“People complain that Sargent violates the secret recesses of human vanity, and brings hidden, because unlovely, traits out into the light of day; that his candor with the brush is startling, to say the least, and sometimes even perilous. He is accused not simply of painting his sitter, ‘wart and all,’ but of exaggerating the physical or moral disfigurement. If this is true there is something humorous in the spectacle, which is constantly being presented, of men and women running the risk.... Few of his sitters, seem, as we see them on the canvas, to have been passive in his hands. The electric currents of a duel are in the air. Character has thrown down its challenge, the painter has taken it up, and the result is a work in which character is fused with design, playing its part in the artistic unit as powerfully, and almost as vividly, as any one of the tangible facts of the portrait. “In the light of the long procession of portraits which he has put to his credit, it seems to me that if there is a living painter in whose interpretations of character confidence can be placed, it is Sargent. His range is apparently unlimited. He has painted men and women in their prime and in their old age, and in whatever walk of life he has found them, he has apprehended them with the ‘seeing eye’ that is half the battle.... It is worth noticing that it is not his portraits of men, but in his portraits of women, who illustrate far more histrionically the nervous tension of the age, that Sargent has painted his most unconventional compositions. When his subject has permitted him to exchange nervousness for repose, with what felicity he has seized his opportunity! There is not in modern portraiture a more satisfactory study in dignity and noble stateliness than his ‘Mrs. Marquand.’ (Shown in this exhibition) “Sargent is himself in his reading of character in his design, and in his style. To say this is not to forget his indebtedness, where style is concerned, to other painters, even, Carolus-Duran. I think there is something of Carolus-Duran in his mere cleverness which like so much that is fluent and self-possessed in modern craftsmanship, could have been developed in Paris and nowhere else. The broad slashing stroke of Hals has taught him something, it is fair to assume; and the influence of Velasquez in his work is sufficiently obvious. Yet there is not in all his painting the ghost of what it would be reasonable to call an imitative passage. He is no more a modern Hals or Velasquez than he is a modern Rembrandt or Botticelli, for he looks at life and art from a totally different point of view, not simply, or grandly, or tragically, or imaginatively, but with the detached intellectual curiosity of a man of the world.” _American Painting and Its Traditions_ _John Van Dyke_ _Courtesy of Scribner & Sons, 1919_