Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  Italian-born Teoboldi Travi, known simply as “Bolgi,” supervised the transportation of the objects—from the warehouse, to the long holding sheds built near the mansion, and then into the museum. He earned Belle’s trust, although if a column accidentally broke in transit due to a workman’s carelessness, Bolgi would stealthily cover up for the man, claiming that the column had arrived in that condition. (If not for Bolgi, a number of men would have been fired.) The Italian was not only diplomatic but he was also musical. He played the cornet, which Belle put to great use. As the construction proceeded, Bolgi accompanied her during the day, summoning the workers with his instrument. If she wanted the head mason, he’d give one blast of the cornet; two blasts brought the head pipe fitter; three, the head plumber; four, the master carpenter; five, the head plasterer; six, the top painter. Bolgi remained a devoted majordomo to Belle for the rest of her life. A 1904 photograph taken in the North Cloister shows the mustachioed Bolgi in a floor-length double-breasted overcoat, a cocked hat, and what looks like a scepter.

  Belle was totally devoted to her museum. “I am building a new house on the Fenway,” she wrote in 1901 to Frances Glessner, who lived in a magnificent Romanesque mansion in Chicago. “I made the plans myself and it has been and is a great pleasure and interest.” But, she admitted, it required all of her days, and even some nights “to insure being on the spot early enough to guard against anything going wrong.” Like one of the workmen, she carried her lunch pail every day, ate on-site, and contributed a dime to the fund that added oatmeal to the drinking water. (Exactly why oatmeal was needed is a mystery, though one Gardner biographer speculates it might have helped settle any mud in the drinking water.) Somehow Belle and the construction workers managed to coexist and the building was completed.

  Though newspapers throughout the country speculated about the museum as it rose above the Fens, Belle swore everyone involved in the construction to secrecy. In late 1901 she moved into her fourth-floor quarters—much of it fashioned after her old home at 152 Beacon Street—and then spent an entire year overseeing the installation of the collection, arranging and rearranging it to her specifications, and buying bits and pieces to fill in the gaps. Last-minute purchases included eight Old Masters. The unveiling ceremonies were to include a concert by fifty members of the Boston Symphony. Belle needed to check the acoustics in the museum’s Music Room in advance of opening night, but she didn’t want anyone to actually see the place beforehand. Her solution? She invited the children from the Perkins Institution for the Blind to attend a private concert. It was a snowy day and the children arrived wearing galoshes. Each child placed his or her overshoes in a designated spot, but an overzealous servant, concerned about the clutter, moved all the rubbers into a big pile, creating chaos when none of the children could locate their galoshes afterward. The acoustics, however, passed muster.

  All was in readiness. The curtain was about to rise on Belle’s creation.

  The opening gala was on New Year’s night, 1903. Belle instructed her guests to arrive at nine in the evening—“Punctually,” according to the engraved invitation. Physically set apart from the rest of Boston like its own duchy, the museum was ruled by Isabella, its undisputed queen. Even the name of her creation, Fenway Court, has a suitably royal ring to it. Belle welcomed her opening-night guests from a landing at the top of a curving stairway. She was a regal presence in black, slathered with jewels: a ruby, pearls (149 of them), and two enormous diamonds named “Rajah” and “Light of India,” which she wore atop her head on gold spiral wires so that they’d bob and sparkle as she talked.

  It was a frigid, clear night and there was a bottleneck at the entrance where Bolgi, attired in green velvet with gold trim, ushered in the guests, two by two so that everyone could ascend the staircase to greet Isabella personally. A long line of carriages waited outside, and the guests—bundled in sealskin and sable furs, top hats, and long white gloves—awaited their turn to pay homage to the woman who many had so loved to sneer at. There was no sneering that night, just sheer envy. And awe.

