Jennifer Eimers - "No greater work of art": Henry James and Pictorial Art - The Henry James Review 23:1 The Henry James Review 23.1 (2002) 72-84 "No greater work of art": Henry James and Pictorial Art Jennifer Eimers, Creighton University Henry James was an amateur critic of the pictorial arts most of his life, frequently publishing his thoughts on the topic. Peter Rawlings emphasizes the importance of those publications: The reactions to painting, in particular, regularly seek to imply the perspective of a supine, archly self-conscious critic revelling in the guise of a leisured dilettante whose trade is levity and irony. But as the workshop of James's literary apprenticeship and, as they develop, the site of his theoretical and technical introspections, they are much more than a marginal adjunction. (1) However, John Sweeney notes in the introduction to The Painter's Eye that from 1882 to 1897 James's painting criticism markedly slackened. In fact, from 1882 to 1888, the years studied in this essay, James published only four essays on art, a notable difference from the previous seven years in which he had published approximately thirty-six essays and notes (v-vii, 262-64). Sweeney remarks, "The gap is regrettable because it was between 1882 and 1897 that his sense of artistic experiment was sharpened and developed by his own exercises" (25). As Sweeney highlights, during these years of artistic development James published several notable works of...