What a contrast he presents to Whistler, with whom he shares the honour of being among the very few distinctly notable painters of the present day! Sargent with his grip upon the actual, Whistler in his search for the supersensitive significance, are the direct antipodes in motive. Each started with a justifiable consciousness of superiority to the average taste of his times; but while Whistler, on one side of his character a man of the world, has in his art withdrawn himself into a secluded region of poetry, Sargent, almost a recluse, has delighted his imagination with the seemings and shows of things and with their material significance.
Is the reason for this merely that success claimed him early and that he has not been able to extricate himself from the golden entanglement, or that deeper one, noticeable in many artists, that their artistic personality is the direct antithesis of that personality by which they are commonly known to the world? Otherwise, this man with his gift of seeing pictures, with his power of a brush that seems loaded with light rather than with pigment, with his smiting force or tender suggestiveness of expression--what might he not have done had he followed the bent of his mind, a mind stored with culture, serene and reflective? Something, doubtless, less dazzling than his portraits, but more poetical, more mysteriously suggestive, more distinctly creative. As it is, some little studies of Venice, such as “Venetian Bead Stringers,” come nearer probably to the true spirit of Sargent; to that exquisiteness of fancy which he developed more completely in the study of children lighting lanterns in a garden, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose.” The refined originality of this embroidery of light and shadow, the lights so brilliant, the shadows penetrated with mystery, the affectionate tenderness with which the children and flowers are represented, the lovely imaginativeness of the whole conception, bespoke qualities which have appeared only partially in the portraits, and are altogether of a rarer significance than their vivid actuality. This picture is perhaps even more acceptable than his elaborate decorations in the Boston Public Library, because it represents more unreservedly an artist’s vision and one of such delicate apprehensiveness. The decorations involve a more laboured, conscious effort to produce something noble, and the literary allusion encroaches somewhat upon the æsthetic. Yet to enjoy them we are not bound to thread our way through the maze of mythological suggestion. The panels are full of dignity and beauty, considered purely as decoration; finely rhythmical in the frieze, stern with tensity of form and deliberate harshness of colour in the lunette, a labyrinth of tapestried ornament in the soffit of the arch.