Every once in awhile Sargent did something different than paint portraits of women fully adorned and expressed in their clothing and of men who look rather craggy and whose clothes cover them rather than individuate them, a distinction that still holds, at least when women dress up for gala events like the Oscars. Sargent always went back to his true calling of realistic portraiture even when it had become a burden, his portrait of Woodrow Wilson capturing at least as much of the man as the photographs made of him at the time. It was a last gasp of the realistic eye in portraiture. Sargent’s experiments are interesting because they point out the roads not taken and because they show Sargent’s profound understanding of the art movements that were swirling around him in the course of his career, and so give reason to think that his art was chosen rather than the only thing he could have done,