Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  Belle loved sports of all kinds, including spectator sports not generally favored by women. She went to see the world-famous Sandow, the so-called perfect man who could balance three horses atop a plank that rested on his chest. It was not enough for Belle to watch such a feat. She insisted on feeling his muscles. Belle’s love of prizefighters was well-known. When her carriage was stopped one day by an angry crowd of strikers in South Boston, she leaned out the window to find out what the trouble was. John L. Sullivan, the reigning American heavyweight boxing champion known as “The Boston Strong Boy,” was in the crowd and recognized Belle. Stepping forward, he told her not to be afraid, and he shepherded her carriage out from the mayhem.

  Belle shared her passion for strong men with prim Boston society. One afternoon she entertained some women friends while a barely clad prizefighter posed behind a translucent screen. As legend has it, the women demanded that the fighter come out from behind the screen and flex his muscles for them. (Because of such escapades, Grace Minot and other blue bloods were forbidden to attend Belle’s parties.) On another occasion, Belle orchestrated a boxing match for women spectators only. The bout took place in an artist’s studio. The women cheered lustily when either fighter landed a solid punch. The bout went seventeen ferocious rounds, replete with knockdowns and blood. The losing fighter, an Irishman from Belfast, broke his hand.

  Boston found itself alternately “charmed, scandalized and greatly preoccupied” with Belle. And why not? Her “unscrupulous flirtations” were the talk of the town, as was her outlandish manner of dressing. One night she “fairly stopped one’s heartbeat” when she arrived at a costume party tightly wrapped in layers of gold-embroidered gauze that she had purchased in Egypt. Town Topics reported that on another gala evening she “was conspicuously elegant . . . in a Renaissance costume cut extremely décolleté back and front.” The pink dress, accessorized with her most lavish diamonds and pearls, had a long train that was carried by an African attendant. To add a further touch of theatricality to her entrance (as well as a distressing bit of racism) she made the black servant dress in a sarong. A white poodle completed the entourage—though she would have preferred a panther.

  The more exotic and wild the animal, the better, as far as Belle was concerned. She frequented the zoo in Boston, and in November 1896 she persuaded the zookeeper to let her take a pair of six-week-old lion cubs in her carriage—doubtless, for all of Boston to see—so that she could play with them for the afternoon at her house. She preferred one cub to the other, and tied a red ribbon around the neck of her favorite. The zookeeper, who clearly loved the publicity, left the ribbon on “to let the world know it was a society lion.” On another occasion, pandemonium broke out among visitors to the zoo when Belle strolled down the main hallway, holding a full-grown lion by its mane. (It was an old, toothless lion according to one cynical reporter.)

  A contemporary wrote that Belle “stood out in vivid contrast to the people among whom she lived, and seemed to belong to another age and clime, where passions burned brighter, pleasures were more sumptuous, and repentances more dramatic than in sober Beacon Street.” Passion, pleasure, repentance. Belle specialized in those subjects.

  Her piety was as flamboyant—and as public—as her extravagances. She wore black on Ash Wednesday in an act of penance, a pair of rosary beads hanging from her waist. She and two women from the Altar Society—dressed in tight-fitting blue dresses that Belle had designed, along with veils and Franciscan scandals—washed the altar and steps of the Church of the Advent with palm fronds during a Maundy Thursday service. These ancient rites touched a deep religious chord within her. Belle loved the power and mystery of ritual, the scent of incense. To the horror of the Boston elite, she had a private audience with the Pope (during which he admired her pearls) and, at her request, he allowed her to attend Mass in his private chapel. She was deeply moved by the experience, and rumors spread that she had converted to Catholicism, a practically unthinkable violation in her circle.

  Belle’s antics and the colorful stories about her—some apocryphal, others not—tend to diminish her importance as one of the greatest art collectors and museum builders in America. She’s dismissed as a lightweight dilettante, not taken as seriously as the other millionaires (almost all of them male, with their own foibles) with whom she competed in the art market. Collecting art and antiquities was a blood sport in the Gilded Age, part stealth, part thievery—and she often got the best of her much wealthier competitors. Robber barons were looting Europe and Asia with abandon—literally dismantling crumbling villas whose owners could no longer afford them; buying at bargain prices masterworks from churches and temples; making off with Renaissance paintings from mansion walls.

