The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  She received abundant praise—she was a “veritable phenomenon”— and her paintings were selling. “Mame’s success is certainly more marked this year than at any time previous,” her father was glad to report to Alexander in the spring of 1881.

  The thing that pleases her most in this success is not the newspaper publicity, for that she despises as a rule—but the fact that artists of talent and reputation and other persons prominent in art matters asked to be introduced to her and complimented her on her work. She has sold all her pictures or can sell them if she chooses—

  Alexander, who had spent his whole career with the Pennsylvania Railroad and had recently been made a vice president of the company, had now, under Mary’s guidance, begun his own collection of Impressionist works. But early in 1882, when the Impressionists began quarreling among themselves, Mary withdrew from the group. Worse still, that summer at Marly, Lydia became “very ill” and Mary became extremely sad and unproductive. “Mary being the worst kind of alarmist does not help when things look gloomy … and is not doing much in the way of art,” her father wrote. After a private meeting with Lydia’s doctor, who said there was no hope for a cure, Mary went home so depressed she had to take to her bed.

  “Poor dear!” her father wrote of Lydia in mid-September. “This is the first time she has spoken plainly and directly of her death. …” Mary, Lydia had told him, had developed into a “most excellent nurse.”

  Lydia Cassatt died in Paris of Bright’s disease at age forty-five on a dismal, rain-soaked November 7, 1882.

  Mary had never known the death of someone close to her. When Alexander, Lois, and the children arrived in Paris three weeks later, Mary told Lois how desperately lonely she felt. Perhaps she would have been better off to have married, she said, than face being “left alone in the world.”

  II

  In 1882, the year of Lydia Cassatt’s death, John Sargent’s genius took hold as never before. In that one year, at age twenty-six, he painted not only his Lady with the Rose and the stunning small portrait of Madame Escudier, but a second portrait of her standing in her sumptuous parlor, as well as eight other portraits and two of the largest, most arresting works of his career, El Jaleo and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, in neither of which was there any holding back on his sense of theater and love of dramatic light and shadow.

  The French critic Henry Houssaye called El Jaleo “the most striking picture of the year.” Eight feet high and nearly twelve feet long—so huge no one could fail to take notice—it was Sargent’s passionate, bravura tribute to Spanish dance and music. In a scene lit by footlights, a dark-haired flamenco dancer in a flowing silver-white skirt flings herself into her performance, as behind her, against a wall, a line of musicians and singers, all in black, play and sing, and other seated dancers clap hands.

  Painted far from Madrid on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, with a French model posed as the dancer, it was the exuberant culmination of innumerable pencil, ink, and oil sketches from Sargent’s time in Spain three years earlier and in Paris as part of his preparation. The Spanish word jaleo denotes the burst of clapping and shouts of olé that are part of flamenco dancing. Once Sargent had the immense canvas under way, such was the vigor and clarity of the brushwork in the highlights of the dancer’s skirt that it was as if he, too, were shouting “olé! ” to the loud stamp of her high heels. The darkly shadowed back wall, the dramatic lighting, the singer who throws back his head in a kind of ecstasy, are all pure, unabashed theater.

  Nor was there much less theater in the second masterpiece, painted only months later, with the difference this time that the curtain had opened on an altogether silent tableau in which four very proper figures stand perfectly still, all but one looking directly at the audience—a scene made especially arresting in that they are children.

  Edward Darley Boit and Mary Louisa Cushing Boit were the rich American expatriates and friends of Sargent’s who commissioned him to paint their four daughters. Boit had given up being a Boston lawyer to paint, specializing in watercolor, at which he was highly proficient. His wife, whose inherited wealth exceeded even his, was described by Henry James as “brilliantly friendly.”

