THE year 1876 is a memorable landmark in our industrial and artistic development. Then it was that the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia revealed for the first time to numbers of our people the artistic resources of the Old World. They were displayed not only in pictures and sculpture, but in the products of factories and workshops, and the lesson of the occasion was the commercial value as well as the desirableness of beauty. To the superior attractiveness of the foreign articles, in which the skill of the maker had been supplemented by artistic design and treatment, neither merchants nor public could be blind; and when, upon the close of the Exposition, a large number of these objects were presented to the City of Philadelphia, they were installed as a permanent exhibition of arts and crafts in one of the buildings at Fairmount Park. Then it was recognised that some practical step should be taken to give technical and artistic training to our own craftsmen. Accordingly, as the result of a citizen’s movement, was founded the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art, the first of its kind in this country.
The Centennial, however, only quickened and broadened forces that were already at work in the community. Gradually at first, and later with leaps and bounds, the little America of the Fathers had grown into a vast continent, already too small to confine the impetuous energies of its people. The increase and diffusion of wealth, and the growing facilities of oceanic transportation, prompted foreign travel, and made it easy; the barricades of national isolation were being broken down, and already the tide of travel toward Europe was in flood.
The familiarity with the art of the Old World, thus made possible to many, had already produced concrete results. In 1870 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was incorporated, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was granted a charter by the Legislature, which in the following year, at the request of the municipal authorities, passed an Act making an appropriation for a building in Central Park. These new museums, like the earlier Pennsylvania Academy, were organised by business and professional men. They were the product of the layman’s interest in art. And, whereas, in the case of the older institution in Philadelphia, the motive had been the modest one of introducing ” correct and elegant copies of works of the first masters in sculpture and painting,” now the enterprise of the promoters was more ambitious, and their wealth made it possible to supplement the necessary copies of antique sculpture with original works of painting. The American amateur had begun to invade the foreign picture-market and offer alluring inducements to private owners to part with their treasures. When, there-fore, the Centennial Exposition stirred the public imagination, there was already an active nucleus of organised and private appreciation of art around which the extended interest could gather. It served to give immense impetus to a movement already under way. But one thing more was neededa stirring among painters themselves; and this, by a happy chance, coincided in point of time with the Exposition.
During 1875 and 1876 the first harvest of Parisian teaching reached our country. A group of young painters arrived, trained in the newest methods of the French School, proclaiming its superiority, and equipped to prove it. They appeared at a moment when they could do much to draw attention to the Exposition, and also receive from it an indorsement of what they themselves stood for.
All along the line of artistic production it was realised that some approximation must be made to foreign methods and standards of taste, and here, at least in the department of painting, was a body of enthusiasts, eager and able to show the way.
If you study the magazines of the period, you will find the evidence of an immediate and continuing improvement in the quality of the illustrations. It was primarily due to the quick apprehension of new talent on the part of the editors, and then, later, to the additional opportunity given to the artist by the gradual development of the photo-engraving process. But this exceedingly interesting chapter in our native art is outside the scope of our present story. More to the point is it that many of these younger men became teachers in our art schools, and thus effectually spread the knowledge of the new technique among students, until the French method of teaching has become the basis of instruction in this country.
But the way of these enthusiasts was not altogether smooth. By the older men of the National Academy of Design they were regarded somewhat as revolutionaries; troublesome disturbers of almost sacred traditions ; dangerous, and not to be encouraged. Thus a cleavage in the ranks of painters ensued. Some of the older men, pre-eminently John La Farge, gave the new arrivals the support of their encouragement, and, as a consequence, a new organisation was effected. The Society of American Artists was founded in 1877, and incorporated the following year. John La Farge was elected president, and among its early members were Robert Swain Gifford, William Sartain, Louis C. Tiffany, J. Alden Weir, Will H. Low, William M. Chase, J. H. Twachtman, Abbott H. Thayer, Francis Lathrop, and D. Maitland Arm-strong. These names belong to the years 1877-1879, and were supplemented a little later by those of Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Edwin H. Blashfield, George de Forest Brush, Thomas Allen, J. Carroll Beckwith, Robert F. Blum, Kenyon Cox, Bruce Crane, Frank Duveneck, Birge Harrison, Frank Fowler, George Inness, Jr., H. Bolton Jones, Francis C. Jones, George W. Maynard, Frank D. Millet, John H. Niemeyer, Eastman Johnson, Walter L. Palmer, William T. Smedley, Dwight W. Tryon, Elihu Vedder, Frederick P. Vinton, Douglas Volk, Sarah C. Whitman, George Fuller, Thomas Hovenden, William L. Picknell, Arthur Quartley, Charles S. Reinhart, Alexander H. Wyant, and Theodore Robinson.
