t's productions is the
portrait of a young lady, the magnificent picture which he exhibited
in 1881; and if it has mainly been his fortune since to commemorate the
fair faces of women, there is no ground for surprise at this sort of
success on the part of one who had given so signal a proof of possessing
the secret of the particular aspect that the contemporary lady (of any
period) likes to wear in the eyes of posterity. Painted when he was
but four-and-twenty years of age, the picture by which Mr. Sargent was
represented at the Salon of 1881 is a performance which may well have
made any critic of imagination rather anxious about his future. In
common with the superb group of the children of Mr. Edward Boit,
exhibited two years later, it offers the slightly "uncanny" spectacle of
a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to
learn. It is not simply precocity in the guise of maturity--a phenomenon
we very often meet, which deceives us only for an hour; it is the
freshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, really
felt and assimilated, of generations. My admiration for this deeply
distinguished work is such that I am perhaps in danger of overstating
its merits; but it is worth taking into account that to-day, after
several years' acquaintance with them, these merits seem to me more and
more to justify enthusiasm. The picture has this sign of productions of
the first order, that its style clearly would save it if everything else
should change--our measure of its value of resemblance, its expression
of character, the fashion of dress, the particular associations it
evokes. It is not only a portrait, but a picture, and it arouses even
in the profane spectator something of the painter's sense, the joy of
engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem.
There are works of which it is sometimes said that they are painters'
pictures (this description is apt to be intended invidiously), and the
production of which I speak has the good-fortune at once to belong to
this class and to give the "plain man" the kind of pleasure that the
plain man looks for.

The young lady, dressed in black satin, stands upright, with her right
hand bent back, resting on her waist, while the other, with the arm
somewhat extended, offers to view a single white flower. The dress.
stretched at the hips over a sort of hoop, and ornamented in front,
where it opens on a velvet petticoat with large sat