"O vanity of vanities" — so said medieval Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, bemoaning the less-than-holy intentions of art patrons. However noble or intellectual or purely creative the artistic act may be (or appear), it has always been impurely tied to — and often supplanted by — power. And within that muddied schema, commissioned portraiture is the grand dame of patronage: the ultimate vanity of vanities.

Throw in the problematic entanglement of nations and colonies and "exotic" travel locales that marked the hairpin turn between the 19th and 20th centuries (a period more recently derided for its "travel literature," and the residual colonial ugliness that phrase implies), and what might materialize is "Matteo Sandonà and Hawai'i: A Capital Ambition," on view at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

What's curious about the exhibition, which gathers royal and missionary portraits Sandonà made on three consecutive trips to Hawai'i from his San Francisco residence, beginning in 1903, is not its assemblage of turn-of-the-century local power under the guise of art; that's to be expected of portraiture. The client roster represented is a virtual Rolodex that would make any early 20th-century public-relations firm (were there such a thing) blush: Campbell, Kawananakoa, Cooke, Judd, Macfarlane, Dole.

No, what's curious is the show's claim that these local patrons' choice to commission Sandonà was "unapologetically modern."

It's true that early moderns were besotted with fashion — as were the period's premiere portrait artists, including John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler (Sandonà is compared to both here): Think Whistler's candied furs and jewels, the subject of a 2003 show at the Frick Collection in New York, or Sargent's symphonic, saturated gowns.

But that Whistler and Sargent painted fashionable society portraits with bravura brushwork, attention to dress, sunken backgrounds, and "realism" (largely a misnomer in commissioned portraiture) hardly made them modernists. Premoderns, from Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez to Flemish artist Sir Anthony van Dyck, exercised the same grand techniques centuries before.

Rather, what most characterized modernism was its rejection of traditional portraiture's pretty collusion of wealth and paint — or art in the service of power.

The cult of power became the cult of artist-as-bohemian: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted absinthe drinkers at local pubs; Pierre-Auguste Renoir's partygoers swirled out of the frame, snapshot-style; Edouard Manet replaced the idealized Venus-like odalisque with a common prostitute; and, in a nontraditional pseudo-portrait, Whistler reduced his own mother to a flat compositional "arrangement" of black and gray planes.

Modernist claims aside, Sandonà's no Whistler. While his gestural brushwork and society figures emanating from chasmic backgrounds capture something partial and ephemeral as Whistler's do, Sandonà's a second-tier painter. That's clear here in the stiff, awkwardly foreshortened limbs of sitters such as former territorial Gov. Sanford Ballard Dole, and in clumsily reworked or underworked background passages that seem careless, rather than intentionally dematerialized or modest.

Even Sandonà's piece de resistance, a full-length likeness of Princess Abigail Campbell Kawananakoa, plays pret-a-porter to Whistler's couture: Witness Whistler's luscious, strikingly similar "Arrangement in Black No. 5: Lady Meux," painted decades earlier, from the academy's permanent collection. (Or not — the Whistler's on loan in Italy, to return next summer.)

Sandonà's greatest talent is draftsmanship, evidenced by his terrific crosshatch drawings of a freshly widowed Anna Rice Cooke and a very young Princess Abigail Kapi'olani Kawananakoa. In Cooke's resolute eyes and slightly hung jowl, and in Kapi'olani's engaging, parted-almost-to-laugh lips, there's a quality of the real that's difficult to capture on paper.

Both drawings also recall portraiture's end purpose, which lies in the tension between loss and immortality. As they say, life is short and art long — a concept that would have made sense to the disease-stricken sensibility of early modern Hawai'i.

But it's hard to know, without photographic evidence or first-person accounts, if Sandonà was as facile at capturing a sitter's likeness and spirit as he's credited with having been. Was Sanford Dole a hard, calculating man, as his portrait suggests? Was Sophie Judd Cooke kind? Was Princess Kapi'olani a sweet and spunky toddler? Were Alice Cooke Spalding and Alice Kamokilaikawai Campbell Macfarlane really near look-alikes with limpid eyes, as Sandonà rendered them in 1913?

And those who'd appreciate a balanced depiction of early modern Hawai'i will be disappointed by Sandonà's Hawaiiana entries. Two similar pieces, one in paint, feature a bare-breasted native woman; the painted work's sensual exoticism more typifies Paul Gauguin's luxuriating natives — and the colonial eye — than portraiture. Sandonà's one landscape, a minor etching, is less idealized but also less relevant in this context.

Despite Sandonà's obvious technical achievement as a graphic artist, visitors hankering after good painted portraiture might be best served instead by a detour through the Academy's fine, underutilized American collection, housed upstairs in its main galleries. There's a John Singleton Copley there, a Gilbert Stuart, a lovely Sargent, and a small Mary Cassatt in lieu of the absent Whistler.

Those portrait sitters' descendants who hunger for ancestral visages will find delight here, as will others curious about what images, or whose, that fictional early twentieth-century Honolulu PR firm would have promoted. But in the end, the exhibition may have limited appeal.

Marie Carvalho writes about art and literature.