Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  Then for three months, the Gardners crisscrossed the Indian subcontinent. Jack kept track of their daily expenses, while Belle collected jewels. When they heard that the nizam, or monarch, of the princely state of Hyderabad was to be officially installed as ruler, they ignored the advice of local officials who warned that there were neither tickets for the event nor accommodations available, and also that, as Westerners, it would be too dangerous. Hyderabad was a “hot bed of Mohammedanism” and “at a time like this Fanaticism would be rampant.” Those concerns seemed only to fuel the Gardners’ desire to go, and Jack blandly remarked, “I have always found hitherto that money will provide something.” Indeed, they found lodgings—a tent in the Public Garden—and secured their invitations. Belle was one of only twenty-five Western women at the royal palace to witness the nizam’s installation by the viceroy of India. “And really I was staggered!” Belle wrote of the extravagant proceedings—elephants pulling artillery, princes covered in jewels prostrating themselves before the nizam and offering tribute, the streets packed with Indian noblemen and their colorful retinues, the monarch being carried about on a yellow and gold palanquin and then brought into his palace by women, “for no male may enter there!”

  Throughout her travels Belle noted how the women lived. She took particular delight in encountering the practice of polyandry—women marrying multiple men—in the Himalayas of India. She wrote to a Boston friend, “[Polyandry] seems to have a glorious effect on the women. Such great strapping creatures, red cheeks, covered with silver and tourquoises and much painted, and as merry as larks. One splendid specimen sat, selling her wares, with four husbands in a row behind her.” On the other hand, Belle was rather shocked by the reality of arranged marriages in India. During the spring “marrying season” she encountered a score of newlyweds on the street in a single day. The husbands, in yellow, walked ahead of the brides, who wore red; their long gowns were tied together. Though a seemingly sweet scene, Belle noted that some of the brides were “small enough to be carried.”

  The mystery and variety of religious experiences were running themes in her diaries. In a remote palm forest in Malaysia, Belle once came upon a chanting Buddhist priest dressed in yellow. “I crept up softly—no light but the moon and the service lamps and the burning incense, and I stood behind the priest, who never heard or noticed me. It was exquisite—but very sad.” She also witnessed scenes hard for the Westerner to fathom: thousands of Indians, their faces daubed with paint, in a frenzy as they approached a temple devoted to Kali, the goddess of death and destruction. The faithful came carrying young goats to be sacrificed to the deity. “The place was literally washed with blood,” Belle wrote. “The heads were carried in and laid before the hideous Image [of Kali], black and with three eyes, and the worshipping Hindu trotted off, bedecked with flowers, smeared with lines of paint, singing and shouting, carrying the little headless body at his side, the blood of it rubbing on to his legs at each step. It was horrible.” She also watched as dead human bodies were carried to a tributary of the Ganges: “Two corpses brought in on stretchers, toes sticking up cold and stiff.” And she saw other people, near death, brought to the Ganges. “It seems that to die in the Ganges insures Paradise,” she wrote. Corpses were placed so that their feet could continue to be washed by the holy water of the Ganges while waiting “for a disengaged funeral pyre.” Flames consumed the corpses “with Pariahs watching them and now and again shouting to the Hindu God.”

  A noted Boston scientist who crossed paths with Belle in India pronounced her the “perfect traveler, incapable of fear or fatigue & wishing to see everything that ought to be seen.” Her letters from abroad were so vivid that Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, a relative by marriage, couldn’t understand why she wanted him to destroy them. “I destroy your letters in obedience to your commands but I do it with regret,” he wrote. “[T]hey ought to be collated with all the others and published.” Her extant letters and diaries reveal an exquisite sensitivity and appreciation of color, texture, ritual, and spiritual practice. She experienced the world as an artist might. “Goodbye to the country of men with tattooed legs and with skirts open down the front,” she wrote upon leaving Burma in January 1884. She was struck by certain images as she departed: “the stirabout of rainbows on the wharf” and a “flash of fire up to heaven from the Pagoda.” But “one little picture stands out—a woman with a long soft pink silk skirt light about her shoulders, and hanging down her back. She is holding, like Titian’s woman, a large silver bowl.”

