contributed to bring about his death, which took place on the 18th of July, 1868. The immediate cause was apoplexy, superinduced by the intense heat.
"Mr. Leutze," says a writer in the Annual Cyclopedia, "was altogether the best educated artist in America, possessed of vast technical learning, of great genius, and fine powers of conception. His weakest point was in his coloring, but even here he was superior to most others."
"Leutze," says Mr. Tuckerman, "delights in representing adventure. He ardently sympathizes with chivalric action and spirit-stirring events: not the abstractly beautiful or the simply true, but the heroic, the progressive, the individual, and earnest phases of life, warm his fancy and attract his pencil. His forte is the dramatic.... If Leutze were not a painter, he would certainly join some expedition to the Rocky Mountains, thrust himself into a fiery political controversy, or seek to wrest a new truth from the arcana of science.... We remember hearing a brother artist describe him in his studio at Home, engaged for hours upon a picture, deftly shifting palette, cigar, and maul-stick from hand to hand, as occasion required; absorbed, rapid, intent, and then suddenly breaking from his quiet task to vent his constrained spirits in a jovial song, or a romp with his great dog, whose vociferous barking he thoroughly enjoyed; and often abandoning his quiet studies for some wild, elaborate frolic, as if a row was essential to his happiness. His very jokes partook of this bold heartiness of disposition. He scorned all ultra refinement, and found his impulse to art not so much in delicate perception as in vivid sensation. There was ever a reaction from the meditative. His temperament is Teutonic—hardy, cordial, and brave. Such men hold the conventional in little reverence, and their natures gush like mountain streams, with wild freedom and unchastened enthusiasm."