Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  Lucia also collected articles about strange, unexplained disappearances, hypnosis, ghosts, and other supernatural occurrences. Drawn to the world of the occult, she was also frightened by it. When she was twenty she had visited a well-known palm reader in London. The woman looked at Lucia’s hand and immediately detected a sign that Lucia, too, was psychic. She warned her never to reveal that fact to anyone who didn’t share the same gift. Lucia believed she had extrasensory abilities. She sometimes saw things or knew things for no explicable reason. She was once chatting with people she had never met before. After they talked about their children and various pets Lucia burst out, “But you forgot the parrot.” Indeed they had one. On another occasion she saw more than she wanted. She told her mother that after looking down at a particular man’s hand she realized it was the hand of a dead man. The next day he drowned. Lucia told these stories to her daughter. True or not, Clara believed them. Her mother seemed to be touched with a gift—or perhaps a curse—that made her sensitive to others, empathic. But even Lucia, with her second sight, might not have been able to foresee the tragedies still ahead.

  The Fullers’ marriage began to crumble. As Sargent had predicted, terrific, intense love could turn poisonous. The free and easy society at Cornish—the boozy dinner parties and nude modeling, and the ideal of beauty and art above all else—led to diverse couplings and uncouplings. Unconvention was the rule. The worldly Maxfield Parrish hired a fifteen-year-old country girl to take care of his first son; in short order she became his favorite model, and eventually his lover, moving into his studio where she lived with him for decades. His wife remained in the big house, but everyone knew of his double life. Augustus Saint-Gaudens had his own shadow family, conceiving a child with model Davida Clark, his vision of ethereal beauty who posed for several of his most famous works: the scandalous nude statue of Diana that twirled atop Stanford White’s pleasure palace, Madison Square Garden; and his winged bronze angel Amor Caritas, meaning “love is charity”—though Gussie, the artist’s deaf and cranky wife, might not have thought so. Saint-Gaudens’s affections were quite clear. He frequently visited Davida and his son in Connecticut, and, to his wife’s disgust, he removed the bas-relief of their son, Homer, from their home in Cornish, and replaced it with a bas-relief of his illegitimate son. When the Saint-Gaudenses showed dinner guests around the house, Gussie would pause in front of this hated image, turn to her husband and say, her voice dripping with anger: “Now tell us all about this one.”

  Rumors abounded about Lucia and Harry. She posed for several paintings by fellow Cornisher Thomas Dewing in the spring and summer of 1901, and before long, word spread around the artists’ colony that they were having an affair. Harry, suspicious and angry over her straying affection, had already written her a scathing letter accusing her of being unfaithful. Their marriage had long been teetering, largely because of Harry’s sexual dalliances. The strong-willed Lucia was furious that she should be judged by him. In a bitter handwritten poem she recounted their marriage:

  You said that you must marry now,

  ’Twas time for you to settle down—

  You had another maid I know,

  Almost before you left the town.

  And I, who had given you everything,

  Who had put myself beneath the ban

  For when you were the Lord & King,

  —I’ve never known another man. . . .

  I think I see you turn away,

  Your face, once tender, now is cold,

  You very very humbly pray

  Forgiveness for your sins of old. . . .

  Did you forget our nine long years,

  The time when I was all in all—

  Our laughter, & our common tears,

  The hour that you heard your “Call”?

  Oh Harry Harry let me cry,

  For I am deep distressed.

  And gladly gladly would I die

  To know a moment’s rest.

  You said you loved me long ago

  And now it is not so.

  The poem comes to its abrupt end, the stanza unfinished and abandoned. Lucia had worked tirelessly for their children, for their marriage. She was ill and exhausted. Her doctors were discussing yet another operation in which they’d break all of her joints. (Fortunately they decided against it, urging rest instead.) Meantime, she was making portrait after portrait in order to support them. In 1903, at the age of thirty-one, she took note of the fact that she’d just finished her 191st commission. Harry had yet to complete one.

