Painting Posh.

The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World, by Paul Fisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $40) FOR the modern viewer of the paintings of the American artist John Singer Sargent, the question is simple: Do we trust the art experts, or our lying eyes? So I wondered when I recently found myself rereading the collected works of novelist Louis Auchincloss, who shared with Sargent a lifelong interest in the modern aristocracy - and several of whose books featured on their dust jackets portraits by Sargent. Self-portraits by Sargent are deemed insufficiently revealing of his inner psychology: "In all three of his self-portraits, Sargent suited himself up in his Savile Row coat and styled himself in a rather boring and conventional three-quarters view.". [Extracted from the article]