For those to whom the experience of a great painting is essential nourishment, the new exhibition at The Frick Collection, Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery, is a feast.

Just ten artworks, this exhibit includes a panel by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) never before shown in America, as well as pieces by El Greco (1541-1614), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). But in this small yet broad selection of jewels from Scotland, the standouts are canvases by Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), John Constable (1776-1837), Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925).

“Fêtes Vénitiennes,” 1718-1719, Watteau’s luminous painting of a dance, is like great jazz. Using an assortment of poses taken from his figure drawings, Watteau constructs a fête galante composition that is both improvisational in its arrangement of costumed characters and achieves profound form.

Gainsborough and Constable hang on the same gallery wall in this show and both artists gain from the juxtaposition. Gainsborough’s smooth, deep landscape balances black-greens in the foliage with emergent lights in fields and sky. All of nature, including the animals and humans that inhabit it, is caught in the echo and response of space.

“The Vale of Dedham,” 1827-1828, is among Constable’s best-known works. A densely painted surface with intensely worked forms, an all-consuming vision of nature is also the subject here. Stately trees rhythmically rhyme with billowy clouds while providing safe haven for figures below.

For visitors who may be unused to considering Sargent among such elevated company, “Lady Agnew of Lochnaw,” 1892, deserves special attention.

Sargent’s reputation has swung from adulation to detestation. While American presidents and art collectors commissioned Sargent portraits, some leading critics of his day derided Sargent as a society painter whose compositions lacked artistic merit and whose bravura brushwork was affected. But it is precisely Sargent’s immersion in his craft that led contemporary art writer Robert Hughes to remark: “There is virtue in [Sargent’s] virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.”

Sargent’s portrait of Lady Agnew has pride of place at the Frick. Completed in just six sittings, the portrait was painted entirely from life. Without even preliminary drawings, this is the alla prima technique of a showman, risking everything in the moment.

In this canvas brilliant light pours from a fluid brush. Saturated shadows and sensual light have breath, bringing Lady Agnew to life.

Lady Agnew, seated in an armchair, crosses her legs under a silk gown. Cropped at the ankles, Lady Agnew’s lap simultaneously bars the viewer’s way and leads the eye into the picture through soft strokes that describe her white dress.

There is something flirtatious in the gesture of Lady Agnew’s left hand, her pose at once casual and seductive, ensnaring the viewer. Lady Agnew’s right hand, hidden in her lap, holds an unfolding camellia. We see Lady Agnew, an uncommon beauty, as much beneath the transparent veils of her dress as outside it.

Above all, rising up through the curtain of the dress covering her breast, through the cameo that hangs there, whose bright white center throws all the whites of the dress into cool and warm greys, the viewer’s eye lands at the focal point of the painting- the face.

Lady Agnew has a quizzical, seductive gaze, thrown off balance by her unsteady left eye, a subtle imperfection. The cool grey-blue fabric behind her sculpts out the space she sits in. A decorative pattern of Chinese characters on the blue cloth adds an air of mystery.

Her rich cap of black hair and her black eyebrows and dark, staring eyes contrast against alabaster skin. As in any great portrait, the viewer sees and is seen, coexisting with Lady Agnew, if only for a moment.

A pale lavender sash wrapped tightly around her waist flows off the bottom edge of the canvas and out into the Frick East Gallery, another example of Sargent connecting viewers to Lady Agnew. The sash, like a lure, functions as path back into the painting, into the space left shadowed and empty to her right, the space the viewer is offered beside her.

In all the paintings in this marvelous show, the representation of the human figure is central to artistic expression. These paintings proclaim a human reality in form and space, emotion and narrative, which should be as essential to contemporary artists as anything now on view in the galleries of Chelsea or the Lower East Side. Can artists today accept the challenge and respond in kind?

Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery, on view through February 1, 2015, The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, 212-288-0700, www.frick.org

More information about Simon Carr’s work can be found at www.simoncarrstudio.com