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Akron, [O.?] May 24th 1887
Hon. Leland Stanford,
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir:
I am an artist with more than forty years experience at the easel [and?] because I hope and work for a nobler, more distinctively national art than we have yet seen in America, I write you. Allow me, without further introduction, to say the things I wish to lay before you.
You are aware that we have in our country none of that grand art which distinguishes Italy and some other parts of Europe, and I think the reason is to be found in the fact that we have no pace to invite or to put such works. In Italy churches have been the natural receptacles of great compositions, but in this country churches are nearly all of the gothic style which leaves no large wall spaces to invite the invention of the painter, beside the prejudice against that kind of church decoration has not died out of Protestantism; so we can hope for no great sacred art in America for a century to come.