With very few exceptions these painters received their training abroad, and for the most part in Paris. Indeed, in those early years admission to the Society was in the nature of a final graduation of the studentship abroad. It is interesting to recall this roll of names, for, although William Morris Hunt and George Inness are absent, it includes practically all the men of the advance guard in that progress which has put American painting in line with the art of other countries. Nearly two-thirds of them are figure-painters, and the pro-duct of Academic training. It is this that we have now to consider.
As we have already seen, the three pioneers in the movement to FranceHunt, La Farge, and Innesscame under influences that existed in antagonism to the Academic teaching. But it was under the latter that the figure-painters of the next generation came. It was natural enough that the great teachers in the official schools should attract them. As Duveneck and Chase at Munich put themselves, respectively, under the famous Diez and Piloty, and Maynard and Millet under Van Lerius at the Academy at Antwerp, so the French students clustered around such eminent masters as Gérôme, Cabanel, Bouguereau, Boulanger, Lefebvre, Bonnat, and Carolus Duran.
The last named stands apart from the others in that he made the actual brushwork rather than the charcoal drawing the foundation of his method. Bonnat also was distinct, because in consequence of his close study of old Spanish painting he had modified his Academic training with a strongly naturalistic tendency. He painted, for example, wonderful portraits in which every inequality of the surface and texture of the flesh was faithfully renderedmarvels of characteristic physiognomy.
On the other hand, the rest of the masters we have mentioned were neither naturalistic in their motives nor skilful painters in their methods. Their aim was beauty of individual forms and elegance of line in composition; the basis of their method was perfectly finished drawing, to be subsequently coloured. They were not colourists, nor had their brushwork any character of distinction, while matters of light and atmosphere concerned them little. Yet they had not escaped entirely the influence of outside tendencies; for example, they frequently popularised their pictures by giving them a sentimental or anecdotal appeal.
It is no part of our purpose to attempt to show how American students were influenced individually by one or another of these masters, but rather to summarise results. What they acquired, briefly stated, was a precise and scholarly knowledge of the human form in its relation to painting. The crux that confronted them, on returning home to America, was the use to which this knowledge could be put. Those, who at this period or later remained in Paris after the conclusion of their student days, in a measure evaded the issue by devoting them-selves to the kind of subjects that were interesting the Frenchmen, and their work became French in feeling and character. But to those figure-painters who returned to America the problem was far more difficult.
They had returned because their sympathies were with their own country, but the latter offered them little encouragement. Abroad the figure-painters devoted themselves primarily to the representation of the nude; then to classic and historic subjects, or to costume or peasant genre. But in none of these directions was there much opening for the painter in America.
To the American public the nude was scarcely distinguishable from the naked. It had not the familiarity with culture that discovers in the human form the highest symbol of abstract beauty; and two centuries of Puritanical tradition and prejudice had engendered a prudishness that even today, while not quite so virulent, is still prevalent and hide-bound. The classics, as a mine of poetic thought and concrete ideals, were equally unfamiliar, while the scope of history had become narrowed down to episodes of the Revolution and the Civil War. Costume subjects smacked of an ” effete ” aristocracy, while the people over here who correspond to the ouvrier and peasant abroad lacked the latter’s individuality. The painter in search of the picturesque found himself confronted with the monotonous uniformity of store clothes, of a public-school average of manners, and of organised labour, regulated by union conventions.
This is how the home conditions appeared to the returning students, and it was not much exaggerated by their imaginations.
