American painter John Singer Sargent, who grew up in Europe and spent much of his life traveling, holds a mixed reputation in the art world. He was able to dash off superb feats of painting with incredible ease, yet he sometimes used that facility to produce paintings that didn't get beyond surface glitz.

Best known for his alluring portraits of voluptuous society women, their wealthy husbands and the children they doted on, Sargent (1856-1925) also had a more private oeuvre of drawings and paintings devoted to masculine beauty.

Former Seattle Art Museum curator Trevor Fairbrother delved into Sargent's passions and obsessions in a groundbreaking exhibit and catalog titled "John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist," that opened at SAM five years ago and attracted high praise.

His outstanding selection of paintings led viewers through the range of Sargent's work, from an unfinished version of his famous "Madame X" and a grand series of Wertheimer family portraits, to a selection of entrancing watercolor sketches of the artist's travels in Italy.

Also included, from a private portfolio that had not been previously exhibited, were a series of nude male drawings that helped support Fairbrother's theory that Sargent was secretly gay.

This summer, the traveling show "Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children," on view at the Portland Art Museum, doesn't come close to the connoisseur's delight of Fairbrother's exhibition.

By contrast, "Great Expectations," organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, is a theme show of Sargent's children's paintings that obviously were the artist's bread-and-butter work.

Yet looking at the exhibition with the perspective of Fairbrother's show "The Sensualist" in mind, one can see hints that Sargent's attraction to subjects such as a group of nude boys on the beach might not have been wholly disinterested.

And then there's the imposing grand-scale portrait of young Livingston Davis and his stern mother. Sargent depicts the dreamy-eyed boy radiant in his sailor suit, a straw hat pushed back to frame his face like a golden halo. The boy nestles against his mother's black silk skirt in a fetching pose that mimics the contrapposto stance of Michelangelo's "David." Is it simply a classical allusion by the painter or a special ode to the boy's beauty?

What's happening at PAM

The art scene in Portland is sizzling these days and Portland Art Museum is turning up the heat. PAM is poised to open a big expansion project in the fall. On Oct. 2, the remodeled North Building, a former Masonic Temple, premieres to the public as part of an ongoing master plan to develop the museum. It will open up 28,000 square feet of gallery space for contemporary and modern art, a new library and art-study center and bright new administrative offices. In addition, two grand ballrooms have been restored for public events. Museum admission will be free to the public 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Oct. 2, with tours of the expanded museum, a special cafe menu and festivities.

Then, at the end of October, the opulent exhibit "Hesse: A Princely German Collection," including German cultural treasures acquired by the Hesse dynasty, a ruling family since the 13th century, will open in the museum's existing special-exhibitions galleries. The show features decorative arts, antiques and paintings including the extraordinary loan of Hans Holbein's "Madonna." The Renaissance masterpiece has never before been shown outside Europe. Meanwhile, with a geared-to-please traveling show of John Singer Sargent paintings and an impressive new collection of ancient Chinese art on view, there is plenty to see at the museum as summer winds down.

Even though many of the portraits and genre paintings of children and adolescents are undistinguished, "Great Expectations" boasts a handful of knock-out paintings, including a couple that overlap with the SAM show.

Here we see Sargent at his brilliant best — where the dazzle of his technique unveils some profound aspect of character or mood. One such triumph is the 1885 oil painting "The Birthday Party," in which Sargent cunningly depicts the family of his friend, the portrait artist Albert Besnard.

In an effective conceit — one the artist re-enacts in other pictures as well — Sargent focuses his composition as if seen through a camera lens, so that certain images are crisply defined and bathed in light, others indistinct.

In this case, Sargent positions the man of the family in the background against a blood-red wall, looking on as his matronly wife cuts a birthday cake for the couple's son. But here's the irony and a telling metaphor as well: Besnard — the painter of faces — appears as little more than a dark blur, a faceless shadow overlooking the vivid family scene before him.

A few fascinating early paintings and drawings that Sargent made of his sister Violet demonstrate the tremendous ability Sargent showed even as a teenager. These images were, for me, the special pleasures of "Great Expectations" and give meaning to the exhibition title.

I loved seeing the small 1875 oil portrait "Violet Sargent," painted before the artist turned 20. It has none of the opulent props and tricks of his society portraits, no silks, flowers or luscious colors to captivate the eye. Sargent simply and sensitively painted his young sister's face as she gazes pensively away from him, limpid and delicate. In each of the sketches and paintings of her in the show, Sargent reveals the same solemn, sorrowing girl.

Among his mature paintings, it's hard to beat the moody and brilliantly executed "Essie, Ruby and Ferdinand, Children of Asher Wertheimer" 1902, a highlight of the series of Wertheimer portraits that appeared in Seattle in "The Sensualist."

For those, and a few other gems, "Great Expectations" is well worth a visit. As a whole, though, the exhibition could best be classified as Sargent lite — the kind of pictures that earned the painter his reputation for superficiality.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com