  Leaving India in April 1884 and heading back to the West was bittersweet for Belle. “I was very low hearted,” she wrote. As the boat pulled away, the land—and all the adventures they had—began to recede. With an air of resignation, Belle ended her diary: “But that is all over now and India is going down into the sea.”

  When Jack and Belle had set off for Asia in 1883, their nephews were nearly grown, their futures seemingly secure. All attended Harvard: Joe graduated in 1882, Amory graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1884, and Gus two years later. At the end of their round-the-world trip, Belle and Jack met the newly graduated Amory in London. Amory was at the end of his own trip—a gentleman’s tour of England and the continent with his classmate John Jay Chapman, future literary lion and husband of Elizabeth Chanler. Chapman later recalled that he and Amory “gambolled up the Rhine like puppies at play” but that fun was limited in Paris—where they could have gotten into lots of mischief—because “Amory had the conscience of an anchorite.” Amory and his aunt and uncle sailed home at the end of July. According to novelist Henry James, Belle was “in despair at going back to Boston where she has neither friends nor lovers, nor entertainments, nor resources of any kind left.”

  Two summers later the Gardners were abroad once more—this time with their nephew Joe. Very likely the Gardners were trying to cheer up Joe, who had fallen into a depression. (Louise Hall Tharp, one of Belle’s early biographers, speculates he might have been brokenhearted over a young woman; a more recent biographer, Douglass Shand-Tucci, suspects it was over a male lover.) The three of them proceeded to Paris where they joined up with Amory, who was visiting Germany. Joe then abruptly disappears from the record—until October 17, 1886. On that date Jack Gardner noted in his pocket diary, “Rec’d telegram . . . of death of J. P. G.” Joseph Peabody Gardner—deemed “the wittiest man of his epoch” by his contemporary and friend John Jay Chapman—took his own life at age twenty-five. The details of his death remain mysterious. No more references were made about him—or, if there were, those papers were destroyed. Only a single letter of condolence remains that notes how charming Joe was.

  A new chapter of Belle’s life opened almost immediately. Within weeks of receiving word about Joe’s death, she met John Singer Sargent in London, where he now lived and worked. The once-rising star of the Parisian art world had fled that city in the wake of the critical lambasting he suffered over a single painting—his frankly erotic portrait of Madame Gautreau (Madame X), exhibited at the 1884 Paris Salon. Even sophisticated Parisians swooned after viewing the painting. The strap of her gown painted so provocatively off her shoulder, as if her dress might slip off entirely at any moment (Sargent later painted the strap back into place, but by then it was too late); her skin tone so unnatural and decadent. Critics and the public alike howled: “She looks decomposed.”

  Belle wanted to meet the controversial artist of the moment, so their mutual friend Henry James made the arrangements. “I am writing to Sargent to say to him that we will come & see Mme Gautereau on Thursday at about 3:15 . . . the time being short to prepare Sargent’s mind & Mme Gautreau’s body,” James wrote her on October 26, 1886. “I only send a word in advance to give you a timely warning & let you know that the bolt is leveled at the susceptible young artist.” Sargent was trying to build a new clientele and enhance his reputation after the near disaster of Paris. A rich American woman interested in his work? “It would be doing me a very great pleasure,” Sargent wrote to her, ur
ging her to visit his studio even though “my afternoon sittings are dreadfully in the way.” Belle went to the studio and greatly admired his painting of Madame X—even if Gautreau’s outraged husband had refused to purchase it. Thus began a lifelong relationship between Belle and Sargent. She became his greatest patron, and—though she could be infuriating and demanding—she became one of his dearest friends.

