Portrait Capital

Above all, he said, he always wants to "please the client."

If a subject has no time to sit for him -- and almost none of them do -- he's happy to make the portrait a pastiche of photographs. (He said he's lost clients by insisting on live sessions.)

If clients don't like how they look in those photographs, he's happy to improve on them. When Hillary Rodham Clinton found the face in Knox's portrait of her husband a little gray, in came some pink paint and out went the five o'clock shadow that the photos showed. (Even Gilbert Stuart was less eager to please than that: In some of his most famous pictures of Washington, he chose to portray the president just as he was on the day he sat, complete with ill-fitting dentures and swollen lips. Some Old Masters managed to inject a critical note that feels almost like contemporary art, even into works that were commissioned. Goya's sitters almost all come off as deeply flawed; it's a wonder he could make a living as a court portraitist.)

Knox said the years have often begun to take their toll on his sitters by the time they matter enough to have a portrait painted. So he's eager to use his brush to give them a shot of pictorial Botox.

As Knox sums up his profession, official portraits need to capture likenesses -- even if they're not so truly like their sitters. And if possible they should tell a little story, too -- so long as it's a flattering one. And that's about it. Such portraits certainly aren't meant to break aesthetic ground or give new insight into art or life -- which is lucky, because they rarely do, if a tour of the Capitol's latest bumper crop of portraits is anything to go by.

The recent portraits in Congress sit somewhere between evoking the painted portraits of the past and copying corporate photography of more recent times.

They are strange beasts.

Mostly, they are creatures of our habits: The faces of George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt have come down to us in oil paintings, with a certain look and feel and scale and gilded frame, so we want to see our current leaders' portraits looking more or less the same. But if we demand such a strong link to the past, we make it hard for portrait painters to do more than copy their predecessors' art. It's as though we so admired Ben Franklin's prose that we insisted every modern journalist should write like him.

Of course such aesthetic issues wouldn't matter much if the central goal of official portraiture was to record a bunch of faces for posterity -- as it used to be. Today, however, that role has been usurped. When our descendants want to see what House speaker Dennis Hastert looked like, they'll go to any of a thousand photos that have been shot of him. Portraits have become markers of a sitter's stature in the establishment, and old-fashioned oil paintings seem to work best to mark that status -- because they make a current leader look a bit like bigwigs from our past.

Even the most moderately challenging contemporary art would send a very different, much stronger message. A probing photo installation, let alone a loop of video, would signal a deliberate break with that past and a preference for adventure over tradition and continuity. It's hard to imagine that in the halls of power.

Even politicians who enjoy today's newest art might hesitate to order portraits that look like it, because of the social baggage that might bring along.

"They are looking for the familiar, you could even say the formulaic," says Ann Temkin, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and that's the opposite of what she's looking to hang at MoMA. She and her colleagues seek out "things that we haven't seen before -- ways of looking at the world we haven't seen before."