Such was life for the orphans. The Chanlers wandered all over the globe. Brother Willie spent a fortune on several harrowing expeditions in East Africa, nearly fomenting war during one of them, but having the wherewithal—to say nothing of the ego—to name a waterfall after himself before making a hasty exit. The youngest brother, Robert, announced to Elizabeth, his dearest confidante, that his goal in life was “To roam & see & learn to be quiet & steady, to be energetic & firm. In fact like a bit of wood on the mother sea.” Bobbing about aimlessly, like driftwood on the ocean, seemed to be the fate of the orphans.
But expectations for a woman of Elizabeth’s status were rigid and clear. She had one job, and one job only: finding a suitably rich, blue-blooded husband. Love played little part in the equation. For Elizabeth, it did not seem she’d have much choice in the selection as her fragile health and limp would be seen as a burden by many men. Elizabeth bore the scars of her illness. (Her symptoms indicate that she probably suffered from tuberculosis of the hip, a bacterial disease, in an era that predated antibiotics. Her years strapped to a board didn’t help a bit.) Thanks to her father’s largesse, Elizabeth had plenty of money so marriage was not a financial necessity, but she did need to find her place in society. And that itself posed a problem. Elizabeth had little interest in the nonstop procession of balls, entertainments, and social seasons that consumed her class. All of it struck her as vapid. Literature and art were what appealed to her. She wrote poetry and studied painting in Paris.
Elizabeth’s cousin and former guardian, Daisy Rutherfurd (by that time married to Henry “Harry” White, an American diplomat in London), was a woman of steely social ambition. She decided to take Elizabeth in hand, and Daisy did not take on projects lightly. Previously, she had remade her rather lighthearted groom, who at age twenty-nine had been perfectly content to pursue a life of sport and easy camaraderie. That wouldn’t do for Daisy. Deciding that Harry needed to do something useful, she nudged him into the diplomatic service, and her beauty and charm helped him ascend the ranks quickly. She made Harry’s career, and he admitted as much. She also helped launch Sargent in London. In 1883, before he had become a brand name, Daisy sought out the up-and-coming artist in his disheveled fifth-floor walk-up studio in Paris. She wanted Sargent to paint her portrait. (In contrast, her husband Harry had his own portrait painted by Léon Bonnat, a far safer, known quantity.) Sargent’s imposing portrayal of Daisy, over seven feet tall and every inch of it stately, became the focal point of the Whites’ dining room in their London home. The aristocrats and members of Parliament who dined around their table marveled at the elegance of the composition. Word spread and Sargent’s reputation soared in England. A star was born, helped in part by Daisy.
Elizabeth stayed for long stretches with the Whites in London and Daisy introduced her unmarried cousin to all the best sorts of people—among them, members of the “Souls.” The Whites were part of that set, the first Americans to be accepted into that very high-toned political/artistic/literary group (though Edith Wharton and Henry James did not make the cut), which was composed of the bright young things of London. Members included Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister who would be raised to the rank of earl (the Whites affectionately referred to him as “Ah Bah”), and George Curzon, who would go on to become the viceroy of India and the marquess of Kedleston. The group met at one another’s grand country houses where they spent weekends playing word games, charades, and generally looking into one another’s souls—thus they were christened the “Souls”—and sometimes into each other’s bedrooms. Illicit love affairs among the members added high drama, though Daisy herself was much too puritanical for that sort of thing and doubtless shielded Elizabeth.
The Whites glided in the highest social circles. When a robber made off with Daisy’s valuable jewels at their country estate, Ramsdale, the Duke and Duchess of Westminster sent one of their own jewels to console her. The Whites occasionally dined with the Prince of Wales—later, Edward VII—and even spent a memorable evening with Queen Victoria at her Scottish castle, Balmoral. After dinner the queen had a private conversation with Daisy about poetry and other matters. Daisy was later pleased to learn that the queen had been impressed by her “pleasant voice and speech (I suppose this she does not expect from Americans) and that she thinks me very pretty!”
