Sargent's 'El Jaleo' Dances Anew National Gallery Plays Host to the Famed Portraitist's Restored Painting

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JOHN SINGER SARGENT'S thrilling "El Jaleo," now on loan to the National Gallery, is really about how some creative artists are seized with a vision or an obsession that will not leave them until the image is realized: as close to perfection as possible.

Think of Monet's series paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, or water lilies, or haystacks, or the gardens at Giverny; or think of Andrew Wyeth's fixation with his German model Helga.

In the non-painting world, there are novelists, poets, and composers who have been inspired by one memory or imagined scene to create a work. Larry McMurtry once said a final scene flashed into his consciousness before he wrote "Horseman, …