1) A contemporary: Malcolm Liepke (The Independent, 1998)

2) A contemporary: Eduardo Faradje

3) Popular modern "classics": John Sargent and others

(1) A contemporary: Liepke (The Independent, 1998)

A trip to the National Gallery bears out Malcolm T Liepke's placing of Velazquez amongst his influences. Room 29 at Trafalgar Square shows you that the great Spaniard does indeed hover in the eye, mind and hand of this modern American, whose work at the Albemarle is his first British outing. The show is dragging in lunchtime businessmen, tempted by the bosom and frank stares the painter's models throw out.

Born in Minneapolis in 1953, Liepke's work is sombre and the people in it are fleshy and doomed. He seems to lay paint on vigorously, in what look like almost declamatory strokes. But the canvases and prints (on show until Saturday March 28) are also frankly sexy: these pale underclothed young women look hungry, and a tad insatiable. They look cross and you'd not want to cross them. But sobered up, they'd probably be quite larky.

According to an interview and profile by the artist Kathleen Anderson, in American Artist, Liepke is a successful illustrator in New York, and he often exhibits there. The paintings in London have mostly sold, and it's not surprising. Liepke is showing us a complicated world, but does it with charm. And it may be that being an illustrator encourages in him a certain modesty: he is happy to declare several influences and we are happy to hunt down those and more. There's the Degas love of strong light and shade and whacky angles and cropping. There's an element of John Singer Sargent's swagger portrait flirty-dirty in the women. There's Whistler's fuzzy, visionary illumination.

There are also qualities which the artist didn't mention to American Artist and which may be coincidental. But it's hard not to compare the man with Thomas Eakins, America's awkward, brilliant, anguished portraitist: here's the same discussion of the potency of women and the same mixture of pride and resentment with which women regard men regarding them. And then here too is a great dollop of Walter Sickert, with his snapshots liveried out in oil and his claustrophobic suburban scenes and his back bedrooms glimpsed with a mixture of horror and fascination.

It's not necessary to pity Malcolm L Liepke for being so rich in influences. He seems delighted not to be straining after the empty new. He tells his students to study how to draw before attempting artistic revolutions and himself left art school because he wasn't being taught the basic skills. He now works surrounded by books of his favourite painters. When one's stopped name-dropping, the walk round these images feels as though it is done in the company of an individual with a secure touch of his own.

Albemarle Gallery, 49 Albemarle Street, London W1X 3FE 0171 499 1616, until March 28

(2) A contemporary: Eduardo Faradje (The Independent, 1999)

Eduardo Faradje is an Argentinian in his early 40s. This is his first London show and he's lucky, as we are, that it is spacious. These 40 paintings fairly pick you up and chuck you against the opposite wall. Stand back ten feet and more, and their strength and subtlety get to work.

The paintings are much more luminous than the catalogue can suggest. There is not a smile in the joint. The life-sized women turn their mouths downward and peer down considerable noses in expressions which convey rather more disdain than mere gloom. All this would be unbearable were it not for the occasional gleams of vivid colour, and the passion for light, which pick the spirits up.

Faradje says he spent some time in Madrid, in the late 80s, and at the Prado he soaked up an adoration of the almost Medieval seriousness of the old country. Like Malcolm Liepke and Antony Williams (both featured beautifully at the Albemarle recently), Faradje is deliberately and happily conventional, but properly modern too.

How come? The excitement of good oil painting lies in the way it takes on the same challenges and problems that have been around for centuries. The clever bit is to convey the liveliness which lies in shadow. Low countries and Spanish masters are still the benchmark, and the modern artist picks up the same tools with the same understanding about the job in hand.

Faradje is finding much the same way through this terrain as Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, and Lucian Freud. Like them, he maximises the difference between what a streak of paint seems to be doing when looked at closely and the effect it has when viewed at a proper distance. In this way, even the most conventional painter accepts the impressionist challenge.

Faradje's nudes are a triumph. Here is the proper devotion to the reality but also the eloquence of the human form: its capacity to do hard work but also to be an object of worship. There are the required translucent flesh tones on a woman's breast, especially in one of several nudes, Durmiendo. One nude, Desnudo Con Pan[[squiggle over the n]]]o Rojo, is that simplest and most glorious of images, a woman's back. The hair is up, the robe distractingly covering half the rump. This is "swagger" painting of which John Singer Sargent (thank goodness for the forthcoming Tate celebration of him) would be proud. Vestita De Negro, one of the few small paintings in the show, is a full-on, simple, piece assembled out of the minimum vigorous strokes in which a semi-naked woman in stockings looks with something like menace at the viewer. Sickert would be envious.

Faradje can convey personality beautifully, though he often sketches in the bare minimum of portraiture. Like the people in a Thomas Eakins, these are far more than simple parcels of studied misery. The thoughtful man in Mujer Durmiendo might have jumped right of an easel of the Philadelphia master.

