Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  A pacifist in previous wars, Jack became apoplectic over U.S. neutrality and heaped a stream of abuse upon President Woodrow Wilson. He ranted in letters to the New-York Tribune and other newspapers, and contributed an article to a pamphlet titled The French Heroes. When Wilson finally did declare war, Jack published the long poem, Ode on the Sailing of Our Troops for France: Dedicated to President Wilson in the November 1917 edition of the North American Review. Wilson, perhaps relieved that Jack’s caustic pen was stilled, wrote a personal note to Chapman saying that he’d read the ode to his family not once, but twice, and they were delighted with it. Conrad—the only surviving son from Jack’s first marriage—served in the Navy during the war. But Elizabeth and Jack refused to let seventeen-year-old Chanler sign up for duty.

  When war with the Germans was finished, Jack began waging his own private wars. He harbored a particular hatred of Catholics, whom he deemed antidemocratic, so the rising New York Catholic politician Al Smith became a favorite target. Even Jack’s alma mater came into his crosshairs. In 1920 when a Catholic was elected a Fellow of Harvard—a rich New York lawyer whom Jack described as “high up in the Cathedral gang”—Chapman was livid. He feared that the Roman Church was intent on controlling education, even at Harvard. Jack announced he would prefer being “nailed to the cross” to seeing “any line of connection between the Pope, Cardinal O’Connell, and the Harvard Board of Fellows.” At times he focused his rage on the so-called “Jewish menace,” and in a sonnet titled “Cape Cod, Rome, and Jerusalem” he managed to merge his fears about both religions. The poem was published in the Ku Klux Klan’s National Kourier, surely a low point in Chapman’s literary career. Jack’s unhinged religious crusade blinded him to the evils of the KKK. (He was, after all, a proud descendant of abolitionists and a fierce opponent of lynching.) In 1925 he wrote to a British poet: “The K.K. are all right. They are the only healthy-minded people in the country and while they have the lamentable simplicity of mind that seems universal in America their lunacies seem to be confined to foolish names.”

  Elizabeth focused her attention and advice on their son, Chanler. He needed it. Like his father and his namesake Uncle Archie, he took delight in outraging others. At St. Paul’s exceedingly buttoned-down boarding school he organized prizefights for money, sold firearms, and was told by the schoolmasters he had “the wrong attitude.” He used that phrase as the title of a memoir he later wrote about the school. Harvard came next. A cousin recalled that Chanler ran a gambling den with some partners, taking in hundreds of dollars a week. The booze ran freely, thanks to a bootlegger, and the prep-school types who frequented the place would stagger out in the middle of the night.

  Elizabeth offered much counsel to her son, most of it useless. While he was taking wagers, she was speaking to him of poetry. Robert Browning had been her favorite poet as a young girl; she held him in “worshipful reverence,” she wrote. “I hear, now, that the youth of the world sees nothing in him to admire, that his day is past, & that he never was a real poet anyway.” She was concerned that Chanler was following the wrong poets, was set on the wrong path. “The analysis of my obsession is as follows: you, yourself have great trouble to express your own thought clearly. You have turgid maelstroms in your brain, like those storms in the Aeneid . . . I do want you to carry the thought of beauty & symmetry & rhythm in your dreams, waking & sleeping, for they are the qualities toward which you need to bend your gaze.” Later her advice became more practical. He had given up drinking and carousing—at least temporarily—when she urged him to brighten up his room and make it “a bower, not a cell.” With the letter she sent along fabric from India and Florence to festoon the walls, and also a check to buy new blankets. She warned him not to get red ones as they’d clash with the wall hangings. Beauty, she believed, was always a tonic.

  Elizabeth didn’t understand the new world of the 1920s and ’30s. She and Jack were relics from a world of books and art and high culture. A niece later recalled making solo visits to Elizabeth, who discussed highbrow topics and read “Shakespeare and such stuff” aloud. The young girl was bored to tears. She hated those visits, but her mother, Margaret, insisted. Elizabeth, with her Old World manners and breeding, was decidedly out of step with the next generation. She was a product of Miss Sewell’s, not the current Jazz Age; modernism held no charm for her.

