Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  191American Consul: Gardner’s Egypt Scrapbook, January 17–18, 1875, and March 4, 1875, Gardner Museum Archives. Discovering that Belle loved to smoke, Pasha Nubar offered to have a servant fetch his hookah for her. Nubar found her irresistible—“enchanté, enchanté, Madame” he kept repeating. In turn, Belle found the politician “charming” and his very grand steam-driven dahabeah “a beauty.” But as for the government’s cruelty, she noted on February 22 that the Ibis gave refuge to another young boy “who fled from the conscription to us at Assouan.”

  191“with the earth more green”: Ibid., December 21, 1874.

  191“I hope they were as innocent”: Ibid., December 26, 1874.

  192“The Desert, the rocks and the air”: Ibid., February 2–8, 1875, and March 8, 1875.

  192“We had truly ‘come abroad and forgot ourselves’ ”: Ibid., December 10, 1874.

  192“Muezzin’s call’ ”: Ibid., January 20, 1875.

  192“the moon rose”: Ibid., February 20, 1875.

  192cataract men: George B. McClellan, “Winter on the Nile. Second Paper,” Scribner’s Monthly 13, no. 4 (February, 1877), 453.

  192“The Shellalee were like the inmates”: Gardner’s Egypt Scrapbook, February 11, [1875], Gardner Museum Archives. At the end of the day, when “the maniacs had left us, the stillness was so great and so sudden that I felt like fainting,” Belle wrote as the Ibis glided gently past Philae, a picturesque island of dark granite covered with ancient ruins that rose out of the Nile.

  192As many as fifty of them: Ibid., March 4, [1875].

  192“universal shrieking”: McClellan, “Winter on the Nile. Second Paper,” 454.

  193jumping “up and down, waving a stick”: Gardner’s Egypt Scrapbook, February 11, [1875], Gardner Museum Archives.

  193The Ibis was shunted . . . German prince: Ibid., February 2–8 and 10, 1875.

  193“such a delicious laziness”: Ibid., February 13, 1875.

  193expeditions into the outback: Ibid., January 28, 1875, and February 2–15, 1875.

  193father of their shellalee pilot: Ibid., March 1–3, 1875. Description of the grieving and subsequent funeral.

  194“I had the top of the mountain”: Ibid., February 23, 1875.

  194telegrams: Ibid., July 16, 1875.

  194“blew his brains out”: Shand-Tucci, Crimson Letter, 39.

  195mourning gowns: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 58.

  195“religious types” . . . “nervous structure”: Howe, John Jay Chapman, 35.

  195“idea of a British nation”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 59–60. Discussion of their upbringing.

  195a summer of touring cathedrals: Ibid., 61–63. Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 49, 51.

  195Charles Eliot Norton: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 93. Rollin Van N. Hadley, ed., The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), xix.

  195“Oh! Oh! Oh! So Overdone!”: Rachel Cohen, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 45.

  196“The two are one”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 173. Alan Chong, Richard Lingner, and Carl Zahn, eds., Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in association with Beacon Press, 2003), 72–73.

  196“he would pose”: Maud Howe Elliott, My Cousin F. Marion Crawford (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 90.

  196“chandeliering”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 74.

  196his first novel . . . In a sudden about-face: Chong and Murai, Journeys East, 15–16. Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 78. Crawford wrote to his mother on March 26, 1882, of “the slandering tongues of petty Boston.”

  196sought out the most unusual . . . White Cloud Mountains: Chong and Murai, Journeys East, 155, 195, 208, 215, 227. After attending the sumo match she wrote to a friend, “I shall go to see the Missionaries . . . to atone.”

  197one of the elephants: Ibid., 246–48.

  197“glitter”: Ibid., 255. Admiring her yellow diamond, the king said he had nothing like it.

  197Struck by the beauty: Ibid., 259, 263–65.

  197“most strange music”: Ibid., 265.

  197Gardners crisscrossed the Indian subcontinent: Ibid., 299, 313, 315, 378.

  198“a glorious effect on the women”: Ibid., 308.

  198“marrying season”: Ibid., 343.

  198“I crept up softly”: Ibid., 286.

  199“literally washed with blood”: Ibid., 306.

  199“Two corpses brought in”: Ibid., 304.

  199“to die in the Ganges” . . . “disengaged funeral pyre”: Ibid., 342, 304.

  199“with Pariahs watching”: Ibid., 304.

  199“perfect traveler”: Thomas Jefferson Coolidge to I. S. Gardner, April 26, 1884, Gardner Museum Archives. Coolidge reported that he’d just visited Alexander Agassiz, a well-known American scientist and mining engineer, who’d recently returned from India. There he had seen Belle, whom he considered the “perfect traveler.”

  199“I destroy your letters”: Ibid.

  199“Goodbye to the country of men with tattooed legs”: Chong and Murai, Journeys East, 294.

  200“I was very low hearted”: Ibid., 378.

  200nephews: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 48. The three nephews were Joseph Peabody Gardner (1861–1886), William Amory Gardner (“Amory” or “WAG”; 1863–1931), and Augustus (“Gus”) Peabody Gardner (1865–1918).

  200“gambolled”: Howe, John Jay Chapman, 40.

  200“anchorite”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 104.

  200“in despair”: Ibid., 105.

