“So dazzled has the majority been by what is called the man’s cosmopolitanism that the real racial basis of his nature has been over-looked.... Sargent is American in his fundamental instincts. His adaptability and his very lack of marked bias bespeak the native complexity of his origin. It cannot for a moment be maintained that the French paint themselves as Sargent paints them, or the English either. His art is neither Gallic nor British, it is American, and the chief reason why it is so different from most Anglo-Saxon art is because it is so superior, not because it is unAmerican. In any case the sense of motion remains Sargent’s personal conquest, possibly, even, his chief contribution to portraiture. “In Sargent’s portraits women are in the act of starting from their chairs and men are on the very point of speaking. Here is a dancer whose yellow skirt still swirls in elastic convolutions; there stands a painter lunging at the canvas with sensitively poised brush. All is restless, vivid, spontaneous. One and all these creatures vibrate with the nervous tension of the age. Other artists have given calm, or momentarily arrested motion. Sargent gives motion itself. With a technique facile as it is assertive this magician of the palette, this paganini of portraiture, has lured us into a new world, a world which we ourselves know well—perhaps too well—but a world hitherto undiscovered by painting.” _Art and Common Sense_ _By Royal Cortizzoz_ _Courtesy of Scribner & Son, 1913_ “Sargent studying under the wing of Carolus-Duran, was in an atmosphere sympathetic to new ideas, but not at all inhospitable to old ones. While he emerged from his master’s studio a modern in the best sense of the term, it was with a vein of conservatism in him which has never disappeared. Of how many modern painters, endowed, as he has been, superabundant technical brilliance, could it be said that they have never exceeded a certain limit of audacity? I know of no canvas of his which could fairly be called sensational. One of the least conventional of painters, his art nevertheless remains adjusted to the tone and movement of the world in which he lives—surely a fine example of genius expressing its age.