American Painting and its Tradition by John C. Van Dyke

It was Corot who declared that in art Rousseau was an eagle and he himself was merely a lark singing a song from the meadow-grasses. The contrast and the comparison are not inapplicable to two of our own painters. Wyant never possessed the wide range or the far-seeing eye of Inness, but he had something about him of Corot's mood and charm. He, too, was a lark, or should we say a wood-thrush singing along the edge of an American forest? He had only a few mellow notes, yet we would not be without them. They still charm us. And it is not certain that in the long account of time the direct and simple utterances of Corot and Wyant may not outlive the wide truth of Rousseau and the vision splendid of Inness. More than once in esthetic story the songs of a Burns have been held more precious than the tumults of a Milton.

The wonder of Wyant's success is greater than that of Inness, for his boyhood surroundings, if anything, were less stimulating and his pictorial education far more restricted. Besides, Inness lived on to seventy years, but Wyant died at fifty-six, having endured ill-health, and for the last ten years of his life -- his best working years -- been paralyzed in his right arm and hand. Living much to himself, something of a hermit in his mountain home, weighed down by misfortunes and disappointments, the wonder grows that he not only kept up and improved his technique to the end, but that he preserved his serenity of mood and purity of outlook through it all. He must have been a man with fortitude of soul beyond the average. It is not every painter that can turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.