NOW YOU SEE ME

John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.

- JACKSON ARN

In works like "Asher Wertheimer" (1898), Sargent seems to capture both glamour and the strain of those trying to sustain it.

If you remember anything about this painting, may it be that the dog's name is Noble. The black poodle in the bottom left greets us as a silhouette with a few shiny parts: teeth, eye, damp nose, pink tongue. The teeth could crack bone; the tongue wants to be friends. Not a very dignified pose for a creature called Noble, but humans love to saddle animals with teasingly grand names-Rex, Princess, King, Queenie. It's one of our many little ways of being modest and boastful in the same breath, of displaying our possessions and hinting that we are, in both senses, above it all.

The man girthily looming over Noble is not a noble. You might be able to tell by his coat, which blends into the blackness as easily as his pet's fur. But his hands are the bigger giveaway he's no manual laborer, yet you sense that he uses them all the time. They speak every language, know classical rhetoric and differential calculus, have interesting opinions about the Berlin Conference. One sinks a thumb in his pocket. The other pokes at us with a cigar. Wordlessly, both announce, "We know exactly what we're talking about." They belong to a man named Asher Wertheimer, and in the years leading up to this portrait's unveiling, in 1898, he became fantastically wealthy by dealing art. To celebrate his talent for persuading people to buy expensive objects, he has hired the famous John Singer Sargent and done what nobles do: converted himself into an expensive object.