In the summer of 1882, a young English critic sent a copy of a book she had just published, in which she had argued that art must yield nothing to conventional facility, to a painter-friend traveling on the Continent. He thanked her in a meditative letter, observing, by way of agreement, that “there are certain times when talent entirely oven comes thought or poetry.” The critic was Violet Paget, who called herself “Vernon Lee”: her correspondent was the young American painter John Singer Sargent. Little did he realize that he was formulating, better than anyone else ever would, the chief reproach to be leveled at his own work for the next hundred years.
That Sargent soon became aware of such failings, yet remained powerless on the whole to correct them, is not the greatest puzzle in a career abounding in paradoxes. One such paradox may be glimpsed in the contrary reactions of Henry James and Roger Fry to the painter’s well-known bravura manner. Writing in 1887, when Sargent was thirty-one, James observed that “perception with him is already a kind of execution”; Fry, speaking out of the van of British modernism soon after the artist’s death in 1926, charged that since he had “never felt tempted to probe sensation . . . there was nothing to check his unbounded eye.” James meant to acclaim Sargent, Fry to dim his posthumous luster: what strikes us today is that they chose such similar terms.
Other paradoxes spring from Sargent’s
