A True Visual Sensualist

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England made his fortune. He was what the English upper classes--both hereditary aristocrats and nouveau riche --had wanted but not found: a portraitist who could perform in the Grand Manner. There had been none since the death of Thomas Gainsborough a century before, and Sargent, with his tremendous fluency and genuine empathy for the social levels of his sitters, filled the gap to perfection. He had no interest in politics past or present, was completely without class resentment and seemed to be devoid of irony. As a biographer who knew him pointed out, "He would have been puzzled to answer if he had been asked how nine-tenths of the population lived; he would have been dumbfounded if asked how they were governed."

This gave him the best possible qualification for painting the great and the good. He simply took them at their own valuation, producing vivid epitomes of social standing as he did so. His portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, for instance, remains the definitive image of the late-Victorian equestrian male: superbly grave and self-contained, tall as a tree, and yet with a touch of carelessness in the flare of his buff hunting waistcoat and the dashing arabesque of paint with which, in a single loaded stroke, Sargent conveyed the fold of his breeches--a gesture as assured, in its way, as any brushstroke by de Kooning. With women Sargent was in his element, and icons of late-Victorian and Edwardian femininity rise from his work with wonderful directness: those all-time-champion Jewish princesses the Wertheimer sisters, zaftig and bursting with life, or the paler and more shadowed beauty of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw.

As far as anyone knows, Sargent never had--or was even rumored to have had--a sexual relationship in his whole life; nor did he ever do a painting of a nude. His sensuality was wholly visual and confined to the surface of things--the confused glitter of light on a Venetian canal, the rumplings of fabric, the porcelain skin of an upper-class face. The sexiest picture in this show is Two Girls in White Dresses, circa 1909-11. (It is actually one girl, his niece, painted twice, lying on an Alpine hillside.) Except for the faces, not an inch of skin is visible. They are completely swaddled in cotton and cashmere, but the agitation of the cloth into powerful folds and hollows, together with the passivity of the poses, gives the image a disconcerting sensuality--not striptease, but layer-tease.

Nevertheless, the incessant production of highly paid portraiture began to chafe on Sargent. Clients kept interfering, pestering him to take this out and paint that in. "It seems there is a little something wrong with the mouth!" he complained to one of his sitters, about the demands of another. "A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!" In 1907, at the age of only 51, Sargent decided to give up doing "paughtraits," as he disparagingly called them--except for those commissions he couldn't refuse, like a 1917 portrait of John D. Rockefeller. Sargent wanted to travel more and do landscapes, especially in watercolor--and next only to Winslow Homer, he was the finest American watercolorist of his time.

He also had ambitions as a monumental painter, which resulted in a set of weird murals--Pre-Raphaelite throwbacks with overtones of realist modeling--depicting The Triumph of Religion for the Boston Public Library. But Sargent the public artist was never much good. His big commissioned war painting, Gassed, 1919, is full of compassion and even nobility but is dead as mutton.

It's the smaller, more private works that really count, and in them it's Sargent's skill that gets you (almost) every time. True-blue modernists liked to call it "empty virtuosity"--in their book, virtuosity itself smelled of emptiness anyway; works of art had to be gritty and sincere and full of doubt, in homage to Papa Cezanne. But some kinds of virtuosity are deliciously full; they are self-delighting in their reluctance to turn every stroke of paint into the residue of a moral struggle that may not have really happened; they make difficult performance look easy, and give weight to casualness. Sargent was that kind of painter, and it seems pointless to rebuke him for it--especially at the end of a century whose art he did not for a moment aspire to change.