In 1954, writing as art critic for The Nation, my late colleague Lane Faison described a memorable evening with a party of art students summering in Vermont. They were suitably bohemian—“black beards, blue jeans, and all”—and their views on contemporary art were “properly violent”:

The recognized masters of our day were not good; they were old hat, insufferable bores. Critics were blind to the new things, unaware that the future was already becoming the present. I listened with rapt attention, anticipating a memorable enlightenment. When their work of destruction was accomplished, I asked a leading question with the idea of quickening an impending revelation of avant-garde deity. It came, and I am still astonished by it. The patron saint of this group of young zealots was none other than John Singer Sargent.

It is easy to see that Faison cleverly crafted his paragraph so as to drop the most shocking words at the end, but it is no longer obvious why they should be shocking. To understand how Sargent, one of the most brilliant painters in American history, was once derided as a mere facile courtier now requires an act of historical imagination. For it has been forgotten just how thoroughly Victorian painting had been once banished from the cultural conversation. And not merely painting, but architecture, sculpture, and the decorative arts; all of Victorian culture, in fact. This state of affairs lasted through the heyday of the modern movement, from the end of World