In London one met no corrective.
The only American who came by, capable of teaching, was William
Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the Minister which now
completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt talked
constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous teacher, but
Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had
inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which
he was slow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish
of Adams's mind. The portrait finished, he went.
As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du
Bac, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the
Palais Royal, and talk of whatever interested the students of the
Beaux Arts. Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet
seized his style. Adams caught very little of what lay in his
mind, and the less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad
except the restaurants, while the continuous life in England made
French art seem worst of all. This did not prove that English
art, in 1866, was good; far from it; but it helped to make
bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of England.
Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden
of innate disorder called taste.
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