E. Maurice Bloch A writer in a national magazine in 185 5 stated that: Public sentiment is decidedly in favor of these art unions, with their prize systems, as an effective means of diffusing a popular taste for art, and although a venal press, whose columns daily teem in advocacy of doctrines degrading to human nature, had the power to suppress a .audible enterprise of that kind in this city, yet the very parties who acted now regret their agency in the matter, and have been heard to express wishes for a reestablishment of a similar institution... .ffi In later years Worthington Whittredge affirmed that the Art Union was largely responsible for the development of genre painting in this country—"not so much by buying them ... as by the encouragement it gave to native art. . . . "46 And Asher B. Durand credited it not only with the multiplication of American artists but also, in large part, with the stimulation "of a taste for art in the community. . . . Through it," he said, "the people awoke to the fact that art was one of the forces in society."47 We have observed that the loss of the American Art-Union was deeply felt and is thus recorded in the annals of this nation's art. It has been declared that even the most active antagonists regretted its suppression in after years. Whatever the legal aspects were, we have also seen how it was possible for one disappointed and unsuccessful artist, whose deeply personal aversion for the Art-Union was built on unfair and flimsy grounds, could cause indirectly the destruction of a large and influential organization. With the aid and encouragement of an editor dedicated to a sensational press, Whitley started the machinery of its catastrophe which, once started, worked rapidly. "And thus by such a hand . . . was accomplished the downfall of the old American Art-Union." 45 "Progress of Art in this Country," in United States Magazine of Science, Art, Manufactures, Agriculture, Commerce, and Trade, II (1855), 262. 48 Whittredge, op. cit., 66, where the writer also claimed that Eastman Johnson's well-known picture, "The Old Kentucky Home"—"although painted after the Union was broken up, would never have" been painted . . . had it not been for an inspiration begotten of the Union and born of love of his country . . . ." "John Durand, Life and Times of A.B. Durand, 172. 359