Meanwhile the influx of foreign pictures was increasing, and collectors who would have hesitated to buy a nude, a classical or historical subject, a costume or peasant genre, by an American, invested in the foreign article. For, an investment they considered it, and a safe one, since the foreign painters had received the official indorsement of their own country, in the shape of medals and honours. Such pictures, it was presumed, though in many cases erroneously, would always bring their money back with interest. Moreover, foreign things were the fashion. The Exposition and the return of American students, while they were to be of ultimate benefit to native art, were for the time being a source of impoverishment to the individual artist. He found it difficult to sell his pictures, for the investor-collector was swayed by the argument of the dealersthat, granted the superiority of the foreign article, it was a shrewder speculation to invest in the real thing. And this had a further advantage. It saved the collector’s face. The nudes might seem to be shamelessly indecent, the classical subjects completely unintelligible, but they were French, and that covered .a multitude of embarrassments. Is it not a fact that one does a lot of things in Paris, that one would not so much as speak of in New York or Philadelphia or Boston? These pictures were French, which at once explained, even if it did not condone, them, and, most important, gave them a caché.
Now, these conditions, distressing enough at the time to individual painters, were on the whole to the advantage of American art. It is true they drove many men to the necessity of seeking a living in illustration rather than in painting, and of forsaking the precariousness of imaginative work for the surer returns of portraiture. They even postponed for nearly twenty years an active demand for figure-subjects; until, in fact, the vogue of mural painting was established. On the other hand, these conditions had their compensations. They headed off any general tendency that might have existed to imitate the motives as well as the methods of the foreigner; brought to the surface such individuality as existed in American figure-painters, and set the current of our art in the direction of expressing what is distinctly American. They helped to bring the painting of the figure in line with that of landscape. For the latter, though gaining reinforcement from abroad, has throughout its course of steady progression been a product and expression of native sentiment. By comparison, the progression of figure-painting has been fitful and uncertain.
Among the few painters who in the seventies and early ‘eighties ventured to render the nude in easel pictures, the most notable were B. R. Fitz and Walter Shirlaw, of Munich training, Wyatt Eaton, a pupil of Gérôme, and Elihu Vedder, who studied under Picot in Paris, but derived his real instruction from living in Rome.
The best example by Fitz, The Reflection, rep-resents a girl standing on the edge of a pool, looking down into the water. It has the charm of absolutely unconscious loveliness, and the technical merit of being well drawn and painted. On the other hand, though the figure is shown in the open air, no attempt has been made to render the effects of light and atmosphere. In this it betrays its academic origin, as also do the easel pictures of nudes by Wyatt Eaton and Walter Shirlaw. These represent a riper type of beauty than the girl by Fitz, but the same words of commendation can be given them. Less skilful as a painter, Vedder has far more facility of drawing and a richer imagination than either of the others possessed. His illustrations to the poems of Omar Khâyyâm, as well as his easel-pictures and mural paintings, reveal an unusual gift for decorative treatment of line and mass, and a still more unusual gift of original and creative thought. The latter is a rarer quality in painting than in some other branches of art, such as poetry and music, and there have been painters who have tried to cover up their own lack of it by belittling Vedder. They would say that in the strict sense of the term he is not a painter. It is true; but the same might be said of Gérôme, Bouguereau, and Cabanel, and of many of their pupils. The academic method, as we have already observed, is based upon form; the colouring is rather in the nature of a tinting that only approximates to the realities of flesh colour, since it takes little or no account of the action of light upon the surfaces. Vedder takes none whatever, and goes even further in not attempting even an approximation to the local flesh tones. The reason is that painting, as the representation of real appearances, does not interest him; it is for him a symbol of expression; from his point of view the human figure is but a concrete symbol, and his colouring of the figure like his use of it is not realistic but symbolical. His imagination, these critics have insisted, is too ” literary.” We shall have more to say about this when we discuss a little later the catch-cry of ” art for art’s sake,” which began to be heard in the following decade. At present we will observe that the charge amounts to thisthat Vedder has ideas embracing the mysteries of life and death; a store of conceptions formed by experience and reflection and by intimacy with the thoughts of great minds, and has used his art to give expression to them. If his art were weak and overweighted with the thought, there might be some ground for the criticism ; but it is not. In fact, the main point of the criticism is that intellectual and imaginative originality is rare among painters, as in other professions, and the man who possesses it is apt to be an offence to some who do not.
