InsaneJournal

Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the influential English art work critic Roger Fry, within the Bloomsbury Group, who in the 1926 Sargent Abstract Art retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's operate as lacking aesthetic quality: "Wonderful indeed, but most marvelous that this marvelous efficiency should really actually happen to be baffled with that of an artist." And, in your 1930s, Lewis Mumford led a chorus within the severest critics: "Sargent remained for the finish an illustrator…the most adroit look of workmanship, one of the most dashing eyesight for effect, cannot Floral Art conceal the vital emptiness of Sargent's mind, or even the contemptuous and cynical superficiality of the particular component of his execution."
Part of Sargent's devaluation can also be attributed to his expatriate life, which produced him appear much less American at a time when "authentic" socially-conscious American art, as exemplified through the Stieglitz circle and through the Ashcan Oil Painting Reproductions School, was around the ascent.