Picture by American painter

In 1843 George Fuller wrote from his Deerfield farm to , then in , “I have concluded to see nature for myself, through the eye of no one else.” It may have been a decision forced upon him by circumstances that denied familiarity with the visions of other painters, but it was no less a wise one and resulted eventually in his creating a kind of picture distinctively different from those with which the public was already acquainted. He may have underestimated the value of technic, for certainly time has made havoc with much that he did, but even when he wrote from (whither he went in 1860 to study the old masters) that it pleased him “to see how the old fellows went at their subject to tell their story, and how scumbling, light and dark shadows, took care of themselves,” he added, “Yes, and drawing, too, not that these things are less important, but that something is.
The picture Winifred Dysart followed in 1881. Winifred Dysart is patently more pleasing in color, more satisfactory in technic, but notwithstanding less significant and therefore less impressive than either of the paintings mentioned. It is, however, a sufficiently interesting picture to arrest one’s attention anywhere and as likely as not to satisfy one quite as completely with its exquisite suggestion of the dreaming loveliness of maiden meditation. The figure is less mature even than the Nydia and a fraction more graceful, the pose simpler and finer, the drawing as good, and the idea perhaps only seemingly less perfectly embodied in the model because of the less dramatic quality of the conception. This girl is lyrical in her loveliness, the Nydia tragic in her trouble.