Is it a fancy?--but I see a resemblance between the art of Sargent and that in writing of Mr. Henry James. The same pleasure in nuances of effect in detail, and the readiness to turn to the life at hand for this. To enjoy Sargent is above all to appreciate the means by which he obtains effect in detail, the economy of colour and of brush marks with which he deceives the eye, and the quality of subtle colour in the interpretation of minor phenomena. On the large scale, in the general effect, the quality of his colour is sometimes uninviting. But when at its best it takes the everyday colour of things as if it was colour, without the hysterical exaggeration with which so much youthful contemporary art attempts to cheat itself and other people. If Sargent's admirers do not claim that he sees all the colour there is in things, they claim for him that he sees colour and has the reverence for reality which prevents a tawdry emphasis upon it for the sake of sweetness of effect. And after the sweetmeat vagaries, which have followed in the wake of Whistler, by those without that master's self-control, this is refreshing.
Sargent's brush seems to trifle with things that are trifling, to proceed thoughtfully in its approach to lips and eyes. In painting accessories around his sitters there is the accommodation of touch to the importance of the objects suggested, and nowadays, since interior painting is the fashion--to suit the taste of a young man of genius imposing his peculiar gift upon the time--there are many portraits where the sitter is brought into line with an elaborate setting out of _objets d'art_, the painter's pleasure in the treatment of these manifesting itself sometimes at the sitter's expense. Translating everything by the methods we have described, Sargent preserves throughout his pictures a certain quality of paint. The impression of the characteristic surface of any material is made within this quality, by the responsiveness of his brush to the subtlest modification of effect which differentiates between the nature of one surface and another, as they are influenced by the light upon them at the moment. There are painters who do not translate reality into paint in this way, but who have striven to imitate the surface qualities of objects by varying, imitative ways of applying their paint. Sargent is not this kind of realist.