Saluting Sargent The Boston Public Library’s murals, the Museum of Fine Arts’ new gallery BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Sick with vertigo, and trying to hold onto both aluminum rails without dropping my briefcase, I make my way up the three flights of rickety scaffolding to the landing just below the high, arched ceiling at the Boston Public Library, where the restoration of John Singer Sargent’s extraordinary murals is in progress. Unlike the top level of most interior scaffolds, this one boasts desks, phones, computers, and a small cadre of devoted conservators who, one cotton swab at a time, are at work cleaning (in a two-stage process, once in a water-based solution, once in wax) Sargent’s elaborate, stylized celebration of the spiritual progress of humanity. Sargent called the interlocking narrative figures The Triumph of Religion. America’s Sistine Chapel, somebody else has called it.

To my surprise, it’s a privilege and a reward to stand so close. I’ve been looking at these murals my whole life, and I realize I’ve never seen them before. Only at such proximity is it evident that the gilded arrows that emanate from Moloch are actual arrows, a molded bas relief. (Sargent experimented with three-dimensional enhancements over the course of the mural commission, beginning with wood, then extending his raised surfaces to include papier-mâché and linoleum.) And who knew that the bejeweled Astarte in her diaphanous robes — she’s the female pagan god opposite Moloch — is truly bejeweled? The blue crystal insets to her gown have been individually removed and cleaned.

Kathy Hanley, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable champion of both Sargent and the restoration project, tells me that in the process of vacuuming an area of molding near Moloch, a conservator pulled up a cigar stub. She’s delighting in the image of Sargent, an indefatigable tweaker of every square inch of ceilings and walls (he worked on the project, intermittently, for nearly 30 years, from 1890 to 1919), fussing with the head of Moses or the prophet Micah or the war goddess Neith while chomping on a cigar. And with that image of the earthy æsthete, one of the country’s most celebrated and worldly painters, puffing a stogie that he misplaced and then forgot on a ledge, the wonderful contradictions in the Sargent exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts come into relief.

Those contradictions are epitomized by the centerpiece of the exhibit, the huge (113 by 77 inches) oil painting titled Charles Stewart, Sixth Marquess of Londonderry, Carrying the Great Sword of State at the Coronation of King Edward VII, August, 1902, and Mr. W.C. Beaumont, His Page on That Occasion. Over the course of his lengthy and formidable career, Sargent produced more than 800 oil portraits, the last of them in 1908, some 17 years before his death. He was, in other words, a society painter; his portrait commissions were his bread and butter, and the man dined well.

The MFA has set up, in the Susan Morse Hilles Gallery, a small, temporary Sargent show to create a context for Charles Stewart, Sixth Marquess of Londonderry, which the museum purchased two months ago. The portrait is a technical tour de force. Sunlight dapples the white satin cape with an intensity not unlike Stewart’s own dispassionate gaze, and the sword of state towers like a ship’s mast. It’s clear that Lord Londonderry belongs to the ruling class, and not just of Britain but of the world.

At the same time, one has to wonder just how seriously to take some if not many of Sargent’s pricy commissions. Is there any way of seeing Mrs. Fiske Warren, for instance, as other than condescending and self-important? Or compare Sargent’s treatment of Edith, Lady Playfair (Edith Russell) — her imperiousness almost turns her mouth into a snarl — with Mrs. Edward Darley Boit (Mary Louisa Cushing), whose liveliness and humor make it seem that she’s just recovered from hearing a good joke.

The portrait of Charles Stewart begs to be understood as something other than purely stately. Could anyone, then or now, not see in the pomp of the imagery (or for that matter, the title!) pomposity approaching the ridiculous? Shouldn’t the coronation of a king be celebratory? Instead, Lord Londonderry’s gaze borders on discomfort. Let’s not even talk about the great big sword.

Consider the difference between Sargent’s treatment of Stewart and his painting from the same year (1904) of the Civil War hero General Charles J. Paine. Both men are middle-aged, mustached, somber. Paine, however, wears a world-weary look, and the artist attends to him closely; the near life-size scale, the relaxed, familiar posture, the expression that is at once resigned and purposeful. Lord Londonderry occupies only a fraction of his portrait; the cape, the sword, and the page upstage him.

But The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, in all their subdued, subtly erotic mischief, are back from their stay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and seeing the girls in the same room with their mother proves enchanting. And two other modest works stand out in the show, An Artist in His Studio, also painted in 1904, and The Master and His Pupils, done a decade later in 1914.

In the first second or two when I saw The Master and His Pupils, I didn’t see the figures off in the distance, so in the instant between glancing at the title and taking in the dry river bed and trees, I understood the Master to be God. In the next instant, my understanding was corrected by taking in the distant painter with his entourage of attendants, but I remain grateful for my mistake. Far more masterful, Sargent appears to be saying, than the far-away artist and his rapt audience is the handiwork of nature. That’s where our eyes are initially drawn and stay riveted, where the excitement of the composition lies: the tumult of rocks and forest and sun. The master of oil paint, by comparison, remains indistinct, anonymous, small.

To the left of The Master and His Pupils hangs An Artist in His Studio, a quietly amazing work that counts among my favorite Sargents. Who is the artist? The wall text informs us that he was a friend of Sargent’s, but what we learn from the painting is something deeper and more interesting. The artist, for one thing, is someone forever working. Paintings lie everywhere; there’s even one on his unmade bed, as if to say the man paints in his sleep. And the scene that engages him — a tree’s coming into formation and beneath it perhaps some cows — isn’t a coronation or a well-dressed sitter. It’s the earth and the sky. An Artist in His Studio anticipates by a decade The Master and His Pupils, and the progression suggested by the two works — the artist moves from the foreground to the background, from large to small, from named to anonymous — hints at Sargent’s own evolution from portrait painter to muralist, from private commissions to public ones.