  The guests were seated. Live, glorious music by the Boston Symphony and singing by members of the Boston Cecilia society—a Bach chorale, the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, works by Schubert—encircled the guests. The critic for the Boston Transcript was enraptured: “Listening to music in such a hall, you feel as if you were inside of some musical instrument, indeed, such a hall is a musical instrument in itself.” The concert ended at 10:15 and a mirrored doorway on one side of the Music Room was opened dramatically. Guests got their first glimpse of the courtyard: Venice in full bloom. Japanese lanterns and candlelight illuminated the brilliant array of flowers, ancient statuary, and water fountains. There was a stunned silence and then a growing buzz of approval. William James, the world-renowned psychologist from Harvard, later wrote to Belle, “The aesthetic perfection of all things . . . seemed to have a peculiar effect on the company, making them quiet and docile and self-forgetful and kind, as if they had become children.” It was, he wrote, “Quite in the line of a Gospel miracle!”

  Fenway Court became a vibrant art center. A series of concerts and experimental performances took place there. Ruth St. Denis, a pioneer of modern dance, performed “The Cobra, or Snake Charmer,” as well as “Radha, a Hindoo Temple Dance,” works inspired by eastern philosophies—and guaranteed to raise the hackles of most sensible Bostonians. Sargent informally played the piano for an assemblage of professional musicians one night. On another evening, guests ushered into the darkened courtyard were mesmerized by the sound of Gregorian chants descending from on high. Charles Martin Loeffler, a favorite composer of Belle’s (she lent him her priceless Stradivarius violin and eventually gave it to him), rescored his orchestral work Pagan Poem to take advantage of the unusual acoustics and geometry of the palace. The audience was seated in the Music Room as pianists onstage began the performance; suddenly trumpet blasts from windows high above the courtyard enveloped the room and joined the piano music. The result was an exhilarating performance piece, music coming from every direction.

  Belle invited Sargent to stay and work at Fenway Court during his planned painting tour in the States in the winter and spring of 1903. Sargent wrote back that early on he’d have to stay at a hotel near the Boston Public Library where he’d be working “in my shirt-sleeves on scaffoldings” installing his most recent wall decorations, but that after that, “I would enjoy staying with you among the beautiful things whose fame has reached me.”

  Sargent’s feelings toward Belle had softened considerably in the years since their initial skirmishing over the creation of her portrait. During Belle’s frequent visits to London, he had invited her to his studio and to dinner. They had corresponded and shared many interests: “Venice misses you—” he ended one letter. Sargent had become a willing co-conspirator in her quest for art. He had bought Paul César Helleu’s painting of the interior of the Abbey Church of St. Denis for her, and had recommended works by the Impressionists Claude Monet and Édouard Manet. Together they had schemed to convince the architects of the Boston Public Library to reconfigure the library plans to accommodate the “Peacock Room” created by Whistler. (They failed in that endeavor when the industrialist Charles Freer purchased the room.)

  In January 1903, Belle, along with a few other trusted friends and artists, was invited to a private viewing of Sargent’s decorations then being installed at the library. Before Sargent could take up Belle’s invitation to stay at Fenway Court, he had other pressing business: a trip to Washington, D.C., to paint President Theodore Roosevelt (who found it difficult to remain still), and to Philadelphia, where the artist received an honorary degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Sargent then returned to Boston and, preceded by tons of baggage, he took up residence that spring at Fenway Court—in the Macknight Room, Belle’s private first-floor sanctum. Belle allowed him to paint in the Gothic Room, a space off-limits to the public during her lifetime. With his scandalous portrait of Bel
le looking over his shoulder from a corner in the room, the artist set up his easel and canvas and began to work. As Belle—and occasionally, her luncheon guests—looked on, Sargent produced an enormous painting of Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood Warren) and her young daughter Rachel. The canvas is nearly the size of the artist. A series of photographs taken during the sitting shows Sargent in midcreation, palette in hand, applying finishing touches to the background, chewing on his paintbrush. Light comes into the room through fifteenth-century German and Flemish stained glass windows; an older Spanish window in the shape of a wheel, without glass and open to the elements, is covered with a dark cloth, presumably to block out too much direct light.

  After his productive interlude as artist-in-residence at Belle’s museum, Sargent typed a note of thanks to his hostess, saying that his thoughts, happily, “have taken permanent abode at Fenway Court.” After his return to London, Belle sent him three dogwood trees—a species not native to England that he must have admired while in Boston. Sargent understood that it would be nothing short of miraculous if the dogwoods produced flowers in London; nonetheless, he was optimistic. He wrote to her of his plan to plant two of the trees in his garden and one in a pot. The potted tree might even appear in one of his paintings. And if the trees refused to flower in her honor? Well, then he’d paste paper flowers onto the branches. Belle remained devoted to Sargent’s talent—and to their friendship—and she continued to purchase his latest watercolors.

