Carolus was a good teacher after his kind and impressed his method upon Sargent, who accepted and bettered it. The method in brief did not start with the carefully prepared sketch of Ingres or even a charcoal-drawing upon the canvas, but a full brush of color laid on in mass. Pupils were to draw, model, paint at one and the same time. In blocking in a figure the paint might be thick and the edges at first sharp, but the values, the tone, the properly constructed body were to be absolute. Underlying structure was a necessity. Sargent learned that early in his career and never forgot it. His brush-work has been thought his greatest technical feature, but that of itself would be for nothing holden did it not by its certainty produce absolute drawing. He has always been a consummate draftsman. Yet it was Carolus who taught facility and ease with the brush and preached Velasquez to his pupils. No doubt the master saw great qualities in the Spaniard where his pupils saw only great dexterity, but at any rate their attention was called to the fact that a picture may be made interesting in its surface and be the better therefor. Sargent was a quick convert to this idea, and he very soon developed a breadth and truth of brush-work that astonished his master and set Paris talking. All his life it has been one of the pronounced features of his technique, and yet not a feature by which his art stands or falls. One of his latest portraits--that of Henry James--does not noticeably show it. The surface is almost smooth so inconspicuous is the brushing, and yet there are few who will not count the James as one of the best considered, cleanest cut, and most profound of Sargent’s portraits. He remained under Carolus for several years, assisted the master in some of his decorations, and soon began to produce noteworthy work of his own. One of his earliest portraits was that of Carolus himself, which at once became talked about, not only as a likeness of the famous master but as the work of a remarkable pupil. In 1878 he painted _En route pour la pêche_, a figure composition which attracted much attention in the Salon. The next year he went to Spain, and from that journey came “El Jaleo,” now in the Boston Museum, and a number of other Spanish pictures. These theme pictures, much as they were praised, did not, could not, determine the painter’s bent. Like other young men, he probably had determined nothing, and eventually let circumstances settle the matter of subject. He did not have to wait long. In 1881 he put out a full-length portrait called a “Lady with Rose” that had so much vitality about it, as well as charm, that it far outran all his earlier performances. The success of it, followed by the “Hall of the Four Children,” in which four of the Beit children were shown, and then the portrait of “Madame G----,” seemed automatically to place him among the portraitists.