Excerpt from A Critical Introduction to American Painting The true significance of this achievement can be understood only by approaching it from the other side in time. During the hundred and fifty years since Copley left this country several different tech nics have been imported and discarded, and all of them have been strikingly at variance with his. Such temporary fashions and a long inadequate accumulation of facts concerning colonial condi tions have given rise to an undue degree of deprecation, sometimes of depreciation, in what has been written about the tradition and equipment of the earliest portraitists. A more accurate sense of his tory will first direct attention to the inevitability of a lag, both in time and in quality, to all colonial cultures; and this initial empha sis will permit a fairer conception of the relative greatness of what was attained in colonial North America. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.