n up to
the emotion of the dance, is not intrinsically a displeasing object.
"El Jaleo" sins, in my opinion, in the direction of ugliness, and,
independently of the fact that the heroine is circling round incommoded
by her petticoats, has a want of serenity.

This is not the defect of the charming, dusky, white-robed person who,
in the Tangerine subject exhibited at the Salon of 1880 (the fruit of
an excursion to the African coast at the time of the artist's visit to
Spain), stands on a rug, under a great white Moorish arch, and from out
of the shadows of the large drapery, raised pentwise by her hands, which
covers her head, looks down, with painted eyes and brows showing above
a bandaged mouth, at the fumes of a beautiful censer or chafing-dish
placed on the carpet. I know not who this stately Mahometan may be, nor
in what mysterious domestic or religious rite she may be engaged; but
in her muffled contemplation and her pearl-colored robes, under her
plastered arcade which shines in the Eastern light, she transports and
torments us. The picture is exquisite, a radiant effect of white upon
white, of similar but discriminated tones. In dividing the honor that
Mr. Sargent has won by his finest work between the portrait of the young
lady of 1881 and the group of four little girls which was painted in
1882 and exhibited with the success it deserved the following year, I
must be careful to give the latter picture not too small a share. The
artist has done nothing more felicitous and interesting than this view
of a rich dim, rather generalized French interior (the perspective of a
hall with a shining floor, where screens and tall Japanese vases
shimmer and loom), which encloses the life and seems to form the happy
play-world of a family of charming children. The treatment is eminently
unconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of
the figures in the foreground. The place is regarded as a whole; it is
a scene, a comprehensive impression; yet none the less do the little
figures in their white pinafores (when was the pinafore ever painted
with that power and made so poetic?) detach themselves and live with a
personal life. Two of the sisters stand hand in hand at the back, in
the delightful, the almost equal, company of a pair of immensely tall
emblazoned jars, which overtop them and seem also to partake of the life
of the picture; the splendid porcelain and the aprons of the children
shine together, wh