But the end justifies the means with Sargent. Precision in drawing immediately begins to evaporate when one starts to knead or overlay the surface; and to weaken Sargent’s accuracy in drawing would be to imperil his authority and dispel such a thing as conviction. One cannot imagine it. If he should now deliberately try for subtlety or depth of color or seek to obtain a mysterious or illusory or enamelled surface, his friends in art would immediately declare him in decline and roll their eyes heavenward in despair. But fortunately there is no immediate prospect of such a thing. The painter’s inclination seems well settled, and neither his eye nor his hand has lost its cunning. On the contrary, since he practically abandoned portrait-painting more than a dozen years ago and turned his attention to landscape and effects of direct sunlight, he has been producing the most astonishing pictures of his career. The things that he sees and draws would have been thought as wild as cubist fancies thirty years ago. And yet they are the most positive pronouncements of elemental truths that he has yet put forth. That does not mean that there is anything weird or queer about these later doings. They are merely appearances of form, color, and light presented with astonishing breadth, force, and simplicity. Sargent has never evidenced any liking for things queer. He is too intelligent for fads and fancies, too sane for mad movements in art. There is not the slightest indication of impressionism, futurism, or cubism in his work. The fashions have never interested him; but style--the best way of presenting a thought or theme--has no doubt been in his thought since boyhood. Perhaps it was his early acquaintance with the works of painters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese that led him to base his own style in largeness, simplicity, and directness. He could not have built on a better foundation. Whatever gimcrack or scrollwork bad taste may add at the top, there never yet has been any great art that did not have a plain and firm foundation at the bottom. And in these days, when all painting seems going to the dogs with new and incomprehensible conventions put forth by first one group of painters and then another, it is a pleasure and a relief to know that there is a large body of the younger men who subscribe to Sargent’s formulas and methods. So far as I know he has never done any teaching nor had any pupils, and yet the influence of his works has been great not only in England but in France and America. For many years his method of handling has been held up for admiration in the schools and every new work of his shown in an exhibition has had its chorus of students to pay it homage. They could not follow a better master.