THERE was a time when Kip Forbes, vice chairman of the Forbes publishing empire, asked himself what he really wanted in life, and one of the things he came up with was this: a portrait of himself rendered in the lush manner of François-Xavier Fabre's 1797 neo-classical portrait of Allen Smith nobly contemplating the Arno River. Forbes, for his part, would be seated in front of the family's Normandy chateau, wearing the family kilt and knickers, noodling at a set of paints.

When this inspiration struck Mr. Forbes in 1989, he turned to a painter named James Childs, whose work Mr. Forbes's father, Malcolm Forbes, had collected with interest. Up until then Mr. Childs had been painting mainly landscapes or classical motifs with models -- that is, models he had to pay, instead of the kind who pay him.

In these times when any visitor to Times Square can sit for an artist whose oeuvre includes fine sketches of Tupac Shakur, Mr. Childs has turned a clever living immortalizing what was once called upper-case-S Society, in a heroic, labor-intensive style you might have thought even more antiquated than Society itself. Working in the formal discipline of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or John Singer Sargent, Mr. Childs takes about four such commissions a year, for which he charges $150,000 and up for full-length portraits.

Mr. Forbes, 52, is a serious collector of art, some of it depicting himself. ''It's one of life's most ego-satisfying experiences,'' he said. ''Anyone who complains about having their portrait painted doesn't know what fun is. Having someone else devote all that effort to immortalize you is highly gratifying.''

He then turned to the details of Mr. Childs's rendering. ''My only quibble is that I always admired Ingres when he put more vertebrae in the 'Odalisque' to make her look more odalesque,'' he said, referring to the 1814 blue-plate special nude, a staple of liberal arts curriculums. ''I would have thought we could have stretched my legs a little longer just to work the composition. Jim was willing to stretch tree trunks but not my legs. I am as is.''

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On a nasty afternoon a few weeks back, Mr. Childs, 57, sat in the cool Sutton Place living room of Jo Hallingby, working methodically on a preliminary sketch of Ms. Hallingby, whom he had previously described as ''quite a well-known socialite.'' For Mr. Childs, who had ridden the subway up from SoHo, contact with people like Ms. Hallingby and her husband, Paul Hallingby, a managing director emeritus of Bear, Stearns & Company, has meant navigating often-forbidding social terrain, like the parterre box at the Metropolitan Opera.

''We have Rudolf Bing's center box,'' Ms. Hallingby volunteered, referring to the company's former general manager, who died in 1997. ''People have been trying to get that box from us forever.''

Like many artists, including Sargent and Ingres, Mr. Childs leads something of a double life, soliciting commissions to support his other work, which often involves themes from classical literature. For more than a decade he has been working on a portrait of a hero in ancient garb inspired by a 1917 Greek poem called ''One of Their Gods,'' by C. P. Cavafy. His model, a downtown club D.J. named Angelos Stylianu, has the features of a Cypriot warrior but, Mr. Childs said, not always the attitude. ''He says, 'Do I have to wear the pink dress?' ''

Mr. Childs also runs a school called the Drawing Academy of the Atlantic in his SoHo studio, where for about $6,500 a year up to six students study in the formal, rigorous, 19th-century tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Mr. Childs gently mentioned that the legendary modernists, Picasso included, would have flunked his class.

In her serene living room, Ms. Hallingby wore a simple, light blue dress set off by diamond earrings and the kind of heavy bejeweled rings that leave a funny feeling when you shake hands. Last fall, she said, she had attended the unveiling of a portrait by Mr. Childs of her friend Barbara Tober, the chairwoman of the Museum of Arts and Design, and decided that she, too, was ready for the Childs treatment. ''It was the most beautiful portrait I'd ever seen,'' said Ms. Hallingby, who compared it to the work of Ingres.

As Mr. Childs sketched a detail of her hand, Ms. Hallingby thought about how she wanted Mr. Childs to paint her. Ms. Tober had worn an iridescent burgundy taffeta dress against a background of burnished gold leaf, which gives the impression of an attractive, accomplished, silver-haired woman set like a precious stone. We should all get that treatment once.

In a separate conversation, Ms. Tober said she had imagined a smaller, less declarative portrait, but her husband, Donald G. Tober, the chairman and chief executive of Sugar Foods Corporation, which makes Sweet 'n' Low, Morton Salt and other household names, said, ''No, I want the full-tilt boogie.''

That much boogie had an unsettling effect at first, Ms. Tober admitted. ''It was like having another one of you in the house. I'd walk in the door and be startled by the image.''

