ous and
experimental; if I am not mistaken, he sees each work that he produces
in a light of its own, not turning off successive portraits according
to some well-tried receipt which has proved useful in the case of their
predecessors; nevertheless there is one idea that pervades them all, in
a different degree, and gives them a family resemblance--the idea that
it would be inspiring to know just how Velasquez would have treated
the theme. We can fancy that on each occasion Mr. Sargent, as a
solemn preliminary, invokes him as a patron saint. This is not, in my
intention, tantamount to saying that the large canvas representing the
contortions of a dancer in the lamp-lit room of a _posada_, which he
exhibited on his return from Spain, strikes me as having come into the
world under the same star as those compositions of the great Spaniard
which at Madrid alternate with his royal portraits. This singular work,
which has found an appreciative home in Boston, has the stamp of
an extraordinary energy and facility--of an actual scene, with its
accidents and peculiarities caught, as distinguished from a composition
where arrangement and invention have played their part. It looks like
life, but it looks also, to my view, rather like a perversion of life,
and has the quality of an enormous "note" or memorandum, rather than of
a representation. A woman in a voluminous white silk dress and a black
mantilla pirouettes in the middle of a dusky room, to the accompaniment
of her own castanets and that of a row of men and women who sit in straw
chairs against the whitewashed wall and thrum upon guitar and tambourine
or lift other castanets into the air. She appears almost colossal, and
the twisted and inflated folds of her long dress increase her volume.
She simpers, in profile, with a long chin, while she slants back at a
dangerous angle, and the lamplight (it proceeds from below, as if she
were on a big platform) makes a strange play in her large face. In the
background the straight line of black-clad, black-hatted, white-shirted
musicians projects shadows against the wall, on which placards, guitars,
and dirty finger-marks display themselves. The merit of this production
is that the air of reality is given in it with remarkable breadth and
boldness; its defect it is difficult to express save by saying that it
makes the spectator vaguely uneasy and even unhappy--an accident the
more to be regretted as a lithe, inspired female figure, give