e of the manifestations of the plastic effort to
which, each year, the Salon stands sponsor. This superb picture, noble
in conception and masterly in line, gives to the figure represented
something of the high relief of the profiled images on great friezes.
It is a work to take or to leave, as the phrase is, and one in regard to
which the question of liking or disliking comes promptly to be settled.
The author has never gone further in being boldly and consistently
himself.

Two of Mr. Sargent's recent productions have been portraits of American
ladies whom it must have been a delight to paint; I allude to those of
Lady Playfair and Mrs. Henry White, both of which were seen in the Royal
Academy of 1885, and the former subsequently in Boston, where it abides.
These things possess, largely, the quality which makes Mr. Sargent so
happy as a painter of women--a quality which can best be expressed by a
reference to what it is not, to the curiously literal, prosaic, sexless
treatment to which, in the commonplace work that looks down at us from
the walls of almost all exhibitions, delicate feminine elements have
evidently so often been sacrificed. Mr. Sargent handles these elements
with a special feeling for them, and they borrow a kind of noble
intensity from his brush. This intensity is not absent from the two
portraits I just mentioned, that of Lady Playfair and that of Mrs. Henry
White; it looks out at us from the erect head and frank animation of
the one, and the silvery sheen and shimmer of white satin and white lace
which form the setting of the slim tall-ness of the other. In the Royal
Academy of 1886 Mr. Sargent was represented by three important canvases,
all of which reminded the spectator of how much the brilliant effect he
produces in an English exhibition arises from a certain appearance that
he has of looking down from a height, a height of cleverness, a sensible
giddiness of facility, at the artistic problems of the given case.
Sometimes there is even a slight impertinence in it; that, doubtless,
was the impression of many of the people who passed, staring, with an
ejaculation, before the triumphant group of the three Misses V. These
young ladies, seated in a row, with a room much foreshortened for a
background, and treated with a certain familiarity of frankness, excited
in London a chorus of murmurs not dissimilar to that which it had been
the fortune of the portrait exhibited in 1884 to elicit in Paris, and