For her own portrait, Ms. Hallingby was thinking of something with cupids, which she collects. Around the room were dozens of 19th-century Meissen figurines. Still, it was a big decision. Some years back she had commissioned a pastel portrait of herself, from an artist she declined to name, and it had always fallen short of satisfying. It hung forlorn behind her.

''I always like to look at diamonds,'' Mr. Childs suggested.

''And I always like to wear them,'' she agreed.

Ms. Hallingby tried to remember why she had started down this road in the first place. Mr. Childs's portraits usually require at least six sittings. What with crowded social schedules, some of his portraits -- like his life-size rendering of the designer Carolyne Roehm, meant to evoke Sargent's portrait of Madame X -- can take years.

At the other end of the room, facing the pastel, was an oil painting of one of Ms. Hallingby's bichon frisés. She addressed Mr. Childs with a soft, breathy voice: ''Remember how I asked you, 'Why do people really have their portraits painted . . . ' '' Her voice trailed off. She couldn't remember what he'd said.

Finally, after a reference to Sept. 11, she said: ''I decided I wanted to look at one of James's paintings, and I wanted it to be of me, not someone else. But it's not a vanity thing.''

Ms. Tober, who met Mr. Childs at an antiquities society at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had her own reasons. ''I said to my husband, 'While I'm still looking O.K., maybe I should do something,' '' she explained. On the boogie question, she added: ''I guess I'm a romantic at heart. I wasn't the editor-in-chief of Bride's magazine for 20 years for nothing. I'm aware how murderous and unjust the world is, but I don't need to surround myself with that in my home.''

For Mr. Childs, the idea of painting society has always been intriguing. Reared in Minneapolis, where his mother sang on the radio, he befriended that city's leading families, including the Pillsburys. When he arrived in New York in 1987, he wanted nothing more than to paint Ms. Roehm, who struck him as evocative of Hollywood glamour -- a favorite theme -- in a way that the actual women of Hollywood weren't. He pursued her through Jerry Zipkin, the legendary ''walker'' to society women, who died in 1995. Such pursuit has put Mr. Childs in the position of asking aesthetic questions like, ''Do you think we can have that necklace taken out of the vault?'' He saw no conflict between high classical ideals and the people who rack up the news clippings.

''I admire those people for their discipline and verve,'' he said. ''I feel a lot of empathy for people who have positions that other people feel envious of. Those positions can be onerous. There's a lot of duties involved.''

Ms. Hallingby endorsed this view. ''You always have to be perfect, and I'm not perfect,'' she said. With her portrait, she added, ''Finally I get to be perfect.''

Because of Mr. Childs's unfashionable idealization of heroism and beauty, a visit to his studio can be an otherworldly experience. Enormous scenes from ancient Greece jockey with the portraits of doyens of the parterre. John Russell Taylor, art critic for The Times of London, likened Mr. Childs's technical ability to that of the Victorian painter Frederic Lord Leighton, adding that his work avoids sentiment but instead ''revels in the sensuous possibilities of embodying the ancient myths'' and also ''seeks to imbue them with a becoming gravitas.''

Ms. Roehm, on a visit to the studio in July, stood by a full-size reproduction of her 1991 portrait, which remains Mr. Childs's best-known work. (The original was destroyed in a fire.) ''All of us want to be the heroine of the opera,'' she said, explaining the attraction. ''We all want to see ourselves as heroic and unforgettable, especially if we think of ourselves as forgettable and not very heroic.''

Mr. Childs plans to close his atelier temporarily in the autumn to go to Greece and paint athletes training for the Olympic Games. Already he has sketched Paul and Morgan Hamm, twin gymnasts from Waukesha, Wis. Modern athletes have no trouble understanding his work, he said: they're raised on the fantasy of video games; compared to that, his fantasies are mild.

When he returns from Greece, he said, he hopes to expand his school: ''There's dozens of small ateliers now teaching the classical style, in the tradition of master and protégé, that's been dead since the rise of the art school and the modernist idea.'' He also has a commission to paint a mural for the National Museum of American History in Washington.

Mr. Childs said he considered himself a modern artist and his work of the moment. Yet there are times he feels like an outsider in the art world. His mentor, R. H. Ives Gammell, who introduced Mr. Childs to the uncompromising discipline of classical art in Boston, died in 1981. Before his death, Gammell used to lament the death of his own teacher, William McGregor Paxton. ''Gammell used to call Paxton 'the last of those who know,' '' Mr. Childs said, meaning the last true classicist. Gammell taught Mr. Childs without charge, and even flew him to Boston from Minneapolis for lessons.

''It's a lonely feeling sometimes,'' Mr. Childs said of life outside modernism. ''My ideals and interests have become specialized. I feel the way Gammell did. When I have a question about something, there's no one I can ask. All the people I look up to are dead.''

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