UR good-natured foreign critics, while admitting that there are American artists, ask insistently where there is such a thing as an American art. The ensuing notes are dedicated to a young painter who, without manifesting such originality and authenticity of invention as would constitute him the leader of a new national school, has reached high position in that classical and eclectic treatment of scholarly themes where all mannerisms merge, and where idiosyncrasies of personal style are almost refined away in the attainment of style itself.

It was my fortune to watch the European career of Mr. Bridgman from its beginnings, and to have forced upon my notice the disadvantages and the privileges that are peculiar to the Western republican in earning the consideration of the world of culture which exists on the other continent. That world of culture,

without meaning to do so, constitutes itself a close corporation. If the republican aspirant acquires some traces of that accent of civilization which is the freemasonry of the educated circles, his accomplishments are his reproach. He is asked, if a painter, why he does not bring into the world's art some national flavor, like the passion of Munkacsy, or the embroidery of Fortuny, instead of emulating the faded perfections of traditional art. He is charged to remain provincial at his peril. If he insists on falling into the line of art-progress in its classical development, every merit he assumes is liable to be imputed as a fault, and the suavities and accomplishments he may acquire, such as would be recognized as perfections in the European, are apt to be blamed upon him as the little hypocrisies of the renegade. That the subject of this paper has conquered a marked place, not by in

er.

Frederick A. Bridgman was, I believe, among the first American students who entered the atelier of Gérôme, in the Beaux-Arts school at Paris. The little group who succeeded in obtaining admission at the date of Bridgman's entrance had been rebuffed and refused time and again. Minister Bigelow had asserted that he could solicit no more, and the news from the school was always the convenient news that it was full. At length, one summer day, the present Professor Eakins, of the Philadelphia Academy, then a slender and not unprepossessing boy, bearded Count Nieuwerkerke in his den, having obtained access by the device of complete ignorance of French, combined with a successful deafness whenever a refusal was pronounced by a lackey; this effectual champion soon wearied the minister of the Emperor's household into signing a pass for the whole list of American aspirants; and Bridgman, on a foggy autumn morning, entered as of right into the crowded school where some of the rest of us were already working and watching with interest the embarrassment of our fellow-countryman.

I remember his entrance pretty distinctly. The last of a series of bleak rooms, whose doors stud a long corridor painted with Raphael's Bible, is the atelier of Gérôme. At the head of the entry, and nearest to our door, a man dressed like a gendarme sits, eternally twisting up little tortillons, or paper stumps, to sell to the students; and the proper direction being easily got from this Cerberus, the admission into the largest and most disreputably noisy of the government art schools is achieved. Bridgman, like every freshman, was greeted with cries of sarcastic joy from about thirty throats. The youngest apprentice is always received with delight, by none more so than by his predecessor

qualities. The picture presented by the school-room on the advent of the latest American must have been to him memorable. A barn-like interior, with the peculiar Rembrandt lighting conferred by a single lofty window, so that the derisive voices proceeding from every corner belonged to bodies at first invisible; rows of students arranged about the model's dais on the principle of the Indians around William Penn, the first semicircle squatting on the floor or on color boxes, the next row sitting, the next standing, and the outside ranks climbing upon high stools; a tympan over the doorway into a small hat-room covered with large and very gross caricatures of the more notable students of this and preceding generations; under the wooden pedestal of the plaster Mars in the vestry-room, a prisoner (this hostage, either at the epoch of Bridgman's admission or directly after, had complained at the bureau of being interrupted at his work, and was forced daily into the wooden box for about a week, until he recalcitrated one morning, and fought out his liberation)—such were the spectacles that greeted our Brooklyn youth as a freshman in the most unruly art school of Europe. Armed with an immense portfolio filled with "Ingres" paper, he fell very quietly to work, and a kind of chivalry extended to his foreignership exempted him, as in the case of all Americans, from the wood and soap fetching-from every tax, indeed, except the initiation breakfast fee. He was also spared the usual and sufficiently brutal ordeal of hazing, which he could watch with greater interest exemplified in the persons of others. The native students are usually made to pose as nude models, to sing songs to the accompaniment of mock choruses, to dance, and to perform any gymnastic feat within their compass. He had early opportunities of witnessing the sickening

In the recesses classical games of very French complexion were organized. Choristers, wearing their shirts externally, and holding lighted matches for tapers, would wind through the studio, singing ribald songs to sacred airs, and circulating among the wet paintings precariously and not always safely. Or the fight of Romulus and Tatius, from David's picture, would be enacted-in costume-with easels and portfolios for shields, or "the metopes of the Parthenon" would be imitated, with a solemn collision of two forces riding quadrupedal stools, in a very measured and Phidian manner.

Of this pandemonium Bridgman became a tolerant but hardly a participating member, saving his reputation by smiling at every turbulent jest, but being always too busy at the moment to mix in the louder demonstrations. He had a knack, never before equalled, of being industrious with a disengaged and Bohemian air; he would plunge into the labors of the ants, all the while laughing at the vagaries of the butterflies so heartily that they thought in good faith he was of their party. With a beaming face of good-nature turned on the escapades of the idle apprentice, he would be found perpetually doing the work of the industrious one, absorbing the nutriment of the school with his whole heart while appearing to laugh school study to scorn. When he seemed only intent on learning the amusements of a student's gaudy nights, he was really dreaming amorously, like good Paolo Ucello, of the tender mysteries of perspective, or cultivating a mathematician's liaison with curves of the higher orders. In this way he became technically learned without being unpopular, correcting the obvious superiority of his drawings with

At the old town of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, he made that summer the acquaintance of Robert Wylie, the regretted American, whose personal magnetism began about this time to draw around him a colony of artistic tourists in the pretty little hamlet and chain of water-mills he had discovered dreaming on the Aven River. It has become a sort of university town for artists since, owing to the impulse Wylie gave it. An agreeable and harmonious party of American and English students bore down upon the village in that first year of Bridgman's residence there, swamping the Hôtel des Voyageurs, putting Madame Feutry to strange devices to feed and bed us, overflowing into the adjacent house of Tanguy, the notary, and surprising the inhabitants on fair days with a totally new line of purchasers of Breton costumes. The jolly notary, who fairly moped when he could not have the society of the artists around the tavern table, was custodian of the keys of a rotten old country house, the Château de Les-Aven, and readily let us open studio there, among the delights of a garden run to seed, and of salon walls from which were dropping old canvases badly painted with Watteau subjects. Studio hours were instituted, the villagers were trained as models, and a healthful and improving system of work organized. Marie Mower, possessed of a waxen complexion and a fine red petticoat, was probably the first model whom Bridgman studied in this academy. A good man, with black hair reaching to his waist, but without any family or Christian name that we ever discovered, was another favorite with the fraternity; and this quaint old fellow I discovered one morning at sunrise, leaning against a wall in a smuggler-like attitude, with Bridgman painting away from him for dear life, having surreptitiously bribed him to posture between hours for his private and special benefit. What chance was there for the others against a comrade who worked so unfairly as this? Bridgman positively enjoyed making the