A muted black-and-white photograph shows Jamie Wyeth measuring Rudolf Nureyev from chin to chest. The painter holds a pair of calipers in one hand and a pen in the other as the dancer looks at him intently, almost defiantly. Wyeth wanted to get it right. By the look of it, Nureyev wanted to get it over with.

It was a rare, motionless moment for the dancer in 1977, the year he served as Wyeth’s model. From then on, Wyeth used those studies to paint a series of intimate portraits that captured Nureyev’s petulance, beauty and charisma in a way no photograph ever could.

These portraits, which span from 1977 to 2001, eight years after the dancer’s death, are on view in “Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer,” through January at the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Wyeth Center in Rockland. The multimedia exhibition features sketches, drawings and paintings by Wyeth, photographs from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, costumes worn by the dancer, and video footage of Nureyev’s ballet performances.

It’s an exhibit that almost didn’t happen. The idea of painting Nureyev – with his chiseled, striking facial features, his costumes, his fur coat, his makeup – had a natural appeal to Wyeth, a painter who loves costumes and whose favorite holidays include Halloween. But the dancer, who had taken the international ballet world by storm after defecting from the Soviet Union in 1961, had no interest in posing for him when the two met in 1974.

“I was fascinated to meet him,” Wyeth said by phone from his home on Southern Island, off Tenants Harbor. “I asked, ‘Would you ever let me do some drawings?’ And he said, ‘No,’ and that was that. With Nureyev, no was no.”

Three years later, no became yes, perhaps because of Wyeth’s 1975 visit to Nureyev’s native country. In the years that followed, Nureyev developed a close friendship with Wyeth and his wife, Phyllis – a friendship that allowed Wyeth to transcend simple portraiture to capture something deeper.

The allure of the resulting paintings lies not in their realism but in their emotion. A photograph may give the sense of a moment, but the details of the paintings – a sidelong glance, the hint of a smile, his tousled, wild hair – give the sense of the man.

The picture of Wyeth measuring Nureyev and the accompanying set of frantic notes suggest that Wyeth’s focus was purely technical. But the resulting paintings are more than a sum of correctly proportioned body parts.

“I’m not into noses and eyeballs,” Wyeth said. “He just embodied so much, and I think my feverish obsession with that comes through in the show.”

You can sense the immediacy in Wyeth’s sketchy pencil marks and ink daubs, drips of India ink and flashes of yellow paint, as if he had to work quickly to grasp the dancer’s spirit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the large, colorful works on cardboard in the exhibition. Wyeth sometimes found himself backstage, scrambling for something – anything – to draw on, and he usually wound up with pieces of cardboard boxes.

“In the case of Nureyev, I just grabbed anything that was available,” he said. “Ballet is so elegant and beautiful and the idea of doing these on cardboard just kind of fascinated me – the contrast of the two.”

For the dancer, beauty was a way of life, so if Wyeth made an unflattering drawing, Nureyev undoubtedly would complain. He was demanding and difficult to work with, but that only added to his allure.

“He never really said, ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Tear that up,'” Wyeth said. “But one day, I was literally drawing his feet. Dancers’ feet are really awful – particularly his after all those years. He looked at my drawing and said, ‘No. My foot more beautiful.’ A dancer, that’s their life. How they appear.”

Things aren’t always as they appear, though. Nureyev was brutally handsome, with a toned, muscular physique. His larger-than-life stage presence was packed into a smaller-than-life body, however.

“Dance is a complete illusion,” Wyeth said. “On stage he looked enormous.”

The costumes on exhibit at the Farnsworth tell a different story, though. There are intricately beaded tops that barely would fit Scarlett O’Hara at the waist and jackets with shoulders more slender than a pre-teen girl’s. But what he lacked in bulk he made up for in personality.

“Unlike many performers, there wasn’t sort of a stage persona he had,” Wyeth said. “That intensity audiences felt coming from the stage – that was one of his incredible appeals. He had this burning intensity that was not an act.”

This intensity was so compelling for Wyeth that he continued to paint the dancer after his death in 1993. His later works are more reflective, more interpretive. They show the dancer as Wyeth knew him rather than as he saw him. In “Curtain Call,” Nureyev stands midbow, alone in the spotlight, which falls around his shadow like angel wings. His 1977-2001 “Portrait of Nureyev” shows the dancer in a fur cap and fur coat – a pose he hated – with his face a ghostlike white.

In the later works, Wyeth has found a freedom to explore his subject more fully, in ways Nureyev wouldn’t have necessarily let him.

“Working with him was incredible but difficult,” Wyeth said. “He left such an indelible impression on me. He was a meteor – always in motion.”