Elizabeth’s own meeting with Queen Victoria did not play out quite so smoothly. Daisy and Harry had arranged for Elizabeth to be presented at the royal court in the spring of 1889. Elizabeth wore the prescribed costume for a young unmarried woman: a long white dress with an enormous train, a white veil, gloves, and a fan in one hand. Photographs of Elizabeth show the beautiful young woman in what looks like a wedding gown.
The presentation ceremony was a grand spectacle from start to finish. Hours before the afternoon event, carriages queued up near Buckingham Palace and throngs of curiosity seekers peered into the equipages to get a look at Elizabeth and the other debutantes. The nervous young women were then ushered into a crowded, stuffy antechamber to wait their turn in line. Elizabeth, like all the other sifted few, had spent weeks envisioning and rehearsing how the event would proceed when her time came: she would gracefully carry the train of her gown as she headed toward the Throne Room; one of the lords-in-waiting would then unfurl her train; and when her name was announced she would stride across the room and kiss the queen’s hand as she curtsied deeply, nearly touching the floor with her knee. But something went askew. Being jostled in the line unnerved Elizabeth. Perhaps it was her difficulty in walking, or her distaste for being poked and touched (something she’d been subjected to during her years of confinement). For whatever reason, when a court official urged her forward with a gentle push and the command “Hurry!” Elizabeth recoiled. She walked across the room, but in her agitated state she completely forgot to curtsy when she reached the queen. This would have been considered a great international slight, if fate hadn’t intervened. Just as Elizabeth approached Queen Victoria, the monarch’s veil became dislodged and revealed her pigtail beneath it. Courtiers immediately surrounded the queen so that Elizabeth’s break with protocol was not widely seen. Her social gaffe did, however, cause enough of a stir that it was reported upon in New York’s society gossip sheet, Town Topics.
In 1893, Elizabeth was twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and dangerously close to being considered over the hill. This was the year John Singer Sargent painted her. She’d come to London that spring for the wedding of her youngest brother, Robert, now a twenty-one-year-old artist with an unstable, manic personality. (He was the one who’d professed his life’s ambition as bobbing about on the sea.) The ceremony came off in such a rush that not all the siblings could attend, but among those in the pews at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square were celebrity architect Stanford White and his wife, who’d come from Paris for the event.
Stanford White’s presence guaranteed that London society would take notice. With his bushy mustache and red hair in a distinctive buzz cut—one of Elizabeth’s brothers affectionately called him “old Fuzz Buzz”—White commanded attention. According to a contemporary, he’d stride into view “like a Triton,” both the name of a Greek god and the largest moon of Saturn. A dazzling presence in the Gilded Age firmament, White helped invent the look of the era with his Beaux Arts architecture. He was a man of feverish passions and over-the-top appetites. The Chanlers were not only clients but friends. White admired everything about them: their money (which the architect knew how to use), their impressive lineage, their eccentricity, and their devotion to art. A plaque pronouncing the family’s undying friendship with Stanford White remains in the front hall at Rokeby. Over the years White caroused with the brothers, remodeled Rokeby, helped decorate their other various homes, and got deeply enmeshed in one of the brothers’ projects to build a mill town in North Carolina (a disastrous miscalculation on White’s part). White was thirteen years older than Elizabeth, and he took a paternal interest in her and her two sisters.
Elizabeth, twenty-two-year-old Margaret, and nineteen-year-old Alida rented a place in London so they could stay on after their brother’s April wedding. The middle sister, Margaret, having recently come into her own inheritance, decided that she wanted a portrait of Elizabeth. Getting the world-famous Sargent to agree to a commission was not easy, but the Chanlers had clout. Elizabeth herself may have known the artist. It is believed that she purchased his oil painting Street in Venice on January 1, 1888, at the St. Botolph Club Exhibition in Boston, the artist’s first one-man show. The painting depicts a young girl, wrapped in a black shawl, her eyes downcast, as she hurries past several men in shadows; two men are talking, but one of the men can’t take his eyes off of her. There’s something disquieting about the scene, about the man’s lingering, not-entirely innocent stare. Elizabeth purportedly gave the painting to Stanford White—a man who also could not take his eyes off a pretty woman—in return for some architectural work.