  Apparently they had no specific requests or requirements of Sargent, leaving the setting, individual poses—everything about the picture—to him. And what resulted, the whole arrangement and mood of the painting, could hardly have been more unorthodox. That the canvas was a huge square, seven by seven feet, was in itself a departure, and the composition, the placement of the subjects, was a clear echo of Las Meninas, the Velázquez masterpiece of children in the Spanish court that Sargent had copied at the Prado.

  The two oldest Boit daughters, Florence, who was fourteen, and Jane, twelve, stand together at the side of a high, wide doorway. Jane is positioned at the exact center of the canvas, Florence with her face in profile is so shadowed she is barely recognizable.

  Further forward on the left, seven-year-old Mary Louisa stands alone, hands behind her back, her face fully lit, while “the baby,” three-year-old Julia, also fully lighted, sits on a Persian rug in the right foreground.

  A pair of giant Japanese vases several heads taller than the two tallest girls also stand on either side of the doorway. With the Persian rug, they constitute the only props suggesting the luxurious Boit way of life. (Such was family pride in the vases that they were shipped back and forth between Boston and Paris every time the Boits crossed the Atlantic, year after year.)

  The three older sisters wear the starched white pinafores considered proper play attire, and the three-year-old holds her doll. But the play attire notwithstanding, none is at play, and each seems oddly alone.

  Other artists of the day painted children at play in the sunlight of public gardens in Paris, often accompanied by stylish, chattering mothers or white-capped nursemaids. Sargent placed these four young Americans not only indoors, but in a sunless interior with a dark void of a background made to seem darker still by a gleam of light reflected in a mirror to the rear. To add further drama and mystery, part of a red screen makes a bright, dagger-shaped slash down the right side of the doorway.

  The children surely have a story to tell, and one waits for them, like actors onstage, to begin speaking, perhaps in turns, to unfold the story.

  Contrasting with the rigid geometric composition of the tableau and the motionless pose of its protagonists is Sargent’s characteristic vitality in the brushwork—in his rendering of the white pinafores, most conspicuously, and the decorative pattern of the Japanese vases. He is like a virtuoso pianist who, playing rapidly, strikes every key perfectly. Moreover, along with the air of mystery there is great warmth in the wall and the parquet floor, but especially in the pretty faces of the two younger girls in the foreground.

  Vernon Lee would later write, “I am persuaded that the individual temperament of every artist expresses itself with unconscious imperative far more in how he paints than in what he chooses to be painting. …” It was, she felt, in such “perfectly pure and contrasted colors” and “the unerring speed of his hand and eye” in such paintings as El Jaleo and the portrait of the Boit daughters that the true temperament of John Sargent was to be found.

  Finished in late 1882, the picture of the Boit daughters was intended for the Paris Salon the next spring. But Sargent could not wait, and so put it on exhibit under the title Portraits d’Enfants at Georges Petit’s gallery on the rue de Sèze in December.

  Reaction to it then and later when shown at the Salon was uneven. Some viewers were troubled by its mood. One French critic described the children as “en pénitence,” being punished. Henry James, writing in Harper’s Weekly, would declare without hesitation that Sargent had never painted anything “more felicitous and interesting.” The picture was “astonishing,” James said, and praised “the complete effect, the light, the free security of execution, the sense it gives of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge. …”

  In London, a critic for the Art
Journal reported that Sargent now found himself “the most talked-about painter in France, with every opportunity to have his head turned by the admiration he had received.” Another English reviewer wrote that El Jaleo not only put Sargent at the head of the American school in Paris, but “on equal ground with the most prominent French painters.”

  A visiting Boston merchant named T. Jefferson Coolidge had wasted no time buying El Jaleo, paying 1,500 francs, or about $300, for it. And while some expatriate Americans chattered about the feeling of loneliness and mystery in the Portraits d’Enfants, speculating over what it might be saying about Sargent’s own childhood, people at Georges Petit’s gallery and later at the Salon kept coming back for a second or third look.

  Sargent paid little or no attention to all this. He was too excited about a new project, a portrait of a famous Paris beauty, Madame Gautreau.