  The only portraits Harry had produced by that time were a handful he did for himself—no pay involved—of friends from Cornish, and, in 1905, a painting of the Fullers’ live-in Swedish model, Ebba Bohm. (Lucia found models for Harry in New York and sent them up to Cornish—perhaps part of her undoing.) The Bohm portrait, now owned by the de Young Museum in San Francisco, practically reeks of sex. Bohm appears to have hastily covered herself with a silk dressing gown, her breasts clearly visible; she stares dreamily at a vase of irises, and reaches out to touch the stem of one of the flowers. It feels like a contemplative postcoital moment.

  In 1900–1901, Harry produced one of the two large works that would define his career: a roughly six-foot-by-four-foot allegorical painting titled Illusions. A beautiful woman is covered only by a see-through Grecian gown. (Keeping women clothed seemed to be a problem for Harry.) In her arms she holds a crystal orb up high, out of the grasp of the eager outstretched arms of a naked, young girl. Here is innocence reaching for knowledge, for the secrets of the adult world. The ball appears to be a glorious bauble, a future full of promise and fulfillment. Its shiny surface enchants the child, who wants to grab it. But the grown woman knows better. She understands the world and sees the orb for what it really is: an illusion that will destroy the child’s innocence. Better to delay the knowledge, to keep the glistening orb out of reach.

  Was Harry alluding to the reality of their lives in that canvas? Saying something about their marriage, which would soon come crashing down into a thousand pieces? It was Lucia and their five-year-old daughter Clara who posed for the painting. Amidst the Fairchild-Fuller papers is a strip of rough fabric with a series of photographs mounted on it—three photos of a naked Clara, her arms outstretched, standing poolside next to one of the classical columns in their courtyard. Tiny pinholes are visible at the top of the fabric—Harry must have hung these nude photos of his daughter near his canvas as he worked. The finished painting includes a backdrop of Mount Ascutney and a glimpse of the Connecticut River. Art imitating life in Symbolist fashion. The painting won a bronze medal at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

  Lucia’s sight began to dim, and creating miniatures became more and more difficult for her. She needed a break. During the summer of 1904 she devoted herself entirely to the children of Cornish. She adapted Ivanhoe for the stage, creating a romantic costume drama full of swashbuckling action, and then directed it. Over a hundred people attended the performance that September, and Maxfield Parrish’s wife gushed over it. “Lucia Fuller,” Parrish wrote in her diary, “was a marvel and the enthusiasm of the audience must have repaid her for the vast amount of care and thought she had put in the performance.” Her work on the play was more than just a frivolous diversion for Lucia. She said it had been “her salvation” that summer, as she was nearly blind.

  The following January, Lucia, with not-quite-ten-year-old Clara in tow, visited Boston and then New York in search of a cure. In Boston she ran into Dr. Wadsworth, a distinguished ophthalmologist and family friend who assured her, “I’m sure you’ll get well.” Lucia wasn’t so sure. She went on to New York, to visit fellow Cornisher Clara Potter Davidge at her Washington Square winter quarters. Davidge was a well-known interior decorator from a socially prominent family—her father, Henry Codman Potter, was the Episcopal bishop of New York and ministered to the Astors of the world—but even by Bohemian standards she stood out. The decorator was once described as “a
nimated, eccentric, rattle-brained Clara! Always dressed like the doll of any little girl of ten who has had recourse to the family ragbag and secured bits of gay silk, fur and lace. . . . She collected old furniture and promising artists.”

  Davidge took an interest in, or perhaps took pity on, Lucia, and provided lodgings for the thirty-two-year-old artist and her daughter. Lucia had despaired of the medical establishment ever helping her. She became interested in Christian Science and began consulting with mental healers on the Upper West Side, dragging young Clara with her on the subway to and from her appointments. Clara would nestle in with a book during the sessions. Afterward it would be roller skating in the park or learning how to make Native American–style baskets from Davidge. For Clara it was an adventure. She was thrilled to be with her mother, and probably just as delighted to be away from her distant, moody father, who spent long hours absorbed in his allegorical paintings, forgetting about his children.

