The  NPG’s Sargent exhibit opened last week and successfully challenges preconceptions that the artist was merely a portrait painter of the wealthy.  As the FT notes, the exhibit contains intimate, idiosyncratic works that often stretch almost to abstraction.  Some of these experimental works include the artist Robert Lewis Stevenson talking and practically walking off the edge of the portrait and the Tate’s  “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” with light seemingly emanating from the painting.  One can spend  a good bit of time staring at the painting of the Paillerons (above) wondering just what these children  were thinking–and sensing that Sargent had unique talent to capture their haunting stares.

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, London — review – FT.com.