Excerpt from Early American Painters: Illustrated by Examples in the Collection of the New-York Historical SocietyThe study of American portraits will be found to be fairly illustrative of the development of our country itself. To understand aright the work of our early artists, some knowledge must be possessed of the conditions under which the paintings themselves were produced. In 1600 this land was a wilderness undeveloped and uninhabited except by savages. It is true that the continent had been discovered one hundred years before, not in the endeavor to found a new empire but to meet the imperative demand to discover a shorter route to the Indies.It was the tremendous development which came to England under the rule of Elizabeth and her masterful advisers, which started the English, born colonizers, to take possession of the newly found continent.The tide of immigration may be divided very generally into three streams: That of the Puritan English to New England, the Dutch to New Amsterdam, and the English to the South.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.