THERE ISN'T REALLY a contemporary equivalent for the turn-of-the-century portraitist, especially one of John Singer Sargent's quality. Certainly not the cheesy studio portrait; it doesn't represent (at least not in any case I'm aware of) a tremendous artistic talent turned toward the pleasure and validation of the very rich. Perhaps architecture is the closest analogue: the reduction of monumental skyscraper dreams to the size of a Microsoft millionaire's domicile.

Or perhaps not. At any rate, the cliché of Sargent as society artist, squandering his prodigious gifts on portraits of high society, is one of the myths that Trevor Fairbrother would like to disabuse viewers of in the exhibition now open at SAM. This show, Fairbrother's last before he departs his curatorial post to concentrate on writing, aims to tie together Sargent's disparate qualities, and the thread of Fairbrother's argument is sensualism--from the languor of Sargent's later work to the pleasure implicit in his brushstrokes to the immediacy of gesture caught even in the most precise of his charcoal and pencil studies.

One good thing about dead artists is that they're not around to disagree with you. Perhaps I'm too young to have participated in the myth of the society painter; there was never any doubt in my mind that he was a great artist. As far back as I can remember, one of the main delights of Sargent's work was the spectacular painthandling, the vagrant smudge of white creating a highlight, the vast dark areas with distinct shadows and rich textures. Fairbrother may well be right about all of it, even the strong strain of homoeroticism in a never-before displayed (in its entirety) portfolio of studies of male nudes. Sargent may have disagreed, only because he seemed to work hard to stay aloof of interpretations of his work: "I chronicle," he was known to say, "I do not judge."

John Singer Sargent was curated around a jewel of an exhibition, shown earlier this year at the Jewish Museum in New York City, which contained all 12 of the commissioned portraits of the Wertheimers, a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. They are a stunning group of portraits, arranged in one room of the gallery as they might have been arranged in the Wertheimers' dining room, where they were originally displayed. In these portraits is all the evidence you need of Sargent's talent. Asher Wertheimer, art dealer and patriarch, brims with suppressed energy and glows with the inner light of a Rembrandt. Sargent captures an obvious sense of fun in Ena Wertheimer; in a portrait with a man's cape, feathered hat, and sword, she seems to be tossing the cape over a shoulder and running off to some adventure, and resembles no one so much as the actress Emma Thompson in all her energy and impishness. If the portraits of Flora Wertheimer, Asher's wife, seem stiff, one imagines that it is more of a reflection of the sitter's stiffness, not Sargent's inability to bring her to life.

The gesture of so small an element as a cigarette gains depth in a Sargent work. In an informal portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson, the cigarette is loosely caught between the writer's slender fingers, adding intimacy to an image already saturated with casual charm: In his bell-bottom pants, rings, and gauntness, Stevenson is the very picture of bohemian repose. A fan held in the oddly but not impossibly turned arm of Betty Wertheimer; the fur collar of a man's cape; a woman tilting back her chair to reveal her pretty shoes--all of these details combine his dexterous hand with a real talent for seeing.

This is not a monographic exhibition. Many familiar paintings are missing--the Boit daughters, Lady Agnew, the original Madame X (although a partially completed replica is there)--and the effect is that of a phantom limb itching but not present. There is plenty to look at, however, including--for me, most surprisingly--sketches for a World War I memorial mural, the only evidence of the artist living in the world beyond his studio. Except for these last images, the work is about pleasure--the artist's and the viewer's. You don't need to be saturated in art history or world history to wander through the galleries and feel the immense impact of Sargent's talent. You walk out of the museum feeling languorous, slightly sleepy, like lighting a cigarette and stretching out on the grass. This being Seattle, and winter, I went home instead and took a nap on the couch with a very photogenic cat.