Standing among the 43 pictures in the show that opens today at the Brooklyn Museum, it is as easy to be seduced by the artist’s hand as well as his subject. John Singer Sargent’s well-heeled, Victorian children – dressed in knickers, satin, and lace,

and clutching dolls, puppies, family, or flowers – stare out at us from flurries of Impressionist brushwork. Their China-doll heads, punctuated by pursed or pouting lips, rosy cheeks, and wide, innocent eyes, appear to implore us to free them from their station and their finery.

Sargent (1856-1925), a successful, high-society portrait painter who worked mostly in London, was born to affluent American parents in Florence, Italy, and was educated in Impressionist technique in Paris. Yet he always considered himself an American. His portraits blend cosmopolitan flair, Victorian sentimentality, and a devil-may-care American directness. The combination is one that appears equally to embrace, and to turn its back on, French painting. His artworks are conflicted: Trumped-up French flourishes clash with a stoic Protestantism.

Sargent can dazzle with his brush, moving it broadly and grandly, almost heroically, finessing it in flickering soft focus washes across the canvas. He can, with a thrashing of strokes, produce a tousled, longhaired dog, a field of grass, or a glimmering, full-length satin evening gown. With a few dashes and daubs he can suggest lilies, highlights on porcelain and glass, the glint in jewels, gold leaf, and eyes. His soft-touch intimates sincerity and intimacy, a willingness to search and discover, and a generosity toward his sitters that puts beauty above all else.

But it is all facade. Sargent was self impressed, seduced by his own hand – a hand driven more by bravado, posturing, and mimicry of form than by actual virtuosity. His paintings only go so far, and it is not nearly far enough. He wages very little in his paintings and therefore gets very little in return. Most of what ends up on his canvases is borrowed, not earned.

Overstated yet undercooked, Sargent’s paintings put canned sentimentality in place of feeling and emotion; nuanced and detailed distractions in place of rhythm, volume, and space. He does not state form clearly or with certainty; he dances around it. Sargent dressed and staged his sitters, whose fanciful materials allowed him to flex his hand. Jumping from one highlight to the next keeps us too busy to notice that his dashed-off forms collapse under the shimmering dresses.

In the portraits, Sargent seems to be first and foremost after a likeness in his sitters’ faces. The figures’ heads, almost always the focus of his pictures, even when they are full-length portraits, are generally the most fully realized areas in the paintings. As his brush moves farther away from the face, volumes are often nonexistent, as if the painter applied everything beyond the sitter’s face by rote; as if, with the painting still unfinished, he had one foot out the door, rushing to the next commission.

The children, though they look different, all possess the same insipid vacancy. There is nothing going on inside them. This vacancy stands in for innocence – just like his cotton-candy brushwork stands in for sensitivity. Everything in Sargent’s portraits radiates outward from the well-lit head, especially the eyes. Certainly it is the eyes with which we most engage while we look at a person, but this is not the way great paintings work.

Painters attend to every inch of the canvas with equal consideration. They move us through layered metaphors that build poetically into layered portraits. In this way the portraits build upon, and connect to, the greater world outside the sitter. They become more than the sum of their parts.

When Sargent attaches a highlight to a child’s polished shoe, as in the works “Portrait of Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron” (1881), “Essie, Ruby, and Ferdinand, Children of Asher Wertheimer” (1902), and “Miss Elsie Palmer” (1889-90), I never believe that it was arrived at, felt, or found, only that it was dutifully placed. Sargent’s decisions are without the element of surprise, and they call attention to themselves, separating the paintings into a series of positioned, overwrought details.

Looking at a Sargent painting is merely a process of accounting for the details and sentiments he puts before us. The paintings begin and end there. There is no chance of building toward a greater, layered, and complex response. Without this anticipation and the experience of discovery there is no life, no chance for mystery. These portrait paintings, though they may be dressed up in fancy clothes, ultimately feel false, machine-made, and formally groundless.