THE RIVALS

Evening Star, Issue 18048, 16 August 1922, Page 9

THE RIVALS

ROYAL academy duel, [From Our London Correspondent.] July 6. The Roval Academy duel between Mr Sargent and Mr Sims is a frightful affair. Although nothing else at present interests London° art circles, some people may nob have heard about it. It arises from the fact that both painters have sent portraits of the same beautiful lady, and each hangs on the line in adjoining rooms. _ Comparisons were, of course, at once inevitable, and a furious faction fight has ensued amongst tho art critics and Chelsea_ practitioners. Any time you visit Burlington House you will sea queer individuals, generally of a Bohemian habit and with oil stains on their suite, rushing off from studying Mr Sargent’s portrait to ponder Mr Sims's work. The beautiful subject of all this frightfulness is Lady Rocksavage, whose dark Oriental magnetism shines forth ravishingly in both portraits, but with entirely different effect. Mr Sims has painted her with exterior romance, seated in a brilliant loggia, with her little son on her knee, in deshabille, and a wonderful blue vase at her elbow. Sho looks at you wistfully from large black eyes in festive mood. Mr Sargent’s three-quarter-length standing figure is treated with interior romance. There are no loggias, babies, or blue vases, but just an alien beauty with tragic eyes, in the purple and fine linen of a Tennysonian English princess. But those are truly haunting eyes, Mr Sims’s work is brilliantly clever; Mr Sargent’s is a masterpiece.