  The museum issued two hundred tickets and on February 23, 1903, the general public was allowed inside the palazzo for the first time. Everyone was welcome—art connoisseurs to streetcar conductors—at one dollar per ticket. Belle delightedly milled about with the curiosity seekers, expounding on the beauties of the art she had collected to anyone who was interested. But in short order some of her small treasures, which were not protected by glass cases, began to vanish. One day she spotted a woman across the room carefully examining a tapestry. Thrilled that someone else shared her enthusiasm for this art form, Belle approached the visitor only to discover that the visitor had a pair of scissors in her hand and was about to cut off a corner of it. Belle continued to open her house to the public, but with increasing dread. She watched as inquisitive museum visitors poked and prodded at her collections until the proprietress would shout “Don’t touch” in “a voice like a parrot,” according to one observer. Pronouncing that the visitors “saw with . . . [their] fingers,” Belle deputized some of her young friends to help patrol the museum and prevent the “patting” of her precious objects.

  Praise for her museum came from every corner. “You are a creator and stand alone,” Henry Adams wrote to her. “As long as such a work can be done I will not despair of our age, though I do not think anyone else could have done it.” “You are simply improbable!” William Sturgis Bigelow chimed in. The New York art dealer Henry Duveen expressed his deep admiration for the “magnificent” art and also his shock “that a lady should have made such a collection.” Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine and one of New York’s premier tastemakers, secured tickets for himself, his wife, and the impressionist artist Cecilia Beaux. “Tis surely the greatest fun this side of the ocean,” he wrote after visiting the museum. “It wipes out the ocean, in fact. We three pilgrims were . . . knocked flat.” The esteemed New York critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer pronounced herself “dazed” by Fenway Court and expressed surprise that Belle could “sleep at night for the pride & joy of thinking about it.” Ethnographer Charles Fletcher Lummis, a leading figure in the Western art scene, wrote from Los Angeles that Fenway Court was “the only palace I ever saw that is Home.” And as for those people who don’t care about the notion of home? Lummis declared that if he were tsar, he’d have them “boiled.”

  Frank Crawford penned a long note from a castle in Kent to his beloved Belle, to say that her “Palazzo di Venezia” made him feel transported to Italy. He was struck by “the sobriety of taste that distinguishes your work from that of some professionals. . . . Nothing really noble can be anything but sober—and perhaps a little melancholy. . . . Your place is grave and calm. . . . It is so altogether yours, the form of your thought, that you and it are one—like light and air.”

  Gretchen Osgood Warren, who’d been painted by Sargent in the museum, wrote Belle that Fenway Court “is not ‘a collection but a unity’. . . . It is alive & an organic wonderful whole—with uniqueness which is the mark of every great living thing.” Evenings in the courtyard, she said, were especially powerful, “full of shadows tall & spired like cypresses” and full of “voices & echoes” from the past. In an addendum on the same letter, Gretchen’s mother wrote, “I nearly wept over the beauty I saw yesterday—it is not like crude America—America owes you everything.”

  The rich and famous begged for an invitation to visit Belle’s palace: actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt and Ethel Barrymore (“I am . . . breathless—for the intense joy you were good enough to let me experience. I didn’t imagine that I should ever see so much beauty”); an English duchess and a marchioness; a knighted explorer who’d led an expedition to Tibet; the governor of Jerusalem; and Elsie de Wolfe, the reigning high priestess of interior decorating.

  Even Brahmins, who never accepted Belle as one of their own (though they dared not ignore her), had to admit that her creation was sublime. In his autobiography, George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher and man of letters, wrote that when Belle “became a widow and built her Venetian palace in The Fenway, as Egyptian monarchs built their tombs and went to live in them, she became an acknowledged public benefactor. Criticism was hushed: and there was something moving in beholding this old lady, whose pleasure it had been to shock, devoting herself . . . [to] her museum, to be left to the town . . . that had long looked at her askance, and that she was now endowing with all her treasures.” Finally, stodgy old Boston acknowledged Belle’s brilliance and her generosity. Her victory seemed complete.

