The beginnings of art in America were confined almost exclusively to portrait painting. In the earliest colonial times unskilled limners came from the mother country and made grotesque effigies of our statesmen and divines. As the settlements developed and the amenities of life increased better men came, and native painters were found, until about the end of the eighteenth century a portrait school of surprising merit arose, founded on the contemporary English school, and developed men like Copley, Stuart, and Sully. The other branches of painting, however,--history, allegory, genre, still life, landscape, and the rest,--were rarely attempted, and usually with unsatisfactory results. Probab…
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