And here a word may be said upon the subject of what many arbitrarily call the ” ideal ” picture. It involves the use of the nude or of figures wrapped in draperies, for the most part, supposed to be ” classical.” This class of motive is based upon the assumption that the painter’s duty and privilege is to improve upon the imperfections of the human form and to give the figure an ideal perfection. Therefore the world of real men and women will not do ; the painter must invent some fancy of his own. As a rule, he does not so much invent as follow along some well-worn ruts that have led for centuries to the same goal. Here some nymph of antiquity for the thousandth time disposes of her maiden beauty to invite the approach of her divine or human lover; or steps into her bath or emerges therefrom; or beautiful youths and maidens pose themselves in self-admiring groups, or weave their bare limbs and nicely calculated draperies into a rhythmic maze. The innumerable changes rung on these and such like themes have produced some of the most beautiful pictures in the world, but by artists who were nearer to the sources of Classic culture than we are to-day, especially in America. Regarded as a product of ourselves, such modern pictures are at best a graceful affectation; and, as a consequence, reach only a pretty mediocrity. Their influence is even detrimental, so far as they help to foster a wrong cenception of the ” ideal.” In appropriating this attribute exclusively to an aim at material perfection and losing sight of that higher ideal of spiritual and imaginative expression, the modern Academic painter has reduced his art to a condition of inferiority, as compared with music and poetry and even the finer kinds of prose. It is but a more or less elegant make-believe, in a world that is very real. It takes no account of man’s higher aspirations and needs, and in its impersonal, unindividual treatment of form runs counter to the individualism and exact study of phenomena, which have become the characteristic of the age. Whereas, in this respect the Academic painter divorces art from life, the trend of the time has been to discover a union of the two.
With many of our painters, however, the Academic training has been but the prelude to very independent and personal development. Three examples may be quoted. Two of these, George de Forest Brush and Abbott H. Thayer, were pupils of Gérôme, himself a man of intellectuality but devoid of imagination. What we may believe they derived from him was a mental discipline and faculty of thought which enabled them to put to entirely independent uses the principles that they learned from him, and ultimately to give free rein to their own imagination.
In Brush’s early pictures after his return home the brushwork is trim and sleek and hard, like his master’s, and he reflects also the latter’s partiality for embodying some story and archæology in his pictures. But as a basis for these qualities Brush did not, like Gérôme, search the Classics or the strange life of the East. His thoughts were to-ward his own country and what it might yield in the way of motive. He found material for story, archæology, and strangeness in the North American Indians; and food for his imagination by discovering in their present condition a clue to their past. He attempted to recreate the spacious, empty world in which they lived a life that was truly primitive, unmixed with any alloy of the white man’s bringing; and to interpret not only the externals of their life, but its inwardness, as with mingled stolidity and naïveté these men-children looked out upon the phenomena of nature, fronted the mystery of death, and peered into the stirrings of their own souls.
In these Indian pictures, far too few in number, Brush still betrayed the tentative technique of the student, for their drawing is tame and the painting constrained and timorous. But the imagination, revealed, is deep and elevated, and no one has approached him in the completeness with which he has suggested the solemn romance of those primitive conditions. In Silence Broken, for example, a goose has burst from a bank of foliage immediately above the head of an Indian in a canoe. One is conscious of the rush of sound, vibrating through the vast isolation. The Indian looks up, but does not cease his paddling; he kneels in the boat, a figure of monumental composure. And here, in Mourning Her Brave, a squaw, muffled in a blanket, stands in the snow on the mountain side chanting a dirge, as she stares dully at the leaden, unrelenting sky. The suggestion is elemental; a note or world-old wailing and protest out of the void of time. Or again, in the Sculptor and the King, the one has wrought upon a block of sandstone, drawing from it some expression of the thought within himself, and now he waits in trembling eagerness for the word of the King. The latter holds himself erect and rigid, with the habit of superiority, but in his mind is embarrassment. This man, his inferior in social standing, has reached out beyond the King’s experience and done something that makes royalty itself seem powerless ; a strange new thing, a creation. The King is oppressed with wonder.