  Belle continued to add to her collection and recast her museum to accommodate new treasures. Spanish, Islamic, and Chinese art became an obsession. In 1914 she reconfigured the entire east wing of the museum. As part of the renovations she created a Spanish cloister to feature an enormous painting that she didn’t even own. It was Sargent’s masterful El Jaleo (meaning “The Ruckus”), which depicts a gypsy dancer moving across the floor of a taverna in Spain, one hand holding up her skirt, the other hand extended, snapping her fingers to the music; behind the dancer, in partial shadow, guitarists and other gypsy women rhythmically clap and sway to the performance. It is an enormous, cinematic work. Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, a relation to Belle by marriage, purchased the painting in 1882, and for decades she had badgered him to sell it to her. He refused. After the cloister was completed, Belle borrowed the work from Coolidge and invited him over to view it in its new setting. A Moorish arch frames the entire painting. Lit dramatically from below, the canvas comes alive. It appears as if a real performance is taking place on a stage set. Coolidge was bowled over by the effect. “If you really think it looks so much better here,” Belle said slyly, “would it be right for you to take it away?” He gave her the painting. A few years later, Sargent, equally thrilled with Belle’s installation of El Jaleo, presented Belle with an album of twenty-one sketches he had made in preparation for the painting.

  But after that major reconfiguration, Belle’s collecting slowed considerably. She feared that she wouldn’t leave enough money behind to fund the museum in perpetuity. Her fabled tales of excess were now replaced with legends of her parsimony (though Belle did purchase an ambulance—named Y in her honor—for the Red Cross in France during World War I). She now instructed Bolgi to purchase only two oranges at a time; luncheon guests were served only toast with a few asparagus stalks. Bernard Berenson claimed that once when he and his wife stayed at Fenway Court there was so little food at dinner that by the middle of the night they were famished, and crept to the kitchen in search of a snack. They found o
nly two dog biscuits.

  During the Christmas cycle of festivities in 1919, Belle attended a dinner where Sargent was also a guest. After going to bed that night she suffered an embolism that left her paralyzed on the right side and she put out the story that she had the flu. Even Sargent, bearing a bouquet of violets—Belle’s favorite—was not permitted to see her. The artist and his sister Emily, who was then in Boston with him, were finally invited to visit on February 24. She was badly diminished, but at nearly seventy-nine, she tried to make light of her condition as she was carried about on a Venetian gondola chair. She insisted that it was arthritis that had left her lame. Soon, of course, all of Boston knew her sorry state.

  A series of strokes over the next several years left her without the use of her hands. She gave away her jewels to friends and relatives—even her beloved dancing diamonds, “Rajah” and the “Light of India,” were of no use to her anymore. She directed her maid to conceal her lifeless hands and her withered body with yards of fabric. A veil, always white, covered her head and shoulders. Sargent visited Belle in September 1922. She looked like a vision of repose and calm—“a fleecy cloud from Heaven” enveloping her head, her face free of wrinkles, ageless. Sargent had long since grown to detest portraiture—to him, it had become a tiresome exercise in flattering his clients. But now he had a request. There’s only one woman in Boston I want to paint, he told her: You. “There isn’t a woman on earth who would refuse to let you paint her portrait,” she told him.

  On September 14, 1922, Sargent painted eighty-two-year-old Belle in the Macknight Room, her private first-floor sitting room, and the room where he had stayed. Named after Dodge Macknight, a New England watercolorist favored by Belle, the room is modest, the least ostentatious one in Belle’s magnificent palace. (Today, it is not open to the public if there aren’t enough guards on duty.) But late in life, Belle would sit in that room among her most personal treasures: a seemingly haphazard collection of objects, drawings, and artifacts that meant something to her. There were gifts from friends and assorted oddities she had collected—a bronze knocker in the shape of a dolphin, a crystal box emblazoned with a Y, an Aeolian harp designed to be played by the wind, sixteenth-century leather strips flanking the windows, and seven plaster studies for Sargent’s massive wall decorations at the Boston Public Library.