Story (1828) is widely considered to be John Neal's most successful novel, most readable for a modern audience, and most successful at manifesting his desire for a national American literature. Along with Brother Jonathan and The Down-Easters, it is notable for depicting peculiar American folkways, accents, and slang. One hundred years later it provided source material for the Dictionary of American English. A historical fiction like many of Neal's other novels, it is the first hardcover novel based on the Salem witch trials and influenced John Greenleaf Whittier and Nathaniel Hawthorne to include witchcraft in their creative writing. Art criticism and patronage Neal was the first American art critic, though he did not receive this recognition until the twentieth century. Starting in 1819 with articles in Baltimore newspapers, he expanded to a much wider audience with Randolph (1823), which communicated his opinions through the thin veil of the novel's protagonist. Though he continued work in this field at least as late 1869, his chief impact was in the 1820s. Neal around this time regularly visited Rembrandt Peale's Peale Museum, courted his daughter Rosalba Carriera Peale, and sat for portraits with his niece Sarah Miriam Peale. Neal's approach to art criticism in the early 1820s was intuitive and showed disdain for connoisseurship, which he viewed as aristocratic and incompatible with American democratic ideals. Neal shows some initial influence from August Wilhelm Schlegel's Course of Lectures in Dramatic Art and Literature and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, but largely broke with those sensibilities over the course of the decade. By the late 1820s he came to dismiss history painting and show preference for "the unadulterated truth of the American locality and nature" he found in portraits and landscapes, anticipating the rise of the Hudson River School. The positive attention Neal paid to American portrait painters trained in the "humbler contingencies" of sign painting and applied arts was accompanied by his acknowledgment of the artist's often conflicting priorities: preserving likeness of the subject without offending the customer. Neal was also unique in his effort in this period to raise the status of engraving as fine art. Reynolds's approach to art criticism would remain dominant in both the US and UK until John Ruskin's Modern Painters was published in 1843, though Neal's "Landscape and Portrait-Painting" (1829) anticipated many of those Ruskinesque changes by distinguishing between "things seen by the artist" and "things as they are".