One can only touch upon the thought of these pictures. If you have seen them, you will recall the grip which they exert on the imagination, and join in the regret that Brush did not persevere in this line of work until his technical ability had become equivalent to his conceptions. But he abandoned it, anxious, I believe, to paint ideas more close to the experience of everybody, and not uninfluenced, we may suspect, by the claims of family life upon his sympathy.. For his theme now became, and has continued to be, his wife and children, painted in the spirit of reverent devotion that characterised the Madonnas of the Old Masters. But with a differencethe interpolation of a modern note of painful seriousness. It is not the happiness of Motherhood that he represents, but the burthen and responsibility of Maternity, a remnant of the rigid strenuousness of Puritanic tendencies. Even in the sweet faces of the children is a foreshadowing of care. Meanwhile the influence of the Madonna motive threw his study back to the old paintings, and his own technique, recalling that of the early Flemish masters, obtained a fulness and dignity that befit the theme. When-ever his pictures appear, they create for themselves an atmosphere of grave distinction.
The same quality, with a superadded note of tenderness, is to be found in the work of Abbott Thayer. He, too, has left behind the manner of his master, and acquired one of his own, characterised rather by sincerity than style, for his colour is confused, the brushwork laboured. Nevertheless his pictures move and hold one by the force of their spirituality. They are the expression of very beautiful qualities of personal character, strong, tender, simple.
The girl-figure that haunts his convases, nobly formed, but free of any cloy of flesh, fronts the world with starlike eyes, serenely fixed beyond the range of common things. She is a vestal virgin, that has in her keeping the spiritual ideal of which she herself is the creation.
Thayer, in fact, has done for the spiritual ideal of American womanhood what Charles Dana Gibson has done for the physical and mundanecreated a type. Gibson’s, through multiplication of copies and because of its aggressive attractiveness, caught the popular fancy; Thayer’s, for exactly opposite reasons, has captivated the imagination only of the few. Gibson’s type is sexless, and self-engrossed; Thayer’s unconscious of her modesty, self-contained, but tender and unselfish. She is typical of the pure, frank outlook upon life, prepared to accept its responsibilities and renunciations, to lighten its grossness, and uphold a high ideal.
In an age and environment, not overgiven to spirituality and imagination, these pictures are a notable embodiment of both.
From them we may pass very naturally to a study of Thomas W. Dewing’s conceptions of woman, as embodied in his pictures. In it also we may find a note distinctly American. For it should be remembered that there are two ways in which a painter may reflect the particularity of his environment. There is, first, the comparatively obvious one of representing the externals; and, secondly, the more subtle one of interpreting the inner nature of the men and women around him.
From an attempt to record the first, as we have already remarked, the earlier home-comers were discouraged, and it cannot yet be said that they or their successors have made considerable contribution to a record of the appearances of American life. Such genre subjects as those of Eastman Johnson, that depict incidents relating to the Civil War, or Thomas Hovenden’s Last Moments of John Brown, or Winslow Homer’s early pictures of rural scenes in the South, were the product of an earlier influence, that at the period we are discussing was losing its force, even if it had not actually expired. It had been undermined by the influence from abroad; for while the latter had done much to put the student on sure ground as regards technique, it had unsettled his motives. It had held up to him certain motives congenial to the conditions abroad, which, however, he could not find’ at home, and as a consequence he was embarrassed and at a loss.
We do not forget that some turned resolutely to the theme of Colonial times. But these pictures of Puritan maidens and the life of the early settlers, by men like C. Y. Turner, George H. Boughton, and Douglas Volk, though charming in many respects, particularly in that of sentiment, are after all the product of fancy; they are not interpretations of American life, as known and studied by the painter. It was the contemporary conditions that this new generation of painters avoided, and that their successors have infrequently and inadequately attempted. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the only great interpretation of any phase of American conditions is to be found in Winslow Homer’s pictures of the fisherfolk of Maine.
On the other hand, in the subtler domain of the spirit the American environment has made itself felt. Its action has been twofold: subjectively affecting the mental attitude of the painter, and objectively offering to his scrutiny certain distinct qualities in the object of his study. We have seen how these results are exhibited in the attitude of Brush and Thayer, respectively, toward maternity and maidenhood, and may now study another phase of them in Dewing’s rendering of women.
His also betray the inherited trait of seriousness, and are all still the daughters of Puritanism, though many times removed from the original strain. Generations of repressed emotion have made them incapable of passion; strenuousness survives only in supersensitive nerves ; their sole religion is the worship of self. From narrow conditions they have emerged into a vision of the Kingdoms of the World and the Glory of them, but have already tasted of satiety. They are motionless in an atmosphere from which all human warmth has been sucked, in a vacuum drained of intellectual and emotional nourishment. These bodily shapes are not of flesh and blood; they are the essence distilled from the withering of what is womanly, the mere fragrance of dead rose-leaves.