  Belle pursued paintings, antiquities, manuscripts, rare illustrated books, religious relics, textiles, tapestries, furniture, ceramics, glassware, and all manner of other curiosities with an unparalleled flair and passion. She wasn’t doing it for investment purposes (though her collection turned out to be an investment bonanza), but for love. She adored art and artists, and she collected Old Masters as avidly as she encouraged contemporary painters like Sargent and Anders Zorn, and promising young musicians like eighteen-year-old George Proctor, whom she sent to Vienna and supported for years. Handsome and appealing as he was, Proctor had neither the ambition nor the capacity for the hard work necessary to reach the heights that Belle expected of him.

  In contrast to the rather indolent Proctor, Sargent couldn’t stop working and seemed constitutionally unable to turn down a commission. Because he had to support his family, part of his ambition may have been fueled by the need for money and the freelancer’s eternal fear that assignments might evaporate at any moment. Even more, at bottom, he was a workaholic, content only when wielding a brush.

  Sargent had a passion for the theater and theatrical characters (perhaps part of his attraction to Belle). As a respite from his commissioned portraits of stuffy dowagers and countesses, Sargent sought out actresses and dancers as subjects. While in New York in 1890, Sargent became obsessed with a temperamental Spanish dancer named Carmencita, who was then performing before delirious crowds at Koster and Bial’s music hall on 23rd Street. The theater was packed every night to watch her “torsal shivers and upheavals,” as Town Topics described her movements.

  Sargent saw Carmencita perform at the music hall and at a private party, where she danced sensuously until nearly 3 a.m. The artist accompanied her home that night and asked if he could paint her. She was twenty-two, illiterate, and spoke broken English; but she had a perfect grasp of money and her own worth. Thus, she was making a small fortune during her stay in the city. She earned $150 per week (about $4,000 in today’s currency) for her evening and matinee performances, and raked in additional cash by giving dance lessons in the mornings to the daughters of some of the richest families in town. Indefatigable, she moonlighted after the curtain fell and performed at private parties.

  The dancer agreed to sit for Sargent at his studio, but it came at a cost. The entire process required an ongoing seduction by jewelry. The artist first bought her several hundred dollars worth of bracelets. Her demands escalated and Sargent later admitted that it cost upwards of three thousand dollars to pay for her pearl necklaces and other extravagances. Sally Fairchild recounted that at one of the parties where Carmencita performed, some of the delighted women guests threw their own jewels at her feet. The dancer happily scooped them up, and Sargent had to buy them back from her.

  During her portrait sittings, Carmencita was petulant and childish—bored and sulking one moment, angry the next. If the mood struck her, she’d walk away while he was in midcomposition. To catch her attention Sargent painted his nose red. When all else failed, he ate his cigar, which pleased her to no end. Sargent painted by daylight, so his work time was limited. He was juggling a number of other portraits simultaneously—paying portraits commissioned by New York plutocrats. The Carmencita portrait was costing him time and money. He felt h
e needed to sell the painting to recoup his investment.

  Belle came immediately to mind. She greatly admired another Spanish-inspired work of his, the hypertheatrical El Jaleo that he’d painted in 1882. That massive canvas portrayed a flamenco dancer in midperformance. Owned by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, the painting had been exhibited at St. Botolph’s Club in 1888 along with Belle’s portrait—and for years thereafter, Belle had pestered Coolidge about buying El Jaleo. Sargent felt sure another Spanish dancer would appeal to Belle. “You must come to the studio on Tuesday at any time and see the figure I am doing of the bewildering superb creature,” he wrote to Belle from New York in March of 1890. To heighten her interest in the painting, he wanted Belle to see Carmencita in real life—to witness her wonderfully untamed spirit, which would surely appeal to her.

  Sargent set up the arrangements. His own studio wouldn’t do, as it didn’t have enough light. His artist friend William Merritt Chase agreed to provide his 10th Street studio. Belle insisted on paying for Carmencita’s fee ($120 for her and two guitarists) as well as dinner from Delmonico’s. Sargent was doubtless relieved at not having to cover the cost of dinner, as he’d been thinking more along the line of sandwiches rather than a feast from a fancy restaurant.

