Sargent's Women
Page 28
Two glass bottles sit atop an elegant eighteenth-century Venetian chest of drawers on one side of the room. One is filled with sand collected near the Great Pyramid at Giza, the other with sand collected near the Sphinx. Belle had scooped up the sand in 1875 and kept it for the rest of her life—a keepsake of her first encounter with the ancient world, when she literally lay upon the sand in her attempt to fathom the mysteries of the Sphinx.
To paint Belle, Sargent decided to use watercolor. Its insubstantial, ethereal quality perfectly captures the ebbing away of one of the greatest spirits of the Gilded Age. Shrouded in white cloth, she sits on a couch propped up with cushions; her pale, expressionless face seems to be disappearing into the cloth, about ready to vanish. Swathed and hooded, she appears like some sort of Egyptian mummy or priestess. There is an air of otherworldliness, as she faces her final days. The artist’s valedictory to his friend and patron depicts a frail, gentle soul with her body scarcely in sight.
Sargent created the watercolor in a day, as if without effort. In contrast, Belle’s earlier, brash, flesh-revealing portrait—which was all about her body—required many, many sittings. The opening salvo between the artist and his patron had been a battle, but Sargent’s final watercolor of Belle was a work of peace, a heartfelt tribute to the woman he’d grown to love and admire. The artist gave her the watercolor and signed it: “To my friend Mrs. Gardner / John S. Sargent.” She placed it in the Macknight Room atop a bookcase so she could see it easily from her couch. It remains there, not far from the cabinet with the Egyptian sand. It seems an apt pairing—the beginning of time, and the end of Belle’s life as she dissolves in watercolor. The alpha and the omega.
That was the last portrait ever made of Belle. She died on July 17, 1924. Among her final, detailed instructions: that Sargent serve as one of her honorary pallbearers. But that turned out to be impossible. Sargent had boarded a ship for England three days before her death. “Carry my coffin high,” she directed her pallbearers, as if she might strike them down if they failed to do so. Even in death, the queenly Isabella was issuing commands.
EPILOGUE
The Curtain Closes
When Sargent reached London he received news of Belle’s death and a full account of her funeral from a friend who had attended the service. The artist regretted that he had not been able “to pay her a last tribute of respect and affection” in person; but, in fact, he had done that with his final depiction of Belle.
Sargent had tried his best to free himself from portraits—or, “paughtraits,” in his sarcastic spelling. “Ask me to paint your gates, your fences, your barns, which I should gladly do, but NOT THE HUMAN FACE,” he wrote to Lady Radnor when she tried to commission him to paint one of her daughters. He’d had enough. He preferred landscapes, watercolors, and the murals he was completing for the Museum of Fine Arts, a commission he received after he’d finished his work at the Boston Public Library. The upper class still clamored for Sargent’s formal portraits, but by the 1920s, modernist critics derided his work as “empty bravura passages of just paint.”
Laying portraiture aside, Sargent regarded his murals, which he created in England and sent in pieces to Boston, as his most lasting and important work. After he finished the final panels and reliefs for the Museum of Fine Arts, he wrote detailed instructions for their installation, and then supervised as they were crated and shipped. “Now the American things are done,” he told a fellow artist, “and so, I suppose, I may die when I like.”
Sargent arranged for a stateroom aboard the RMS Baltic ocean liner for a trip to America, so that he could watch as his work was permanently placed in the museum. The ship was to depart on Saturday, April 18, 1925, and his sister Emily arranged a small farewell party at her home on Tuesday of that week. The guests included some of his dearest friends, including the artist Peter Harrison. (The surviving accounts don’t mention whether Harrison was accompanied by his mistress, Dos Palmer.) It was a jolly evening and Sargent decided to walk back to his Tite Street home. But it began to rain and one of the guests, passing him in a cab, had the driver pull over. His friend insisted that Sargent climb in, and the artist did so reluctantly. At his doorstep, Sargent turned and called out, “Au revoir; in six months.”
Before going to bed, Sargent remembered he’d neglected to inform a gallery owner in New York about a painting that he’d shipped earlier in the month. A stickler for business details, the artist sat at the dining room table, wrote the letter, and went outside and posted it. Back in the house he pulled a volume of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique off his bookcase to read in bed. The next morning, when there was no answer at his bedroom door, the maid entered and found him dead of a heart attack. There he lay, his glasses pushed atop his head, the book lying open next to him.
By the morning of April 15, word had spread of Sargent’s death. At midday the trustee of the National Gallery, Sir Philip Sassoon, arrived at Sargent’s Tite Street home with a mourning wreath to honor the sixty-nine-year-old artist. Tributes poured in, and the London Times claimed Sargent as one of the country’s own: “End of an Epoch in English Art” the headline read, despite Sargent’s insistence that he was an American artist. He was buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Above his name, the gravestone reads “LABORE EST ORARE” (“TO WORK IS TO PRAY”).
ILLUSTRATIONS
John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Elsie Palmer at
Ightham Mote in Kent, England, 1889–1890.
(Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center)
The interior courtyard at Ightham Mote.
(Photograph by the author)
Peter Harrison lounges in a chair at
Glen Eyrie near Colorado Springs.
(Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum)
Dos Palmer poses for artist Peter Harrison in
a studio he set up at Glen Eyrie.
(Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum)
Queen Palmer, her daughter Elsie, and their dog Kelpie in the cobblestone courtyard at Ightham Mote during a visit by John Singer Sargent in 1889.
(@National Trust/Ightham Mote)
John Singer Sargent’s Lady with a Blue Veil (Sally Fairchild),
Nahant, Massachusetts, 1890.
(Private collection)
Lucia Fairchild Fuller (upper right) clutches a black cat; her husband, Harry Fuller, stands beside her; her mother-in-law, Agnes Higginson Fuller, sits beneath the couple, holding their baby Clara; and Harry’s sister, Violet Fuller, is at bottom right. This 1895 photograph was taken at the Fuller family farm in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
(Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts)
Sally Fairchild poses with her dog.
(Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial
Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts)
Illusions by Henry “Harry” Brown Fuller,
created before 1901. Harry’s wife, Lucia, and his daughter, Clara, posed for this painting. Mount Ascutney is visible in the background.
(Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Elizabeth Chanler by John Singer Sargent, 1893.
(Smithsonian American Art Museum)
John Jay Chapman as a young man, seated on his grandfather’s porch in Katonah, New York.
(Rokeby Collection)
Elizabeth Chanler in Taormina, Sicily, 1891.
(Rokeby Collection)
The exterior of Rokeby, the Chanler mansion in the Hudson Valley, circa 1888.
(Rokeby Collection)
Isabella Stewart Gardner by
John Singer Sargent, 1888.
(Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum, Boston)
Mrs. Gardner in White, a watercolor by John Singer Sargent, 1922.
(Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sometimes it takes a village to write a book, and in this case it took many villages, many experts, scholars, and friends. Author and friend Caroline Preston firs
t suggested the idea for Sargent’s Women, which set in motion years of research and writing.
Among those I am most indebted to is J. Winthrop “Wint” Aldrich, grandnephew of Elizabeth Chanler Chapman, who supplied me with family anecdotes, photographs, and access to the rich collection of private papers at Rokeby, the ancestral Astor/Chanler estate in the Hudson Valley. My friend Jane Stewart Humiston, owner of Castle Hill outside Charlottesville, Virginia, generously shared with me a soulful portrait of Elizabeth Chanler that was part of the original collections at the estate. (She also shared much wine and laughter.) I am extremely grateful to Vic King, local historian from the Isle of Wight, who gave me a tour of Bonchurch and brought me to the stone house, once a private school, where Elizabeth spent her formative years. Thanks also to playwright and actor John Goodwin and his wife, Linda, who live near the former school and helped track down local periodicals for me.
Chris Rollins, the current owner of Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s house, graciously gave me transcriptions he had made of some of her correspondence. Lucia Miller also made key transcriptions of Lucia’s diaries. Michael A. Varet and Elizabeth R. Varet kindly invited me to their home and provided me with critical insights on the Fairchild family. Nancy Norwalk, associate director of the Philip Read Memorial Library in Plainfield, New Hampshire, not only offered expert archival assistance on Lucia and the Cornish Colony, but also unlocked the local town hall so that I could see Maxfield Parrish’s magnificent theatrical backdrop. Henry J. Duffy, curator of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, showed me Lucia’s drawings, photographs, and other material that was crucial in establishing Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s role in the Cornish Colony. Art expert James Godfrey and Lisa Cavanaugh, managing director, Midwest Regional Office, at Christie’s, helped me locate Sally Fairchild’s portrait. And Stanley Ellis Cushing, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Boston Athenaeum, ferreted out the uncatalogued scrapbook devoted to John Sargent that includes photos of the artist on the beach in Nahant with the Fairchild family.
While in England following Sargent’s footsteps, I was graciously hosted in both London and in the Cotswolds (in the village of Upper Slaughter, a name right out of an English detective story) by my friends James Morrison and Lee Marshall. To them, my sincere thanks. The proprietors of the Lygon Arms—the hotel in Broadway, England, where the Fairchilds stayed one summer—kindly allowed me to wander freely through the property. Elsie Palmer’s story brought me to Ightham Mote in Kent, where Philip Stott provided me with a fine history of the American family’s stay in that medieval manor house. Tamsin Leigh, visitor experience manager at the mansion, was also very helpful.
In Colorado Springs, Leah Davis Witherow, the curator of history and archivist for the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, shared her deep knowledge of the Palmer family as well as transcripts of correspondence. Witherow organized the extensive collection of Palmer manuscript material that was donated to the museum in recent years, and she and I spent many hours discussing the dynamics of that interesting family, and of Elsie in particular. Stephanie Prochaska, assistant archivist, supplied me with copies of hundreds of documents. Jessy Randall, curator and archivist at Colorado College Special Collections, was also exceedingly knowledgeable and helpful, as were Joy Armstrong, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Center Colorado Springs, and Michael Howell, its registrar and collections manager.