  Sargent was by nature, as Vernon Lee wrote, always “especially attracted by the bizarre and outlandish,” the very essence of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, who, contrary to the impression most people had, was an American.

  Born in New Orleans, she had been brought to Paris as a child of eight by her widowed, socially ambitious mother. Her father, a major in the Confederate army, had been killed at the battle of Shiloh. She was, by 1883, twenty-four years old, two years younger than Sargent.

  To her mother’s great approval, she had married a wealthy French banker, Pierre Gautreau, and became what was called a “professional beauty,” the perfect “parisienne,” someone known for her remarkable looks and social stage presence, and who, in her appearances in society, was expected to fill that role with all due attention to wardrobe and the artful use of cosmetics, no less than a great actress. In her particular case a heavy use of a chalky lavender powder on face and body gave her a pallor distinctive enough in itself to draw attention. To her critics she was all too plainly an arriviste.

  Her beauty was distinctly different, almost eccentric, her nose too long by accepted standards, her forehead too high. Yet the total effect, and particularly given her hourglass figure and her way of moving, was striking in the extreme, her appeal unmistakably seductive, as she well knew.

  An American art student named Edward Simmons wrote of being “thrilled by every movement of her body.”

  She walked as Virgil speaks of a goddess—sliding—and seemed to take no steps. Her head and neck undulated like that of a young doe, and something about her gave you the impression of infinite proportion, infinite grace, and infinite balance. Every artist wanted to make her in marble or paint.

  After meeting her socially, Sargent, some said, had become obsessed by her. He let it be known that he wanted to do “homage to her beauty” in a portrait to be shown at the Salon, the implication being it could bring each of them notoriety in the way Manet’s sensational Olympia had, albeit she need not pose in the nude.

  Do you object to people who are fardées [made up] to the extent of being uniform lavender or blotting paper color all over [he wrote to Vernon Lee]. If so you would not care for my sitter. But she has the most beautiful lines and if the lavender or chlorate-of-potash lozenge color be pretty in itself I shall be more than pleased.

  He did one line drawing after another of her head in profile, made studies in pencil and watercolor of her relaxing on a settee in a low-cut evening dress, painted her in oil drinking a toast, and here again in profile. In the summer of 1883, from the Gautreaus’ country estate in Brittany, he wrote to tell Vernon Lee he was “still struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness” of his subject.

  That he and Amélie Gautreau were both Americans was by no means immaterial to their ambitions. The same year they met, a society journal noted that “Yankees” in Paris were gaining ever-greater prominence. “They have painters who carry off our medals, like Mr. Sargent, beautiful women who eclipse ours, Mme. Gautreau. …” If they were to be known always as Americans, then all the more reason to be at the forefront.

  Finished with his preliminary studies, Sargent left Brittany for Nice to pay his annual visit to his parents, before moving on for an autumn stay in Florence.

  “His life is a pleasant life,” FitzWilliam Sargent wrote to a brother in Philadelphia.

  He seems to be respected, even admired and beloved (according to all accounts) for his talent and success as an artist, for his conduct and character as a man. His work is a pleasurable occupation to him and brings him a very handsome income. He travels about in countries which provide him with materials for his pictures as well as with bread and butter and elements of health and enjoyment. He is well received everywhere for his manners are good and agreeable. He is good looking, plays the piano well and dances well, converses well, etc., etc. In short, he has given us, his parents great satisfaction so far. …

  In the winter of 1883–84, Sargent moved from the Left Bank to a new studio across the Seine at 41 boulevard Berthier, in the then fashionable neighborhood near the Parc Monceau. It was there in a workplace elegantly furnished with comfortably upholstered chairs, Persian rugs, and drapery befitting his new professional standing, and an upright piano against one wall, that he painted his full-length portrait of Madame Gautreau, the whole time suffering what he called “a horrid state of anxiety.”

