a rich man's wealth should be duly transmitted to his heirs, so we may admit that Sir Asher Wertheimer was likewise conferring a benefit on society, both now and in centuries to come, by transmitting his personality and his entourage. Viewing the whole matter, then, in this historical perspective and throwing over as irrelevant the purely aesthetic point of view, I can see and rejoice in Mr Sargent's astonishing professional skill.
We praise a great doctor though he has added nothing to the knowledge of truth, and we should praise a great applied artist though he has given us no new glimpse of beauty. Therefore, although Mr Sargent is already more fully represented than any living and almost any dead artist in our national collections, I for one welcome the bequest by which the National Gallery becomes the trustee of Sir Asher Wertheimer's fame.
I see that this record of the life of a successful business man of the close of the Nineteenth Century has a profound historical interest. It was a new thing in the history of civilization that such a man should venture to have himself and the members of his numerous family portrayed on the scale and with the circumstance of a royal or ducal family, and I see that Mr Sargent has quite peculiar and unique gifts for doing what both his patron and posterity required of him, and that such gifts are by no means common and deserve the fullest recognition.
For Mr Sargent was a brilliant ambassador between Sir Asher Wertheimer and posterity. He managed on the one hand to give these family portraits the sort of decorative splendour and éclat which puts them in line with the princely portraits of the past and which gave just satisfaction to his patron, and yet—and this is surely a supreme merit—he has never flattered him or his family. They are all seen with an almost coldly dispassionate and terribly observant eye. There they are on just the particular social eminence to which they had attained, and not altogether without traces of the meritorious effort of attainment. I used to imagine some trace of irony in Mr Sargent's work. I think I was wrong: he is too detached, too much without parti pris for that. But that detachment has enabled him to miss no fact that might have social significance, so that the record of his observations lends itself, if one chooses, to an ironical interpretation. It requires rare gifts indeed to make such a record—a keenness of eye, a skill of hand, and a
