiTIO^ WANTED.

Precisely when a painter or a musician or a .sculptor is an American is a conundrum. There's John Sargent, for example, who is so proudly claimed by us as true blue Yankee; possibly because he was born in Florence and studied in Paris. His art is French, his brushwork is Gallic, his .way of -envisaging character is wholly individual ; I but since Whistler's death he is ivi'erj red to as the greatest living An:oiican painter. What is really Ameiican about nis work? Wns Whistler, any moi" Ihnn Poe. American? Is Victor Herbert's music American? .We mean his serious, not his lijiht efforts. Herbert is Irish, he studied his art in Geimany, i and in spirit he as more patnotic. than a scoie of Albany politicians. * Sir I Benjamin West painted veiy British pictures, and he wan a Quaker, hailing from Philadelphia ; Gilbert Stuart, born in Jutland, was iKoie American. He lived iieru, and his portraits fairly breathe the national type. The two greatest living engravers on wood, Timothy Cole and 1 Henry Wolf, are English and Alsatian lespectively, yet w-a claim both, and lightly, as American artists. What, then, is an American artist? — Now York Sun.