Curator Trevor Fairbrother, a longtime Sargent scholar, has undertaken a welcome project of infusing the dry realm of art history with glamour and eroticism with "John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist." In this sumptuous book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum (through March 18), Fairbrother shifts the view of Sargent as a technically accomplished yet clinical artist to someone who very much appreciated physical pleasures and captured them in lush, ravishing paintings and drawings.

The project offers in-depth looks at graciously large pictures such as the iconic "Madame X" and a more intimately scaled, little-seen portfolio of 30 drawings of strapping male nudes -- presented publicly in their entirety for the first time in the book and exhibition. They're languorous images that unabashedly adore alluring bodies and settings.

In a nutshell, what's different about this look at Sargent?

What I've done with this book is reveal the contradictions of Sargent's official biography. It's generally understood that he was reserved and shy and tongue-tied and kind of a blank as a sexual being. Yet when we talk about his painting we refer to it as uninhibited and lush and sensual and expressive of an enjoyment of body language, texture and sunlight.

Have you revised your impression of Sargent, the person, after doing this project?

I would argue -- though people may contest what constitutes evidence -- that he was probably gay and very repressed. He led a double life, a public facade vs. the real person. The real person is hidden, as those who really knew were sworn to secrecy, sort of the way Hollywood still is today.

Within the field of art history is that an important revelation?

I personally think it's a footnote. But all these people who carefully avoided the topic feel they have to comment on it in some way. It's a transition to a broader awareness of what's there in the art.

It seems slightly dangerous to couch such a revered artist's work in sexual terms.

When I wrote the first article on the male nudes, it was so obvious to some people that there's an admiration for the male body in there. But then most weren't used to hearing about that 20 years ago. I don't want to label him a gay artist. He never wrote about it. I think it's a positive attribute of the work that he clearly enjoyed the male body. It's not unlike the way Picasso and Matisse enjoyed the female body -- and there's no shortage of literature about their enjoyment of that. But there's almost nothing written about Sargent's enjoyment of the male body. In Robert Hughes' review of the Sargent show at the National Gallery, he wrote that Sargent never painted a nude, male or female. Not true -- he did both! Hughes was speaking to the general understanding that Sargent was asexual. I'm just trying to add one more thing to the table, and I'm doing it more because I think the works are wonderful and worth looking at. But if that's the only thing keeping us looking at the artwork, that's terrible.

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