  Elizabeth and Jack cocooned at Sylvania in summer, and headed south to Sanibel Island or Charleston for the winters. Elizabeth’s health required it. Jack eventually grew tired of his religious crusades, and wrote instead of the ancient world and American culture, winning praise for his final books. The lion that had bellowed through life, quieted in old age. He died on November 4, 1933, several days after surgery for liver cancer. He was seventy-one years old. Elizabeth, at his bedside during his final days, heard him repeatedly murmur, “A soldier lay dying, a soldier lay dying.” When she leaned closer she realized he was reciting the opening lines of the ballad “Bingen on the Rhine”:

  A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers

  There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears . . .

  His voice brimming with emotion, Jack replaced the ballad’s next line with one of his own, telling his devoted wife: “But there is lack of nothing here.” After his death a card was found in his room. On the front was an image of a Fra Angelico angel. On the reverse, Jack had written: “Elizabeth came with a book in each hand. In her left hand she held the mind of the world and this book she gave first. In her right hand she held the heart of the world and that she gave me and the hand that held it.” For all its tempests, their marriage was a merging of hearts and minds.

  Not long before he died, Elizabeth and Jack had moved into a cottage they’d built on the property at Sylvania. They named the house Good Hap, and intended to spend their remaining days there. They turned the big house over to their son, Chanler, his wife Olivia (a grand niece of Henry James), and their children. Chanler was an ongoing trial to his mother, who despaired over his failure to settle on a career. He had worked briefly as a police reporter for the New York Times but found that crime “bores the hell out of me.” He yearned for adventure, but instead became a gentleman farmer at Sylvania, living off the inheritance his mother dispensed before her death.

  Money fueled his eccentricity, and Chanler did his best to live up to the title bestowed on him as the “most eccentric man in America.” Over the years he married three times, the final time to a psychiatrist, prompting one relative to say, “It’s convenient for Chanler to have his own psychiatrist in the house.” He published a local newspaper called the Barrytown Explorer, filled with just about anything that interested him. (“Opinions come out of me like Brussels sprouts,” he once said.) The newspaper’s motto was “When You Can’t Smile, Quit,” and headlines included the memorable KINGSTON ATTACKED BY GIANT MALL. Chanler also used the paper to dispense such priceless advice as “Close the blinds at night and lower the chances of being shot to death in bed.” Guns were something Chanler had in abundance and he would fire at just about anything that moved. He later became enamored of a slingshot and carried it with him at all times, shooting ball bearings at passing cars and denting them. In the 1950s he rented a house on the estate to future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. Bellow hated Chanler and the two of them fought—sometimes physically—during drunken dinner parties. Bellow got his revenge by using Chanler as the model for the main character in Henderson the Rain King. In an interview with Philip Roth, Bellow said, “Chanler Chapman, the son of the famous John Jay Chapman, was the original of Eugene Henderson—the tragic or near-tragic comedian and the buffoon heir of a great name.”

  Fortunately, Elizabeth did not live to see or hear all of this. She died at Good Hap on June 5, 1937, for no apparent reason. She was seventy-one years old. According to the servant who’d lived in the household for years, Elizabeth just willed herself to death. After her husband’s death, she’d spent several years assisting on a volume o
f his collected letters. Her work on the project was now done. The book was published to positive reviews a few months after her death, generating a new wave of enthusiasm for Chapman’s work.

  Elizabeth’s portrait had its own eventful story. Sargent was proud of the portrait and seemed eager to hang on to it as long as possible. Not long after he completed the work in 1893, he wrote to Margaret Chanler and asked if she would permit him to exhibit the painting at the Royal Academy of London in the spring of 1894. He promised to make all the necessary arrangements for insurance and other logistics. He also told her that he’d “ransacked London for an old frame” but couldn’t find one that pleased him. He’d custom ordered a frame with a scallop shell motif that would be ready in several months’ time. In a subsequent note, he wondered if he could just hold on to Elizabeth’s portrait—let her “peacefully hang on my walls”—until the London show, which was many months in the future. He hated to think of the painting “staying in a box in the dark and emerging lemon colour with a crop of mushrooms,” he wrote. But Margaret, anxious to take possession of the painting, opted instead to have the painting shipped back and forth across the Atlantic.

