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"There is no greater work of art than a great portrait," Henry James flatly declared in his 1887 essay on John Singer Sargent.1 This is an extraordinary statement, especially from an artist who is himself known above all for the representation of human consciousness rather than appearances. Not only did one of the century's greatest writers thus sweepingly undo the traditional hierarchy of word and image, whereby the work of the poet had long trumped that of the painter, but he did so on behalf of a genre whose limitations had often troubled even its most celebrated practitioners. "The habits of my profession unluckily extend to the consideration of so much only of character as lies on the surface, as is expressed in the lineaments of the countenance," Joshua Reynolds had ruefully observed a century earlier; any "attempt to go deeper and investigate the peculiar colouring of [a] mind," he implied, would entail an act of writing.2 Yet rather than acclaim the novelist's superior capacities in that regard, James chose to elevate the art of the painter. Nor was he just indulging a bit of public hyperbole on behalf of a friend, since he recorded his envy of the other's work still more extravagantly in private. "I … felt quite weak & foolish after my first stare at it," James wrote to John Hay after he had seen Sargent's The Wyndham Sisters at the Royal Academy in 1900 (Fig. 1): "I mean as one feels when the lady is shot from the cannon. … I came away biting my thumb … & with my ears burning from the sense of how it's not the age of my dim trade."3 We may no longer thrill to the sight of ladies shot from cannons, but it's easy to update James's figure: the novelist feels himself blown away by Sargent's image.
What accounts for this striking case of portrait-envy? With its grand scale-at nearly ten feet by seven-and its shimmering expanses of white silk, The Wyndham Sisters is certainly a spectacular painting, an effect Sargent underscores by posing his three languid beauties against a shadowy portrait of their mother by George Frederic Watts. Though modern taste is likely to prefer some of Sargent's more...