  The setting for the party was perfect: a high-ceiled studio, dimly lit to accentuate the stage, with paintings along the walls, potted ferns, fans, porcelain, and other bric-a-brac artfully placed around the room. But the evening was nearly a disaster. The guests were high-society figures from Boston and New York, two different breeds, most of whom had never met before. The rather stiff atmosphere was not aided by the arrival of the star. She appeared around midnight with her hair a frazzled mess and her face over-made-up with powder and cosmetics. She didn’t look a thing like her portrait. Sargent tried to straighten her hair with a wet brush and to rub off her makeup. Carmencita was enraged. She had to be calmed down and talked into performing. Lit dramatically from below, Carmencita strutted across the stage, casting dark shadows on the walls, and glaring angrily. Sargent, sitting on the floor, cringed as the tempestuous dancer took it out on Belle, the person he was most trying to impress. Carmencita plucked a flower from her hair, threw it in Belle’s face and made “a rude gesture.” A gentleman nearby graciously picked up the flower, pretended it was meant for him, put it in his buttonhole, and profusely thanked the dancer. The crisis was defused. The mercurial dancer’s mood changed and she proceeded to perform with graceful, sinuous movements. But Belle failed to bite; she passed on the painting.

  In 1891, Belle’s father died and left her $1.6 million tax-free dollars. She wanted to spend it on art, and her husband, Jack, eager to keep her happy—and probably away from mischief—agreed. She went on a spree, buying, among other things, Venetian antiques, a fifteenth-century painting of a naked Adam and Eve certain to make Bostonians cringe, and the unconventionally beautiful, nearly abstract Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville by her friend James MacNeill Whistler. Belle more or less wrested the canvas from him. According to one story, Belle grew so impatient over Whistler’s reluctance to part with the painting—even though he’d already agreed to sell it to her—that she brought a friend with her to Whistler’s studio and had him pluck it off the wall. As her friend carried the canvas down the steep stairs to their waiting carriage, Belle blocked Whistler, who was following and protesting all the while. He claimed the painting wasn’t even finished; it lacked his signature butterfly. Come to lunch at my hotel then, and sign it there, Belle told him.

  The same year Belle scored an even greater coup. Without benefit of any art experts whispering advice in her ear, she zeroed in on a painting at a Paris auction. The Concert, an enigmatic masterpiece by Johannes Vermeer painted about 1665, depicts two women at a piano—one woman playing, the other singing—with a man seated between them, his back to the viewer. Not wanting to arouse suspicion that she had an interest in the painting, Belle used a surrogate to bid on her behalf. She sat in the room with a handkerchief to her face the entire time—her signal to keep bidding. Both the Louvre and the National Gallery were pursuing the painting as well, but gave up in the middle of the auction when they thought they were competing against each other. They were shocked to discover that an outsider had managed to best them. Within a decade, the value of the painting had risen exponentially.

  The painting’s worth today is incalculable, but alas, its whereabouts is unknown. The Concert was one of thirteen works of art—among them masterpieces by Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, and Édouard Manet—stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The frames for the paintings sit empty at the museum, a haunting reminder of their loss. Curators at the museum note that the theft of the Vermeer was the cruelest blow of all. Only about three-dozen paintings can be attributed to Vermeer, making this canvas perhaps the most valuable stolen art object in the world. Theater and opera director Peter Sellars describes the Vermeer painting, now vanished, as “utterly impenetrable. I think of the characters in the painting as prisoners in some mysterious world. And now I think of the stolen painting itself as a prisoner in some vault.”

  “How much do you want a Botticelli?” the brash twenty-nine-year-old art connoisseur Bernhard Berenson wrote to Belle in August 1894. He was in London trying to jumpstart a career in the art business, which involved keeping his ear to the ground for rumors of fortunes in decline that would benefit from infusions of American cash. The fifth earl of Ashburnham was in just such a fix, and he happened to have one of the great works by the Florentine master Sandro Botticelli: The Tragedy of Lucretia, painted about 1500. “I understand that, although the noble lord is not keen about selling it, a handsome offer would not insult him,” Berenson wrote in a conspiratorial tone. “I should think it would have to be about £3000. If you cared about it, I could, I dare say, help you in getting the best terms.” As it turned out, Belle—who was then soaking in spa waters in Germany—wanted the Botticelli very badly and was willing to pay more than she ever had for a work of art. In December of that year, she bought the work for £3200, about $16,000 at that time—and more than twice the cost of the Vermeer. It was the first Botticelli to come to America.