  In 1894 the portrait was exhibited at both the Royal Academy in London and the National Academy of Design in New York. The painting garnered mixed reviews on both sides of the ocean: the London Times noted its “vigourous energy” and Elizabeth’s “intense intellectual” expression; but the weekly Spectator complained that the portrait was “dull” and that the overall “vision seems to have lost its edge a little, and the execution . . . its magic.” A contemporary American artist in New York dismissed the painting as “poorly, hastily conceived.” Nonetheless, it made the rounds to other cities in subsequent years—to Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, Washington, Pittsburgh. But as interest in Sargent waned, and as modernist critics derided his work as hopelessly old-fashioned, the painting gathered dust at Rokeby and in New York.

  That is, until the day in 1963 when Chanler walked into Rokeby unannounced, took the painting off the wall, put it in the back of a farm truck, and drove away. One family member, watching, was stupefied. But Chanler couldn’t be stopped. He had the right. His Aunt Margaret, who died in March of that year, had given Chanler 50-percent ownership of the painting during her lifetime, with the understanding that it would remain in place until after she died. Then the portrait would be entirely his. Having claimed his prize, Chanler removed the portrait’s elaborate scallop shell frame chosen by Sargent, which still bore exhibit labels from the 1890s on the back of it, and stored it in the attic at Sylvania. He hung the painting—now in its simple inner frame—on the mansion’s dining room wall, where it remained when Sylvania was rented out. Chanler had gone through all his money, so in the 1970s he announced he was going to sell the family heirloom to the highest bidder. Naturally, some family members protested vehemently. Of course, that was part of the fun for Chanler. His half-brother Conrad, a more reasonable sort, was recruited to dissuade him. Conrad had an inspiration. Why sell it and have to pay taxes on the painting, he asked Chanler, when you can probably donate it to the Smithsonian and avoid paying income tax for the rest of your life? Gyp the government of taxes? Now there was an idea that appealed to Chanler, and he boasted about it ever after. And so, in 1980 he donated the painting to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it currently resides at the heart of their Gilded Age collection. The original scallop shell frame was eventually rescued from the attic and reunited with the painting. And Elizabeth’s christening silver from her godmother, the Mrs. Astor, is exhibited next to the painting in sacramental splendor.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Collector

  She is not a woman, she is a locomotive—with a Pullman car attached.

  —Henry James on Isabella Stewart Gardner

  THIRTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD Isabella “Belle” Stewart Gard­ner lay stretched out on a couch at the back of the Ibis, the boat her husband had hired for a trip up the Nile. It was Christmas Eve, 1874. Frankincense perfumed the air. Belle watched as the Egyptian helmsman bent his forehead to the deck in prayer; meanwhile, a child took charge of the boat. The day had been busy: going ashore at Fascna (such a “dear little village” she wrote in her travel diary), and visiting the ancient fortifications on the hills of El Haybee where fragments of mummies were scattered about. Those bits of preserved flesh and organs had unnerved Belle—but by evening her thoughts were as gentle as the river itself. The here and now seemed to vanish, and she even forgot it was Christmas Eve. The moonlit evening transported her back in time, creating, she wrote, “a fit path by which my thoughts went straight to Cleopatra.”

  Her idle reverie had more than a little justification. Cleopatra used to sail on the same river in a golden barge. Ruthless and resourceful, she seduced both Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony to solidify her political power. Cleopatra was the very definition of ambition and beauty, and, in her lifetime, Belle was compared to her. A young American woman was once heard to say she had waited over an hour to see the notorious Belle come out of a theater because she’s as “wicked as Cleopatra.”