  Charismatic as she was, Belle shared neither Gautreau’s exotic beauty nor her youth; nonetheless, she wanted Sargent to paint a similarly seductive portrait of her. This says something about Belle’s need to create a stir, as well as her oversized ego. She commissioned Sargent to paint her when he was in Boston in January 1888. Forty-seven years old, she wears a daring, low-cut dress that exposes an amount of cleavage not considered appropriate for an aging Boston matron. The portrait seems tame by today’s standards, but the painting electrified the French critic Paul Bourget who wrote, “Her body, rendered supple by exercise, is sheathed—you might say molded—in a tight-fitting black dress.” Belle’s extremely pale skin practically glows in contrast to her severe dark dress. Her arms are rounded, athletic, and reveal “firm hands, the thumb almost too long, which might guide four horses with the precision of an English coachman.” The painting exudes strength and physicality—attributes that a French critic might find appealing, but that Bostonians found appalling.

  Belle had to know that the painting would cause a storm. She wanted to expose herself and believed Sargent was the artist who could do it. She was married and she was not young, but the portrait celebrates her sexuality, her joy in her body. The portrait was meant for public display. It was almost an invitation to the city’s young men to pay attention to her (which they did). As a realistic portrait of an actual woman—someone known in Boston—it was certainly a provocation. How did Belle think her husband would react? The French critic, who had no puritanical scruples, went on to say that this painting might as well be called “The American Idol,” as it expresses the greatness of American civilization—“a faith in the human Will, absolute, unique, systematic, and indomitable. . . . This woman can do without being loved. She has no need of being loved.” Yet, she is “an idol, for whose services man labors, which he has decked with the jewels of a queen . . .”

  In the painting, her jewels are eccentrically placed. Rubies adorn her barely visible shoes. A string of pearls with a ruby pendant encircles her neck and Sargent draped two more strands of pearls around her waist to accentuate her hourglass figure. These were all priceless natural pearls. (Cultured pearls had not yet been invented.) Natural pearls were considered the very symbol of wealth and power. According to legend, Cleopatra once drank a dissolved pearl to win a bet. Here was Belle wearing pearls around her waist. It was almost an affront. She stands erect before a richly patterned piece of Renaissance velvet brocade. One art historian notes that the background creates an effect of “the nimbus of an eastern divinity.” But the hint of Eastern religion did not sit well with a contemporary critic who wrote sarcastically that the backdrop was “as if in testimony of [Mrs. Gardner’s] devotion to the fashionable Hindoo cult.”

  During her sittings Belle drove Sargent to distraction. She couldn’t, or she wouldn’t, keep still. She kept craning her neck to look out the window and watch the boats on the Charles River. Sargent grew so frustrated that he threatened to give up the painting altogether. At dinners with friends he vented about how impossible she was during the sittings and mimicked her voice to their great hilarity.

  Eight times he painted her face and eight times he scraped it off. Belle, still an avid student of Dante, assured Sargent that the ninth time would do the trick, since nine was Dante’s mystic number. And so it was. The ninth incarnation was the final version. Belle loved the painting and, ever after, tried to get Sargent to agree that it was his finest work. She ordered photographic copies of the portrait to give to friends, but she had the photo studio retouch her right eye. When Belle sent Sargent the photograph he wrote back, “Some parts of it came out wonderfully well, but I disclaim any connection with the appearance of your right eye.”

  The painting was unveiled as part of a Sargent exhibition—his first solo show—that opened on January 30, 1888, at the St. Botolph Club in Boston, a private men’s club devoted to the arts and letters whose members included the elite of Boston society. Portraits of prominent local women—including Lily Fairchild, Caroline Mudge Lawrence, and members of the Boit family (one painting of the mother, Mary Louisa Cushing Boit, and another of the Boits’ four daughters ranging in age from four to fourteen)—were included in the show. According to a checklist reconstructed later, there were twenty-one oil paintings and one watercolor exhibited, but it was the portrait of Belle that created the biggest stir. The Boston correspondent for The Critic (“An Illustrated Review of Literature, Art and Life”) admired Sargent’s “brilliant and suggestive” work. Still, he singled out Belle’s portrait as verging “on caricature, as . . . [her] pose reminds one of a Japanese doll hanging from a nail in the wall.” Someone suggested that the painting should be titled Woman: An Enigma, perhaps because the sight of all that décolletage was incomprehensible in Boston. Sargent left Boston just before the opening and was not around to shield Belle from the critical reviews. “The newspapers do not disturb me. I have only seen one or two at any rate,” he wrote to her from the Clarendon Hotel in New York. “Do you bear up?”

