art of painting that he perhaps does
not fear emergencies quite enough, and that having knowledge to spare
he may be tempted to play with it and waste it. Various, curious, as we
have called him, he occasionally tries experiments which seem to arise
from the mere high spirits of his brush, and runs risks little courted
by the votaries of the literal, who never expose their necks to escape
from the common. For the literal and the common he has the smallest
taste; when he renders an object into the language of painting his
translation is a generous paraphrase.

As I have intimated, he has painted little but portraits; but he has
painted very many of these, and I shall not attempt in so few pages to
give a catalogue of his works. Every canvas that has come from his hands
has not figured at the Salon; some of them have seen the light at other
exhibitions in Paris; some of them in London (of which city Mr. Sargent
is now an inhabitant), at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery.
If he has been mainly represented by portraits there are two or three
little subject-pictures of which I retain a grateful memory. There
stands out in particular, as a pure gem, a small picture exhibited at
the Grosvenor, representing a small group of Venetian girls of the lower
class, sitting in gossip together one summer's day in the big, dim
hall of a shabby old palazzo. The shutters let in a clink of light; the
scagliola pavement gleams faintly in it; the whole place is bathed in
a kind of transparent shade. The girls are vaguely engaged in some very
humble household work; they are counting turnips or stringing onions,
and these small vegetables, enchantingly painted, look as valuable as
magnified pearls. The figures are extraordinarily natural and vivid;
wonderfully light and fine is the touch by which the painter evokes
the small familiar Venetian realities (he has handled them with a vigor
altogether peculiar in various other studies which I have not space to
enumerate), and keeps the whole thing free from that element of humbug
which has ever attended most attempts to reproduce the idiosyncrasies
of Italy. I am, however, drawing to the end of my remarks without
having mentioned a dozen of those brilliant triumphs in the field of
portraiture with which Mr. Sargent's name is preponderantly associated.
I jumped from his "Carolus Duran" to the masterpiece of 1881 without
speaking of the charming "Madame Pailleron" of 1879, or the picture of