  Belle was an imposing figure—and ambitious. Like Cleopatra she lived for drama, creating lots of it in her lifetime, taking pleasure in outraging the sensibilities of Puritan Boston, her adopted hometown. But Belle was not at all beautiful. She was short and plain. She had light-colored hair, such a pale complexion that she wore veils outdoors, piercing dark blue eyes that resembled “blue icicles” when angry, and a low theatrical voice with a “delicious caress” in it.

  Belle carried herself like an empress. She loved beautiful things and swathed herself in the most expensive fabrics and jewels. As time went on, she also collected some of the world’s greatest art, nurtured some of the world’s most gifted artists—John Singer Sargent among them—and built arguably the most fascinating and eccentric house museum in America.

  Belle’s life seems to have the neat structure of a three-act play. Act 1: High-spirited young girl, reined in by conventional marriage and disapproving society, is nearly crushed by tragedy. Act 2: Seeking an escape, the heroine sets off on a series of adventures around the world and reinvents herself. Act 3: The heroine revels in her notoriety, breaks all the rules for how a proper Victorian woman should act, and becomes a media sensation. Against all odds, she creates a veritable cathedral to art that doubles as a home for herself and a gift to the world at large. Having risen from the ashes, she overcomes tragedy and emerges triumphant.

  Of course, Belle’s life wasn’t quite that simple. Her mercurial temperament—vain and egotistical one moment, deeply religious and generous the next—makes her a difficult subject to pin down. She left behind a long trail of letters and travel journals, but also selectively burned big chunks of her correspondence in the hope of controlling her image beyond the grave. This was a woman who demanded control. In another era she might have been a corporate CEO, admired for her decisiveness, grit, and personal flair. As a collector, she’d be spoken of in the same hushed tones as the plutocrats J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, who created house museums in New York—but with much more money than she had. Belle’s outrageous personal behavior, the manner in which she gaily thumbed her nose at the grim blue-blood society she married into, has, at times, obscured her brilliance as an art patron and collector. It’s impossible not to portray Belle as a larger-than-life, colorful “character.” She was a character, and seemed to encourage the scandalous rumors that circulated about her, whether they were true or not. (Apparently, all publicity was good publicity, in Belle’s view.) Yet she was extremely serious. An intellectual in an era when women were discouraged—if not banned—from intellectual pursuits, Belle became an incomparable aesthete and patron of the arts. Blessed with a large fortune, she used it to ferret out some of the world’s most beautiful art and curiosities, an eclectic and personal collection that she housed in a Venetian palazzo of her design. The official architect, Willard Sears, hardly mattered. It was her vision, her decisions
.

  As her palace rose out of an empty swampland in Boston, it was like seeing a mirage appear amid desolation. The fortresslike exterior is largely unadorned and pedestrian. The interior is breathtaking. A colonnaded walkway circles a sunlit courtyard with balconies and windows transported from Renaissance palaces in Venice. The central space is filled with flowers—and, during Belle’s lifetime, birds as well. There are three floors of art, and the placement of every single piece is fixed forever. According to Belle’s ironclad will, absolutely nothing in the museum can be changed. If the curators move a piece of furniture or a canvas even a foot from its preordained spot, the entire collection will be put up to auction in Paris with the proceeds going to Harvard. The arrangement of the entire museum is sacrosanct. It’s like an enormous jewel box or collage—all of it Belle’s creation.

  Born in New York City in 1840, the eldest child of four, Belle came from humble, but entrepreneurial stock. Her grandfather ran a bar in Brooklyn. Her father, David Stewart, a second-generation Scotsman, owned a lucrative linen import business until he began to sense other possibilities in the nineteenth-century industrial boom. New railroads and the Erie Canal expanded opportunities to ship goods to and from New York City. Stewart got into the mining business, establishing the Stewart Iron Company near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He amassed a fortune—not Vanderbilt or Astor money, but rich by any other standard. Tales of the Gold Rush in California stirred Belle’s imagination (she was a precocious nine-year-old when gold was discovered), so when her father visited there he got her five coins fashioned out of gold. Belle’s first treasures, the coins were stowed away in her childhood pocketbook—the beginning of her collecting habit.