It was only by degrees that Dewing evolved this conception. His earlier examples, such as the Lady at the Spinet, and some of his small portraits, still have a charm that is physical as well as spiritual. The change may have come about through a change in his technical motive, as he became more and more enamoured of the subtleties of colour and’ lighting, qualities that, we shall see, began to occupy the attention of students during the ‘eighties. It is a phase of our story that belongs to a later chapter. We can only say of it here, that to an -artist of Dewing’s sensibility both of feeling and hand, it offered a possibility of exquisite refinement of style, such as his has become; and that in the refining of his method his typical conception grew to be more and more rarified; less and less concerned with form as form, increasingly occupied with its suggestion of abstract expression.
In this evolution of motive and method he owed as little to his masters, Lefebvre and Boulanger, as Brush and Thayer did to Gérôme. In each case the individuality of the man gradually declared itself. It took some colour from its native environment and gave back in return an interpretation of something distinctively American in spirit. In the latter respect they are alone among their contemporaries ; nor do I know where to look among their successors for any who has done a similar thing. These three men have not exhausted the subject of American womanhood; but, as some of the Florentine sculptors and painters did in the case of the women of the Renaissance, they have represented certain distinct types of contemporary femininity.
We started the chapter with a consideration of the Academic motive, but in following the development of Dewing, especially, have been compelled to wander from it. We may recover our ground by a reference to Edwin A. Abbey, who, though not Paris-trained, is a conspicuous example, almost the only one we have in modern times, of the Academic principle applied to historic painting.
Born in Philadelphia, in 1852, a pupil of the Pennsylvania Academy, he became a draughtsman in the publishing house of Harper & Brothers. Those were the days of reproduction by wood en-graving, and his duty was to draw the picture on the block. Gradually this method was superseded by the mechanical process of photo-engraving, and with this transition , Abbey’s career as an illustra-tor is closely identified. The newer methods offered increased opportunity of originality and skill on the part of the draughtsman, and soon Abbey became known as one of the most original and skilful, especially in the use of pen and ink. His illustrations to ” Herrick’s Poems ” had so much charm of invention and such a sympathy with and insight into the old-time feeling and environment, that he was commissioned by his publishers to go to England and gather material for a series of illustrations of She Stoops to Conquer. This visit proved the turning point of his career. He found in England, not only material for his drawings, but also the mental suggestion and atmosphere that his artistic development craved. He settled in England, married a New York lady, and has since made his home at Morgan Hall, an old manor house at Fairford in Oxfordshire. The success which his work achieved enabled him, without abandoning illustration, to devote a constantly increasing attention to oil painting. In the latter medium he continued the same purposes and characteristics that he had adopted in his illustrations. The basis of the picture is still the subject ; an old world one, frequently taken from some scene in Shakespeare’s plays.
Like his series of decorations in the Boston Public Library, embodying the story of the ” Holy Grail,” they are presented with an archaeological exactness of costume and accessories, and with much dramatic action and regard for individual characterisation. They are rich in colour, showing a preference for blacks, whites, and scarlet; though it is to be noted that Abbey is only in a limited sense a colourist. To borrow a musical simile, he does not compose the colours in a harmony, but introduces separate melodies of colour, and spots his pictures with these, as a draughtsman with pen and ink spots the blacks and whites in his composition. Indeed, in this respect, as well as because of the importance given to subject and his method of building up his effects for the main purpose of telling the story of the scene, Abbey, while working in oil, still remains an illustrator; upon that larger scale which is distinguished as ” historical painting.” He is the most important survivor, in fact, of the vogue of the historical subject; and in consequence was selected to paint the official picture of King Edward’s Coronation. That vogue has given way before the increased attention paid to the manner of representation, rather than to the subject ; to the aim of the modern painter to study his subject at close and intimate range, for which purpose he chooses a simple one, and makes the expression of his picture grow out of the technical expression. These principles, originally learned from the Barbizon painters, have been perpetuated in the steady development of American landscape painting. We will resume, in the next chapter, the thread of these influences during the ‘seventies and early ‘eighties, noting at the same time some interesting examples of independent growth.