  She was dressed in a long black satin skirt and low-cut black velvet bodice, her shoulders bare except for two slim jeweled straps. She held both shoulders back and her head cocked sharply to the left, giving full cameo emphasis to the remarkable profile.

  Her left arm on her hip, she held her skirt with the left hand, while the right arm was oddly turned back on itself, her right hand gripping the top of the side table. She wore her hair up, with a tiny diamond tiara on top.

  It was a flagrantly stagy pose, which could only have been difficult to hold for any length of time, even for one who was a poser by nature. Against the deep black of the dress, the deathly blue-white of her powdered skin was even more strange and striking. When, during one sitting, her right shoulder strap dropped suggestively over her arm, Sargent requested she leave it that way.

  In contrast to his usual approach, he worked and reworked the canvas, simplifying and redefining edges.

  One day I was dissatisfied with it and dashed a tone of light rose over the former gloomy background [he reported to a friend]. I turned the picture upside down, retired to another end of the studio and looked at it under my arm. Vast improvement. The élancée figure of the model shows to much greater advantage.

  No doubt Madame Gautreau saw how the portrait was emerging under his brush from one sitting to another. Possibly her mother, too, may have been present occasionally. If they found anything about it disturbing at the time, there is no evidence that a word was said.

  When Carolus-Duran came by for a look, he told Sargent he could submit the painting to the Salon with perfect confidence. Sargent was not so sure.

  Another who dropped in was Henry James. In Paris briefly, James had met and quite liked the young artist, calling him “the only Franco-American product of importance” in France. But, as James confided to a friend, he only “half-liked” the portrait of Madame Gautreau.

  The 1884 Paris Salon, an exhibition filling thirty-one of the grandes salles in the Palais de l’Industrie, opened on a beautiful May morning with much excitement among the customary well-dressed crowds in attendance. So great had the number of American painters in Paris become, and so important to their careers was representation at the Salon, that they were now second only to the number of French artists included. For Sargent it marked the sixth consecutive year he had exhibited at the Salon, and each time with increasing acclaim.

  Paintings filled every wall. The portrait of Amélie Gautreau, ideally placed at eye level, was hung in Salle 31, and the doors had been open scarcely an hour when it became the talk of the exhibition.

  For all that would be written and said, no eyewitness account of the event and of its effect on Sargent compared to what his friend Ralph Curtis wrote to h
is parents the next day. Whether the opening marked Sargent’s birthday as an artist or his funeral, Curtis could not say.

  Walked up the Champs-Élysées, chestnuts in full flower and a dense mob of “tout Paris” in pretty clothes, gesticulating and laughing, slowly going into the Ark of Art. In 15 minutes I saw no end of acquaintances and strangers and heard everybody say, “Où est le portrait Gautreau?” “Oh, allez voir ça.”

  Curtis had seen Sargent the night before. “He was very nervous about what he feared,” he wrote, “but his fears were far exceeded by the facts of yesterday. There was a grand tapage [great fuss] before it [the portrait] all day.”

  In a few minutes I found him dodging behind doors to avoid friends who looked grave. By the corridors he took me to see it. I was disappointed by the color. She looks decomposed. All the men jeer. “Ah voilà ‘la belle!’ ” “Oh, quelle horreur!” Etc. Then a painter exclaims, “superbe de style, magnifique d’audace!” [Magnificent audacity!] “Quel dessin!” [What drawing!]

  In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic.

  But what was unacceptable to “tout Paris” was the blatant, self-centered impropriety of it all—the heavy powder, the odd, arrogant pose, the décolletage. Such vulgar flaunting was simply not done by women of social standing.

  “All the A.M. it was one series of bons mots, mauvaises plaisanteries and fierce discussions,” Curtis continued in his letter. “John, poor boy, was navré [full of sorrow]. The tumult of talk lasted through the day, but by evening the tone of opinion about the picture had changed. It was discovered to be the knowing thing to say ‘étrangement épatant.’ [Shocking, amazing!]