Shana McKenna, archivist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, provided transcripts of Isabella’s Egypt scrapbook and served as an expert guide to the voluminous papers kept by that remarkable woman. Thanks also to Lisa Carole Long Feldmann and Elizabeth Reluga from the Gardner Museum.
Biography could not be done without archivists and librarians, the heroes of the trade, who know where all the papers—and secrets—are buried. My gratitude to the larger staffs of the organizations listed above, as well as those at the following other repositories: Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the New-York Historical Society; the Nahant Historical Society; Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts. And a special thanks to Maureen Wiencek, who assisted me in researching the John Jay Chapman Papers at Houghton.
The work of previous scholars must also be acknowledged: Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond’s magnificent multivolume catalogue raisonné of Sargent’s paintings; Trevor Fairbrother’s scholarship; and early Sargent biographies, including ones by Evan Charteris, Charles Merrill Mount, and Stanley Olson. Biographies of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Louise Hall Tharp and Douglass Shand-Tucci were indispensable, as were books by Lately Thomas on the Chanler family and Celeste Black’s work on Queen Palmer.
Amy Cherry, my editor, was a delight to work with and improved the manuscript in every way. Her assistant, Remy Cawley, was both wonderfully efficient and good-natured. I must praise everyone who had a hand in the production at Norton—especially Ellen Cipriano, the designer; Julia Druskin, the production manager; Nancy Palmquist, the project manager; Nina Hnatov, the copy editor; and Jenny Carrow, who created the splendid cover. And, as always, I am indebted to my devoted agent and friend, Howard Morhaim, and his assistant Kim-Mei Kirtland.
On a personal note I’d like to express my appreciation to Adam Goodheart, Hodson-Trust director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, and his assistant, Jenifer Emley, who provided office space for me in the early stages of the research. Jeremiah Lucey and Rick Rosan served as hospitable hosts in New York; Judy Vail remained a beacon of encouragement; Ed and Ginger Barber offered invaluable advice; Sarah Sargent, Andrew Wyndham, and Roger Hirschland supplied important contacts; Mary Cassell and Dick Minturn provided assistance at the book’s inception; and Jason Moran and Anne Hoof have promised to guide me through the terrifying (to me) waters of social media. Early readers included Jennifer Ackerman, Alana Woerpel, Mac Griswold, and Cathy Cochran, whose grand uncle owned Glen Eyrie, the Palmer family’s Colorado home. (Though he purchased the landlocked mansion in Colorado, he was “the mad Ludwig of yacht building,” according to Cathy.)
My thanks to the entire staff of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities—and in particular, Robert Vaughan, Kevin McFadden, Matthew Gibson, and Gail Shirley-Warren—who made it possible for me to take a leave of absence to finish the book. To my devoted friends (you know who you are) and family—especially the two Henrys—my love and gratitude.
NOTES
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
ix“His quarry”: Evan Charteris, John Sargent (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 46.
INTRODUCTION
xiii“Portrait painting”: Lucia Miller, “John Singer Sargent in the Diaries of Lucia Fairchild 1890 and 1891,” Archives of American Art Journal 26, no. 4 (1986), 7.
xivDuring his lifetime Sargent created: Accessed October 12, 2016, http://www.johnsingersargent.org/the-complete-works.html.
xviElsie Palmer penned: E. M. P., Two Stories (Glen Eyrie, 1883).
xviiDistraught after losing a child: Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1986), 1.
xviiShe also harbored artistic dreams: Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography (London: Cresset Press, 1957), 11–12. (There are two editions of this book, one published in 1955, and another in 1957. The text varies, so hereafter the notes will include the date of the edition.)
xviiHis first memory: Ibid., 4.
xviiHe’d later say: Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1955), 190.
xviiYoung Sargent and his family: Olson, John Singer Sargent, 3–4, 6–7. Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 4, 6–7.
xviiiBusiness in England: Sargent charges three times his usual fee, Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 104. Stanford White’s influence, Richard Ormond and
Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 196.
xviiiOn the wall: Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 72, 78, 158.
xix“Baby”: Ormond and Kilmurray, Early Portraits, 98, Description of the portrait hanging in Sargent’s dining room, 100.
xix“not a marrying man”: Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 181. In describing Sargent, Mount writes, “He was a large and strong man, with, if one knew him at all, enough indications of virility not to be taken for an example of the intellectualized homosexuality notable among the artists of London. Surely he could not say . . . that he was ‘not a marrying man.’ ”
xix“frenzied bugger”: Elizabeth Anne McCauley et al., Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004), 115. For a discussion of Sargent’s relationship with Charlotte Louise Burkhardt as a possible love interest, see Olson, John Singer Sargent, 87–90. For more recent scholarship on Sargent’s sexual leanings and his collection of nude male portraits, see Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 18–19, 154–55, and the “Album of Figure Studies” following 180.