Eduardo Faradje, Albemarle Gallery, 49 Albemarle Street, London W1, Telephone 0171 499 1616 Until 17 October, 10-6 Mon-Fri, Sat 10-4

(3) Popular modern "classics", John Sargent and others

This piece didn't quite make it into the Express in 1998.

Never mind the neurotic abstract doodles and endless video installations which art-lovers are supposed to flock to. The old game of using brush, paint and canvas to get a likeness that says something more than any photograph can is alive and well, and the public admires anyone who does it well.

Just look at the crowds flocking to the exhibition of John Singer Sargent's work at the Tate. It is everything a great show should be. For instance, it gathers large numbers of familiar, loved works which roar their confidence.

But however much we look at paintings because they are beautiful and uplifting, we need something challenging too. Luckily, this country has a strong and continuing tradition of producing and enjoying painters who do return to the basic, very serious, question. How do you make human flesh and human faces come alive on canvas, and do it so that human vagaries, aspirations and mortality are on display? It's as simple as that. One of our best youngish painters is Antony Williams. Do you remember his portrait of the Queen? There was a lot of comment a couple of years ago about how he made her fingers look like sausages. But actually, you had only to stand in front of the picture to see that here was a man playing fair by what was in front of him, but adding his voice too.

The Sargent show does the same work. During his lifetime and ever since, some critics have fallen for the idea that these paintings are just "swagger" portraits, flattering the Establishment. But some his most famous pictures are of dodgy or interestingly marginal characters: "Madame X" - his most famous painting - shows an arriviste, nouveau riche, French society figure (actually, an American) who was an extravagant exhibitionist. Sargent paints her out of curiosity and fascination, not because she's grand, but because her situation is odd and edgy. She's no beauty, actually, and the whole point of the picture is to unpick the difference between glamour and loveliness. It scandalised Paris when first shown.

A photograph in Yale University Press's recent "British School" (it's an account of great homegrown paintings in the National Gallery) shows that the subject of another favourite Sargent, "Lord Ribblesdale", was nearly as extraordinary-looking as the gently but piercingly caricatured painting of him.

Even Sargent's most flattering portraits are full-on accounts of real people. "Lady Agnew of Lochnaw" (Monica Lewinski is aiming for her look in her Vanity Fair make-over) was unwell as Sargent painted her, and she looks intriguingly and alluringly wan as a result.

So the thrill of the show comes when we see that Sargent has a tough, mordant eye. Have a look at "Mrs Charles Russell": that's a painting that the master of "psychological" portraiture - Sargent's fellow-American, Thomas Eakins - would have been proud of. Thomas Eakins Redsicovered (another new Yale volume) demonstrates just how seriously this once-neglected "conventional" painter is now being taken, not least after a wonderful London show of his penetrating stuff a few years ago.

There is no simple line between old and modern approaches to the oldest problems in painting. Rembrandt (all of whose self-portraits will be shown at the National Gallery next June) was boldly "impressionistic" in his painting. More than 300 years later, Jenny Saville, one of the artists who showed at the Hayward's Sensation show a year ago, paints huge fleshy nudes and doesn't bother to make them attractive (Rembrandt is no less frank). But her work is workmanlike and serious: it's real painting.

Saville is in a "modern" British tradition whose most famous and important living figure is Lucian Freud, as we saw in the Tate's show this summer. He's still vigorously inventing new ways of looking at flesh and faces in his 70s. Stanley Spencer, surely one of the greatest painters we have ever produced, could have looked at a Saville or a Freud and known that they were pursuing the same issues as he was. Even Francis Bacon, as we saw in a Hayward Gallery show this year, and will see again in a Tate show next February, was a real painter: under all the contortions and grimness (much too dreary and depressive for my taste), there's a man addressing the same issues that obsessed Rembrandt.

You don't have to be a genius to deliver solid work that's a joy and worth respect. The part-time painter, Eric Ward, for instance, works rather in the style of John Ward, many years his senior, and a regular at the Royal Academy summer show, with his amiable portraits of confident English midle-class and mildy bohemian people.

Eric Ward is the harbour master at St Ives, Cornwall, and the RNLI coxswain too. His paintings aren't technically brilliant, but they drip seriousness of purpose, and an emerging ability to portray people, especially women, both truly and creatively. One warms to him especially because he cites as a great influence Walter Sickert - a man who understood that the knack of painting was often to be loose and expressive in approach, but to produce accuracy and discipline in the effect. No-one ever quite cracks it: the way the light falls on an eye, or the way there is a colour in even a dark shadow, or the pale gleam of a woman's breast. But the honourable attempts of succeeding generations are one of life's great solaces.

John Singer Sargent, until 17 January, The Tate Gallery, 0171 887 8000

Eric Ward's Paintings, until December 7, The One Below Gallery, 129 Pepys Road, Telegraph Hill, London SE14 5SE. By apppointment, ring 0171 732 3636

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