Dear Mr. McBride: I appreciate the good will shown in your review of the watercolors I showed at the Whitney Galleries. There is a point in it, however, on which I . think it necessary to take issue with you. In the review you speak of your enthusiasm for my work and call me a "swell American painter." This attitude on your part I heartily approve, but you further state that my style is French and that if Picasso had never lived I would have had to think out a style of my own. Now is that nice, Mr. McBride~ And if it is, does it mean anything~ My own answer is that it does not, for reasons, some of which are furnished below. In speaking of French art as opposed to American the assumption is made that there is an American art. Where is it and how does one recognize it? Has any American artist created a style which was unique in painting, completely divorced from European models? To soften this flock of hard questions I will answer the last---no, J. S. Copley was working in the style of the English portrait painters and to my taste doing better work than they did. Whistler's best work was directly inspired by the Japanese while he was housed and fed in England. Ryder's technique derives from Rembrandt by devious ways and Homer's style is no style at all but the natural method of a man who has seen a lot of photographic illustration and likes it. I have never heard the names of the European masters that Eakins particularly admired but from his work I should say that they included Rembrandt and Velasquez. These painters are now regarded as the best that America has produced. Suppose a selected show of the painting of Europe and America for the last four hundred years were held, would the American contribution stand isolated as a distinct point of view, unrelated to the European: Again the answer is, no. Since this is obviously true, why should an American artist today be expected to be oblivious to European thought when Europe is a hundred times closer to us than it ever was before: If a Scotchman is working on television do similarly interested American inventors avoid all information as to his methods! Not if they can help it. If a Norwegian has the most interesting theory of atomic physics do American scientists make a bonfire of his works on the campus! Hardly. If Darwin says that the species evolved, do American educators try to keep one hundred per cent Americans from hearing it: Yes, they do in Tennessee. Picasso, I suppose, is not a hundred per cent Spaniard otherwise he wouldn't disregard the home industries and live in Paris. But regardless of that fact he has been incomparably the dominant painter of the world for the last twenty years and there are very few of the young painters of any country who have not been influenced by him. The ones who were not, simply chose some other artist to be influenced.

I did not spring into the world fully equipped to paint the kind of pictures I want to paint. It was therefore necessary to ask people for advice. This resulted in my attending the school of Robert Henri where I received encouragement and a vague idea of what it was all about. After leaving the direct influence of Mr. Henri I sought other sources of information and as artists whose work. I admired were not personally available I tried to find out what they were thinking about by looking at their pictures. Chief among those consulted were Aubrey Beardsley, ToulouseLautrec, Femand. Leger, and Picasso. This process of learning is from my observation identical with that followed by all artists. The only variation lies in the choice of work to be studied. If Picasso had been a practicing artist in Akron, Ohio, I would have admired his work just the same. I admit the study and the influence and regard it as all to the good. But why one should be penalized for a Picasso influence and not for a Rembrandt or a Renoir influence I can't understand. I can't understand that any more than I can understand how one is supposed to be devoid of influence. I never heard of or saw anyone who was. Picasso himself has as many influences as Carter has pills, as Tad frequently said and I suppose this shows a Tad influence. In view of all this I insist that I am as American as any other American painter. I was born here as were my parents and their parents before, which fact makes me an American whether I want to be or not. While I admit the foreign influence I strongly deny speaking their language. If my work were an imitation I am sure it couldn't arouse in you that enthusiasm from which, you state in your review, the bridles were almost removed. Over here we are racially English-American, IrishAmerican, German-American, French, Italian, Russian, or Jewish-American, and artistically we are Rembrandt-American, Renoir-American, and Picasso-American. But since we live here and paint here we are first of all, American.

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Robert Henri On Individuality of Ideas and Freedom of Expression 1909 Outline the conditions Henri believes necessary to the creation of national art in America Art in the United States as in any othe... View the full answer