  Come spring it was Charley’s turn to accompany his mother to a hotel in New York. “I feast my eyes on this great city!” the eight-year-old announced dramatically on his arrival. He visited relatives, roller-skated, and was generally awestruck by New York. Lucia, meanwhile, scurried around town gathering commissions and setting to work on them. Still, she was painting the miniatures as if through a fog because her eyesight was so poor. But then a piece of good news came: New York socialite Grace Dunham Luling enlisted Lucia to paint her children as a surprise for her husband. To Lucia’s vast relief, Grace wanted an oil portrait substantially larger than a miniature, which would be much easier to paint.

  Lucia had to hand her children off to friends and relatives while she raced about town executing her commissions. The Luling painting required her to be especially careful about her comings and goings at their household, lest she ruin the surprise. No such luck. On her first day at work on the portrait of the son, Saster, his father arrived unannounced—and he wasn’t very pleased: “the door jerked open and a tall man appeared. ‘Dam,’ said he and went out. ‘That was my father’ said Saster. ‘He’s a very cross man, you see.’ ” Grace then walked into the room on the verge of tears. The commission continued nonetheless.

  As usual, money was an ongoing concern and Harry was worse than useless. By today’s standards it may be hard to fathom why Lucia continued to put up with him—his narcissism, his philandering, his drinking, and his bouts of depression. But divorce in the early 1900s was almost unthinkable, and Lucia clung to the idea that she needed Harry. Yet his indifference—his cruelty—to her was nothing short of loathsome during that spring of 1905.

  Young Clara had been having problems with her throat and a doctor in New York strongly recommended that she have her tonsils removed—and while he was at it, why not take out her brother Charley’s as well. Instead of racing down from New Hampshire to be at his children’s side during the surgeries, Harry just complained about the cost. Lucia had to convince Harry that the procedures were necessary—the doctor had been vehement about it—and she promised to take on more work to pay for it. Such surgery generally meant a three-day stay in a hospital, an impossible expense. Lucia told the doctor to perform the operations in her apartment. A nurse arrived early to help Lucia fix up the room, arrange the tables, and hang sheets all over the walls, remarking, “You don’t want to get the walls splashed, you know. It’s a very bloody operation.” The two of them covered the carpets with thick layers of sheets and newspapers, and then Lucia had to stand by as her children were operated on, one after the other. On May 11, 1905, she reported on the procedures to Harry:

  Clarky [Clara] got on the table, all smiles and politeness and took the chloroform like a lamb. . . . In 40 minutes Clarky was in bed and pretty well out from under the chloroform, her poor little lips quivering with pain and her eyes suffused with tears, but so gentle and brave and polite that it was touching to see her. She kept motioning for me to kiss her and then moaning “My throat, Oh my throat!” I told her how proud I felt that she was so brave. “I tried my level best to behave well,” she said gravely. She is a wonderful child. Charles fought under the chloroform like a man—objected to it in a loud voice, and at intervals I could hear his little feet kicking the table madly. However, there was much less to be done to him, only one tonsil and one adenoid, whereas Clara had both tonsils and a group of adenoids and the uvula all cut away.

  Before the operation Clara had asked the doctor to save all of the removed tissue for her, which he did. Lucia must have felt as if she were undergoing the knife herself, as she listened to her children’s groans and cries, and saw all that blood and mucus—half a pail-full while they were still on the table, with more coming up after they emerged from the chloroform. Clara, especially, was in terrible pain after the surgery, and her mother gently soothed her and read to her until she finally dozed off.

