660 Painting in America. America, beginning with portraiture, which has, perhaps, failed to realize its early promise — is now most strongly represented in landscape and marine subjects; that true historic painting is at a somewhat low ebb ; that, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the natural history painters are of no high order of merit ; but that painters of genre subjects and still-life are asserting themselves with a vigour and a display of talent that argue well for the future. A notice of American Art which does not deal with living men must necessarily be very incomplete, and to a certain extent misleading ; for several men who are yet working, made for themselves a name as early as many who now rank in the history of the past : and it is to the present and the future rather than to the past, that the history of American Art belongs.
