Submitted by Sir Joshua, Feb 23, 2007 08:55

After reading the on line article yesterday I bought a copy of 'The Sun' and was hit in the face with the beautiful figure by Henri on the front cover, as I am sure the 150,000 other readers were. The first thing that struck me was that Henri was basically, 'Whistler with a pulse.' Henri uses the same long lean trim canvas utilized by Whistler (as anyone bored stiff by the Frick's Whistlers will confirm - I guess he was the Warhole of his day) and gives us the full frontal of the chosen sitter. The MAJOR difference is that Henri's portrait sings. His figures don't sink, or on occassion slink into the background, and we actually feel that we have had an exchange with the sitter by the time we move on to try to figure out how on earth Houdin balanced that figure of Diana. Henri was the Americanization of the lordly English style portrait that Whistler fed back to his sitters. Personally I'd much rather have been painted by Sargent, but as a New Yorker I think I would have gone with Henri, his sense of Impressionist inspired color is a breath of fresh air. Chase was trained in Dusseldorf and as such loved the dark tenebrous canvases of the Old Masters. Henri was an innovator, truly a son of the New World.

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