If Sargent needed any more convincing to paint Elizabeth, Stanford White surely would have weighed in. He was as devoted to the Chanlers as he was to Sargent. Thanks in large measure to Stanford White, Sargent had recently signed a contract to create vast murals and wall decorations—more than fifty thousand feet of artwork—for the Renaissance-style Boston Public Library designed by White’s architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White. Sargent’s brain was already deeply absorbed in the project and had been for several years. He’d traveled throughout the Near East to soak in the ancient world—pagan gods and goddesses, hieroglyphics, mummy tombs—as well as the iconography of early Christianity and Judaism. The subject of his murals would be nothing less than the entire history of religion over the millennia. He truly believed this would be the capstone of his life’s work, his Sistine Chapel.
Before and after he painted Elizabeth, Sargent was spending most of his time in the village of Fairford in Gloucestershire, working in an oversized, barnlike studio to accommodate his large-scale library project. He was applying relief casts to enormous painted canvasses to create unusual Byzantine-like sculptural effects. To relax he rode horseback. He was within a short distance of the only landmark in the village: a glorious fifteenth-century church that possesses the most complete set of medieval stained glass windows in the entire country. The richly colored windows chronicle the Bible stories, beginning with the serpent tempting Eve and ending with the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. There are visions of sinners, saints, martyrs, and even a grotesque figure of Satan devouring the damned.
Sargent returned to his studio in London to paint Elizabeth in June 1893. He lived and worked in the same building at 33 Tite Street, an artistic enclave in Chelsea. James Whistler (whose credo was “Art for art’s sake”) had previously used the same studio; Oscar Wilde lived across the street. Elizabeth, an aspiring artist and writer herself, doubtless loved the slightly Bohemian setting—sturdy brick buildings lining the narrow street with real artists at work in them. She was ushered into Sargent’s studio with its charming jumble of French furnishings, an upright piano, and marble busts. Morning light streamed through a huge window on the wall facing east.
When Elizabeth limped into the studio a saintly quality hovered over her. The artist said she possessed “the face of the Madonna,” and he wanted to capture that look—the beautiful dark-eyed Madonna, pure, good-hearted, and virginal. To Sargent, her eyes were those of a child, radiating innocence.
Painting for Sargent was practically an athletic performance. Back and forth he would go, viewing Elizabeth, from different angles, different distances. And then when he had an idea he’d strike quickly, lunging at the canvas, his brush in one hand, his palette in the other, a cigarette dangling from his mouth when he wasn’t humming or whistling. While he painted, Sargent talked to her. He learned that he and Elizabeth had a close mutual friend in Sally Fairchild of Boston, and he wrote to the Fairchilds to let them know of the serendipitous connection. He always encouraged outsiders—friends or family of his subjects—to be present while he painted, so that his sitters would be animated. Elizabeth’s sister Margaret, who’d commissioned the painting, was instructed by the artist to keep the conversation moving. But when she suggested aloud that Rudyard Kipling should fill the then-vacant position of poet laureate in England, Sargent bellowed: “What an unpleasant American idea!” Another guest at the sitting reported that Elizabeth was “talking hard” while he painted her; yet Sargent somehow managed to make her look remarkably still and voiceless. She doesn’t seem to be moving a muscle. There is complete calm. And yet those entwined nerve-wracking fingers and that busy pillow inject another whole level of what? Anxiety? Pentup emotions ready to explode? The portrait is dark and funereal in the background, but the light illuminating Elizabeth’s face and hands makes her appear angelic.
The portrait didn’t take long. Sargent was so sure of his approach that he repainted her face only once. After he’d finished the canvas he seemed to regret how deadly serious he’d made her. “Miss Chanler,” he told Elizabeth, “I have painted you la penserosa, I should like to begin all over again, and paint you l’allegra.” Indeed, Elizabeth is pensive in the portrait, and there’s an underlying tension to the image. But she also appears poised, steady, and determined, her eyes staring at the viewer. It’s as if she’s ready to step off the canvas on her own path, as if she’s on the cusp of some great change—and she was.
