John Singer Sargent and the Art of Elegance

By Timothy Sandefur

Oscar Wilde, who lived across the street from John Singer Sargent, once said that “all art is quite useless.”¹ Fifty years later, W. H. Auden said art (specifically, poetry) “makes nothing happen.”² These statements are true, in a sense: Art is not a device for accomplishing some larger task, but a statement—an evaluation of life and the world. An encount…