The last-named picture, a full-length in profile, now in the Metropolitan Museum, set all Paris by the ears. The wonderful if somewhat sharp drawing of the face and head, the equally fine portraiture of the hands, arms, figure, and dress, commanded instant attention. The subject was a great beauty, and the painter, painting precisely what he saw, had dealt with her remorselessly. Even then they began to discuss Sargent as a character reader, an anatomist, a psychologist, a physiognomist--great nonsense to be sure, but nevertheless suggestive of his remarkable truth of observation. It was perhaps this very quality that soon brought him more commissions for portraits than he could fill and possibly led to the virtual abandonment for the time being of other themes. In taking up portraiture as the field of his endeavor Sargent was perhaps wise as well as fortunate, for it requires the keen, cool observer, the man who can record the fact without romance, to make a good portrait-painter; and Sargent has proved himself an observer above all. He is not a poet in paint, nor does he indulge in sentiment, feeling, or emotion. He records the fact. If I apprehend him rightly, such theory of art as he possesses is founded in observation. One night in Gibraltar some fifteen years ago I was dining with him at the old Cecil Hotel. We had been on ship for a dozen days and were glad to get ashore. That night, as a very unusual thing, Sargent talked about painting--talked of his own volition. He suggested his theory of art in a single sentence: “You see things that way” (pointing slightly to the left) “and I see them this way” (pointing slightly to the right). He seemed to think that would account for the variation or peculiarity of eye and mind, and, with a manner of doing--a personal method--there was little more to art. Such a theory would place him in measured agreement with Henry James, whose definition of art has been quoted many times: “Art is a point of view and genius a way of looking at things.” But whether Sargent has followed James, or James followed Sargent, in that definition, I am not able to record.