  Disapproving Boston weighed in. Even author Julia Ward Howe, Belle’s Beacon Street neighbor and friend and a progressive women’s rights advocate, noted that although the portrait had “great artistic merit,” it also suffered from “great faults of taste.” Jack—who paid three thousand dollars for the portrait—was blunter. “It looks like hell but it looks just like you,” he reportedly said. A joke began circulating around the men’s clubs in Boston that made reference to the earlier scandal involving Belle and Frank Crawford. Bostonians had a very long memory for indiscretions, and Sargent’s portrait of her, with that plunging neckline, offered an opportunity to ridicule Belle. The joke went round that “Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner all the way down to Crawford’s Notch,” a snide merging of her supposed lover and the popular New Hampshire mountain resort. When Jack overheard the joke, he was livid. He demanded that the portrait be removed from the exhibition at the St. Botolph Club and never shown publicly again during his lifetime. Belle followed his wishes. When Sargent asked if he could exhibit the painting the following year at the Paris Salon, the Gardners refused.

  Years later, after she built her Fenway Court museum, Belle hung the shocking portrait in a prominent spot in the “Gothic Room”—a space filled with sacred art. The room contains stained-glass windows, choir stalls, an altar panel by Giotto depicting Jesus as an infant being presented at the temple, and a fourteenth-century Italian Madonna and child. Nearby is Belle flaunting her décolletage. The rebel in a room full of saints. A former curator at the Gardner wrote that the Gothic Room, carefully constructed by Belle, “is in some ways the inner sanctum of Fenway Court”—the very heart of her creation; yet the visiting public was not allowed into the room until after she died.

  In reality, the painting was nothing compared with Belle’s own behavior, which grew more and more outrageous over time. She flirted shamelessly, danced with every handsome man in Boston, and attracted a coterie of young men who formed a kind of royal court around her. Belle made good copy. Even Town Topics, a New York society gossip sheet that was the People magazine of its day, followed her antics. In December 1887 it reported:

  “Mrs. Jack,” as she is familiarly called, is easily the brightest, breeziest woman in Boston. Though hardly beautiful in the fleshly sense of the word, she is the idol of the men and the envy of the women. She throws out her lariat and drags after her chariot the brightest men in town, young and old, married and single. She dazzles them by her sparkling wit, her charming coquetry and her no end of polite accomplishments.

  In a later edition the magazine covered a dancing
party at the Gardners’ that was described as “gay, brilliant, magnificent”—just like the hostess. “The beaux were out in full force, of course. Mrs. Jack always attracts all the festive stags, including those who are bored to death with everybody else’s dancing parties.”

  In a town where ostentation of any sort was frowned upon—a deep strain of Puritanism being the ruling ethos—Belle made a point of being noticed. She had a butler at home, and two liveried footmen accompanied her about town. This sort of display was unheard of in Boston. Her carriages were made in Paris and—at her insistence—her horses galloped through the streets at high speed. She made her own rules. After an enormous winter storm, she was determined to visit her friend Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow—a wealthy Boston Brahmin who shared her love of art and her interest in the Far East—despite a huge bank of snow that completely blocked his sidewalk and prevented her from getting to his door. Undeterred, she commanded her coachman to drive her horse-drawn sleigh onto the sidewalk and up to the doorway, thereby blocking pedestrian traffic. Her chutzpah was matched only by her charm. Dr. Bigelow wrote to her in an undated letter:

  My Dear Mrs. Gardner

  I am thinking of having a little medal made for you, as the “Champion All-Round Samaritan.”—As a gloom-dispeller, corpse-reviver, & general chirker-up, you are as unrivalled in the fragrance of your flowers as in the sunshine of your presence. . . . I wish you would stop in again when you have a minute to spare, and exhilarate me some more.—I did not have to take any champagne the last time you came.