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It would be pointless to look in Sargent's work for what a late Rembrandt self-portrait has to offer. There was very little inwardness to Sargent. His images are all external, a form of conventional display by the sitter enacting a public role. But Sargent had tremendous panache, and no other artist in Europe could deal better with the material props of social standing—the cascading velvet and flowing lace, the nervous shimmer of voile over silk, the glitter of ormolu or the subdued crinkle of light on the instep of a Lobb riding boot. One would be wrong to think that this was a routine response to the opulence of his sitters' lives. Sargent had a very exact eye. His idol, when he was a student in Paris in the 1870s, had been Velasquez; and from incessant study of his paintings, he had learned a great deal about the subtleties and difficulties of pure tonal description. He could summon up form and material in a few strokes, every granule of pigment falling into the place demanded by illusion, as though breathed onto the surface: it was this that gave his "stunners," like the pearl, silver and lilac portrait of Lady Agnew (1892-93), their apparitional air. Naturally, there were limits to this sort of rhetoric. Sargent's presentation of Sir Frank Swettenham, one of the proconsuls of the Empire in the Far East, as an overwhelming power object—frosty glare, glittering medal, a pile of imperial spoils and tributes—is pitched to a Rubenesque grandiosity that would crush any modern administrator; it must have seemed a little overdone even 75 years ago. The faces of Sargent's men rarely have the power to haunt you, as Rembrandt's sacramental potato of a nose does. They tend to be pink, brusque, ineffably confident masks; the sense of the official role comes before any question of revealed character. Sargent was better with women. His portrait of the daughters of his chief patron, Asher Wertheimer, must be the canonical image of the Jewish princess. Zaftig, bursting with vitality and chatter, they sway into the frame like a pair of inexorable swans.
In its power of theatrical illusion, its triumphant evocation both of a type and of two very tangible and different girls, this portrait did what no photograph could do. After Sargent's death, no painter could do it either. Sociable confidence was not the business of modernism.
It is sometimes said that Andy Warhol, whose exhibition "Portraits of the '70s" opened last week in Manhattan, is the Sargent of our times. Certainly no modern painter with an equivalent reputation—deserved or not—has spent so much time on celebrity portraiture: Warhol's show is an anthology of famous faces from show biz, art and fashion, an album of discoland and the Concorde set.
Whether these images will look as interesting after 50 years as Sargent's do is another question. Certainly they do not today. What they lack is Sargent's ability to realize and construct a painting. Warhol's admirers, who include David Whitney, the show's organizer, are given to claiming that Warhol has "revived" the social portrait as a form. It would be nearer the truth to say that he has zipped its corpse into a Halston, painted its eyelids and propped it in the back of a limo, where it moves but cannot speak.