  And where exactly was Harry? Was he too absorbed in his work—or a new model—to take time to help his wife? Or, an unlikely scenario, did he actually disapprove on moral grounds? Inspired by the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, Harry had embraced Christian Science along with Lucia—though clearly, neither of them were totally committed to the belief system, as they both opted for doctors when they felt the need. Around that time Harry began painting an eight-and-a-half by eleven-and-a-half-foot work titled The Triumph of Truth over Error, based on the tenets of Christian Science. In it, a winged symbol of Truth—a beautiful woman (model Ebba Bohm) dressed in white flowing robes, one breast exposed—vanquishes the dark force of Error, portrayed as a figure shrouded in black with one hand shielding his eyes, unable to meet Truth’s steady gaze. In defeating Error, Truth has cast aside the illusion of illness and disease. Mary Baker Eddy loved the painting and gave it a rave review; the work even garnered a five hundred dollar art prize in New York, though the headline announcing the award in the New York Times on December 12, 1908—CARNEGIE PRIZE MISPLACED—dismissed the work as lightweight and undeserving. Critics piled on when Harry admitted he’d had some help with the painting from other Cornish artists, Saint-Gaudens and Everett Shinn among them. One journalist noted sarcastically, “This hypothetical MR. FULLER is said to have embodied the thoughts of so many artists in his work that if he were to make full acknowledgement their names would cover the canvas.” Nonetheless, the work remained popular and over the years Harry made cheap reproductions of the painting and sold them, mainly to devotees of Christian Science. Finally, a money-making scheme, though it came too late for Lucia.

  While her children recuperated from their operations in New York in the spring of 1905, Lucia followed the news coming out of Cornish. A huge theatrical event, one that would eclipse all others, was being planned. It was twenty years since Augustus Saint-Gaudens had arrived in Cornish, and word leaked out that the guiding spirit of the colony had cancer. Treatments proved worthless; his time was short. A pagan ritual was in order. The colonists plotted a surprise gift for the sculptor: a pageant in his honor that would take place on the evening of the summer solstice, amid a grove of old-growth pine trees in a far corner of the grounds at Aspet. Delayed one day because of rain, the joyous fête took place on June 22, 1905, and it became the high point, the defining moment for that idyllic artistic community. Basing the event on Florentine entertainments from the Renaissance, the Cornishers put on a masque—the first such performance in the United States—that involved dance, music, poetry, elaborate costumes, and sets. The artists and writers of the colony took the roles of Greek gods and goddesses, not a far cry from how they perceived themselves. Lucia, back in Cornish with the children, became Proserpina, goddess of the underworld. Harry was Apollo, the son of Zeus and the patron of music, poetry, prophecy, and truth—the god revered as a healer. Clara and Charley and the other children of the colony, costumed in Greek robes with wreaths on their heads, played forest nymphs and followers of Bacchus.

  Printed invitations went out to friends and special guests. This was decidedly not a public event and the press was intentionally excluded. (
No matter, reporters managed to worm their way into the crowd.) By late afternoon on the 22nd the invitees, several hundred of them, began assembling, some arriving on horseback, others by train from New York for the theatrical event titled A Masque of “Ours.” Among the celebrities in attendance were the secretary of state, John Hay, and novelist Henry James; they sat on benches facing the woodland stage. When the playwright, Louis Shipman, learned that Henry James would be in the audience, he changed the subtitle of the play to The Gods and the Golden Bowl, riffing on James’s recently published novel The Golden Bowl, and substituted a gold-colored bowl for a sundial that was to be offered at the climax of the play. Musician and fellow Cornisher Arthur Whiting composed incidental music and imported members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to perform it. The atmosphere was festive. Maxfield Parrish created two large gilded comic masks, their stylized faces frozen in permanent smiles, which were hung from trees. Parrish naturally devised his own costume. For his role as the kindly centaur, Chiron, Parrish strapped himself into an elaborate papier-mâché horse’s body, complete with hoofs on wooden rollers.

  Saint-Gaudens and his wife, Gussie, were ushered into special chairs in front. The curtain parted and the stage set designed by Lucia and Harry was revealed: a classical temple with an altar and wreathed Ionic columns.