[Illustration: Plate 21.--Sargent. "The Hermit."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Now, almost any one can see how superbly all this is rendered. Any one
can marvel at and admire the free and instantaneous handling, the web of
slashing and apparently meaningless brush strokes which, at a given
distance, take their places by a kind of magic and _are_ the things they
represent. But it takes a painter to know how justly it is observed. In
these days no painter, whatever may be his deepest convictions, can
escape the occasional desire to be modern; and most of us have
attempted, at one time or another, the actual study of the human figure
in the open air. We have taken our model into a walled garden or a deep
wood or the rocky ravine of a brook and have set ourselves seriously to
find out what a naked man or woman really looks like in the setting of
outdoor nature. And we have found just what Sargent has painted. The
human figure, as a figure, has ceased to exist. Line and structure and
all that we have most cared for have disappeared. Even the color of
flesh has ceased to count, and the most radiant blond skin of the
fairest woman has become an insignificant pinkish spot no more important
than a stone and not half so important as a flower. Humanity is absorbed
into the landscape.
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