AMERICAN MASTERS Casilcar, he was apprenticed for a short time to an engraver, and subsequently studied painting for a little while with Regis Gignoux, a pupil of Dela roche. For the rest he was self-taught. His contemporary, Frederick E. Church, younger than himself by a year, was seeking instruction from Thornas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, whose grand topographical landscapes the pupil was to follow in his studies of the Andes, of Niagara, and of other impressive regions. The young Inness, meanwhile, was independently studying the individual forms of nature. That he should be insessible to the influence of Cole was out of the question, and so late as 1865, when he was forty years old, and had returned from his first visit to Europe deeply impressed with the work of the Barbizon painters, we can detect in at least two pictures, Delaware Valley and the large Peace and Plenty of the Metropolitan Museum, that fondness for grandeur of distance and extent so characteristic of Cole. But we can also detect the expression of a fuller intimacy with the scene than Cole could give. Innesss own penetrating study of natural phenomena, indorsed for himself, no doubt, by the corresponding aim of the Barbizon painters to reach the inwardness of the landscape, had enabled him more thoroughly to comprehend the vastness to collate