  This purchase was a watershed moment. It marked the beginning of Belle’s collaboration with Berenson. This partnership would make his career and her museum. Berenson offered his professional expertise to Belle for financial gain, but it was also a way to pay tribute to her for her past generosity. After all, Berenson probably wouldn’t even be in London in 1894 if not for her. “It would be a pleasure to me,” he wrote when he first approached her about the Botticelli, “to repay you for your kindness on an occasion when I needed help.”

  Belle had met Berenson when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and still known as “Bernhard.” (He dropped the Germanic h in his first name during World War I.) Belle probably crossed paths with him through their mutual teacher, Professor Norton. A poor Jewish Lithuanian émigré, Berenson was a rare breed in the Brahmin precincts of Harvard, though he tried his best to fit in. His Jewishness was one strike against him (perhaps one reason he converted to Episcopalianism during his second year at Harvard), and his family’s lowly status was another. Bernhard’s father was a tin peddler—he scavenged scrap metal and went door-to-door selling tin goods that he carried in a backpack.

  During his senior year Berenson asked Professor Norton to recommend him for a traveling fellowship abroad. Norton refused, later telling a colleague, “Berenson has more ambition than ability.” Instead it was Belle who helped launch the fledgling aesthete, when she and several others privately funded Berenson’s postgraduate studies in Europe and England. In 1889, Berenson wrote to Belle that when he returned home, “I shall be quite picture wise then,” and might even be able “to turn an honest penny.”

  Berenson developed into the era’s greatest connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art, able to assess the value of a painting and correctly identify who painted it. This was no small matter given the legions of skillful Itali
an art forgers and the fact that most Renaissance paintings were unsigned. To complicate matters, many artworks were executed by a school of artists in service to a master rather than by a single painter. Berenson had a prodigious memory and would examine the tiniest details of a painting and compare them with other works. He would also look for evidence of retouching and other changes made to a painting over the centuries. This method of minute examination was a new mode of connoisseurship. Art attribution up until that time relied on more subjective criteria, such as the overall effect and quality of a work. Professor Norton preferred that old-fashioned method and dismissively characterized the new, quasi-scientific approach adopted by Berenson and others as the “ear and toenail” school of connoisseurship.

  There was a great deal of money to be made in the authentication business in the late nineteenth century. American millionaires were stockpiling art and needed professionals like Berenson to help them ferret out masterworks and certify them as real. His stamp of authenticity added tremendous value to the work. In the hypercompetitive art world, judging a painting or an artifact sometimes led down the slippery slope of shilling for something that might not be altogether as splendid as advertised—or worse yet, might not be the real thing at all. Prices were rising at such a preposterous rate that unethical art dealing was common. There were pressures from every side—the down-on-his-luck owner frantic to liquidate his family’s Old World treasures; the art dealer, a super salesman eager to empty his warehouse and top the prices of his last sale; and the collector, equally anxious to be convinced that she has just acquired the most important work in Christendom. Caught in the middle of all of this was the art connoisseur, whose commission depended on the size of the deal.

  Berenson’s success in the art world was based entirely on his reputation, so he was certainly not in the business of willfully misidentifying work. In fact, his attributions have stood up remarkably well over the decades. But he was also willing to invent details about how he came upon a painting, to occasionally press Belle to buy second-rate pictures, and, at all times, to flatter her enormous ego. When he and Belle first began their dealings in 1894, Berenson was still very much a neophyte in the marketplace. Sensing an opportunity to work with her on a large scale, he covertly allied himself with the Colnaghi art dealers in London. Berenson would regale Belle with a romantic tale of how he had discovered a particular masterpiece in a threadbare mansion, when, in fact, the painting was already owned by the Colnaghi firm, and the price already substantially marked up. Berenson took a 5 percent commission from Belle that was quite modest. He failed to mention, however, that he was also getting a hefty commission from Colnaghi. In one instance he had a financial investment of his own in a piece of artwork, which Belle knew nothing about, but which, naturally, factored into the inflated price.