Despite everyone’s belief that she would never do so, Elizabeth fell in love. Madly and deeply. But it was with her best friend’s husband. In the 1890s, Elizabeth had embarked on an intense friendship with Minna Timmins Chapman and her husband, John Jay “Jack” Chapman, a young couple that had moved to New York from Boston. Minna, a tall, dark-haired half Italian/half Bostonian raised on Beacon Street, had a fiery temperament. She was as impulsive as she was generous. She took one look at Elizabeth’s room at Rokeby and declared it bleak. Minna went off and purchased yards and yards of beautiful poppy-colored Italian silk that she hung on the walls of the room, transforming it from a monkish cell to an exuberant refuge. Gesturing dramatically around the room, Minna told Elizabeth, “you must have flames & roses about you.” Minna’s vibrance was the perfect counterweight to Elizabeth’s deep reserves of seriousness and sadness—the traits that Sargent captured so brilliantly.
Elizabeth, Minna, and Jack shared a devotion to literature and a belief in its transforming power. In fact, Minna and Jack had fallen in love while reading Dante together in the Boston Athenaeum library. Chapman was then a student at Harvard and a member of the Porcellian Club, the university’s most elite club. (One of Elizabeth’s brothers was Chapman’s classmate and a fellow club member.) Chapman’s background was suitably august, descended as he was from Chief Justice John Jay. His family’s reform-minded credentials were equally formidable: his grandmother Maria Weston Chapman had worked hand in hand with William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor celebrated in Boston.
Nearly six feet tall, handsome, dark haired with a mustache and stylish sideburns, Chapman was a commanding figure. He spoke in spellbinding paragraphs. He was charismatic, witty, charming, opinionated, and brilliant. But he was also gloomy and tormented. “Be fearfully afraid,” he wrote on the ceiling of his room at Harvard.
Perhaps the one he had to fear most was himself. In a jealous rage over Minna, he beat another student whom he mistakenly believed had offended her. When Chapman realized his error, he felt he had to atone for his sin. He put his left arm in the fireplace in his room—and held it there. He later wrote of this almost incomprehensible act in a matter-of-fact tone:
At that time I was rooming alone in a desolate side-street in Cambridge. It was a small, dark, horrid little room. I sat down. There was a hard-coal fire burning brightly. I took off my coat and waistcoat, wrapped a pair of suspenders tightly on my left forearm above the wrist, plunged the left hand deep in the blaze and held it down with my right hand for some minutes. When I took it out, the charred knuckles and finger bones were exposed.
I said to myself, “This will never do.” I took an old coat, wrapped it about my left hand and arm, slipped my right arm into an overcoat, held the coat about me and started for Boston in the horsecars. On arriving at the Massachusetts General Hospital I showed the trouble to a surgeon, was put under ether, and the next morning waked up without the hand and very calm in my spirits.
From his hospital room he wrote to his mother in New York and lied to her. She was a difficult, domineering woman and he didn’t want her by his bedside. “Please don’t be scared by telegram from hospital,” he wrote, “I had my left hand run over yesterday and taken off. I am perfectly well and happy. Don’t mind it a bit—it shall not make the least difference in my life. If you can help it don’t come on. I shall be here at the Massachusetts Hospital [for a] week or so with all science and comfort.” While hospitalized, he was visited by a well-known alienist—the term for a psychiatrist in those pioneering days of the profession—who asked Chapman whether he was insane. “That is for you to find out,” Chapman answered. The doctor pronounced him sane.
Oddly, it was that grotesque act of self-mutilation that sealed Jack’s bond with Minna. She took it as proof of his utter devotion, their love forged in flames. But her family was understandably alarmed. They did everything they could to keep the lovers apart. They sent Minna to Colorado Springs, then farther off to England, Europe, and Egypt, in the hope she’d find a more suitable husband. To defy their meddling, Minna chopped off her beautiful hair while cruising on the Nile. She would look like a penitent and her sacrifice would be an offering to her lover. A glittering dinner party in London was arranged so she could meet an attractive, eligible Englishman named Renshaw. “Imagine my horror,” the hostess later recalled, “when the door opened and Minna entered, wearing a shabby blue silk frock . . . her cropped hair straggling from an insufficient number of hairpins. She paid no heed to handsome Renshaw. . . . It was the form of her loyalty to the man she loved in the United States, which demanded that she should in nowise either adorn her person or make herself fascinatingly agreeable.”
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