  201“Rec’d telegram”: Ibid., 120. Shand-Tucci, Crimson Letter, 108. Joe was brokenhearted over Logan Pearsall Smith and committed suicide. Cohen, Berenson, 280, note 6. The telegram informing the Gardners of Joe’s death came from his reported male lover, Logan Pearsall Smith.

  201“the wittiest man of his epoch”: Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters, 35.

  201met John Singer Sargent: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 120–21.

  201“She looks decomposed”: Ormond and Kilmurray, Early Portraits, 113.

  201“I am writing to Sargent”: Henry James to I. S. Gardner, October 26, 1886, Gardner Museum Archives.

  201“a very great pleasure”: Sargent to I. S. Gardner, [1886], Gardner Museum Archives.

  202She commissioned Sargent: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 204.

  202“Her body” . . . “the jewels of a queen”: Paul Bourget, Outre-Mer Impressions of America (London: Fisher Unwin, 1895), 107–08.

  203“the nimbus of an eastern divinity”: Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent & America (New York: Garland, 1986), 102, 111.

  203“Hindoo cult”: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 204. Quoting The Art Amateur.

  203Belle drove Sargent to distraction: Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 111–12.

  203ninth incarnation: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 104–05. Ormond, Early Portraits, 211.

  203“I disclaim any connection”: Sargent to I. S. Gardner, November 1, 1889, Gardner Museum Archives.

  204“brilliant and suggestive” . . . “nail in the wall”: William H. Rideing, “Boston Letter,” in The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts, vol. 9 (New York: The Critic Company, 1888), 69.

  204Woman: An Enigma: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 204. Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 105.

  204“The newspapers do not disturb me”: Sargent to I. S. Gardner, [undated], 1888, Gardner Museum Archives.

  204“great artistic merit”: Nancy Whipple Grinnell, Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 66.

  204“It looks like hell but it looks just like you”: Ormond and Kilmurray, Early Portraits, 210. Quoting Theodore Robinson diaries, June 24, 1892. Original diary entry says “h..l”.

  204“Crawford’s Notch”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 134.

  205“inner sanctum”: Goldfarb, Gardner Museum, 135
.

  205“Mrs. Jack”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 109. Quoting Town Topics, December 1, 1887.

  205“gay, brilliant, magnificent”: Ibid., 110. Quoting Town Topics, December 22, 1887.

  206liveried footmen: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 52.

  206“I am thinking of having a little medal made”: William Sturgis Bigelow to I. S. Gardner, [n.d.], Gardner Museum Archives.

  206Sandow: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 139–40.

  207John L. Sullivan: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 126.

  207a barely clad prizefighter: Ibid.

  207Grace Minot and other blue bloods: Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, Roman Spring (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 119.

  207boxing match: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 125–26. Shand-Tucci, Art of Scandal, 104–05. Belle rooted for the American boxer, Tim Harrington of Cambridge, who was exceedingly handsome; but afterward she also “took pains to compliment” the loser, Knucksey Doherty of Donegal Square, Belfast.

  207“charmed, scandalized” . . . “unscrupulous flirtations”: Chanler, Roman Spring, 118.

  207“fairly stopped one’s heartbeat”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 197.

  207“conspicuously elegant” . . . preferred a panther: Ibid., 142. Quoting from Town Topics.

  208“to let the world know it was a society lion”: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 161. Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 197–98. Belle walking with lion, albeit an old toothless one.

  208“stood out in vivid contrast”: Chanler, Roman Spring, 119. Daisy Chanler was the half-sister of F. Marion Crawford.

  208rosary beads: Chanler, Roman Spring, 118.

  208Altar Society: Sand-Tucci, Art of Scandal, 32.

  208audience with the Pope: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 184.

  209blood sport in the Gilded Age: Saarinen, The Proud Possessors, 46. A whole corps of artists specialized in creating copies of the masterworks being taken from the Old World so that fading aristocrats could keep up the pretense that they still owned the family treasures, while evading government officials who were trying to stop the wholesale exportation of their cultural heritage.

  209George Proctor: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 159–60.

  209Sargent couldn’t stop working: Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, a Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 1985), 190. “Without a brush in his hand he never seemed wholly at his ease,” an acquaintance, Rose Nichols, said. “He was like a hungry man with a superb digestion, who need not be too particular what he eats,” Sir William Rothstein, a fellow artist wrote. “Sargent’s unappeased appetite for work allowed him to paint everything and anything, anywhere at any time,” 307.

  210“torsal shivers and upheavals”: Town Topics quoted in Ormond and Kilmurray, Portraits of the 1890s, 21, and Fairbrother, Sargent & America, 162. “On stage, the torsal shivers and upheavals indulged in by Carmencita might be allowed to pass for art, but in the privacy of a richly furnished room, with innocent eyes to view her, nothing but the fatal earthiness of the woman’s performances could make any impression.” Her twirling gyrations—which reveal a good deal of leg and petticoat—were captured in 1894 in a short black-and-white film using an Edison motion picture camera.

  210illiterate: “Dancing Carmencita Can’t Read,” New York Times, May 24, 1890. “Carmencita Sues Kiralfy,” New York Times, May 13, 1890, 4. She earns $150/week. Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 142.

  210bracelets: Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 141–42.

  210Sally Fairchild: Ormond and Kilmurray, Portraits of the 1890s, 21.

  210petulant and childish: Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 141. Charteris, John Sargent, 111.

  210El Jaleo: Ormond and Kilmurray, Early Portraits, 195. Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 143.

  211“bewildering superb creature”: Sargent to I. S. Gardner, March 1890, Gardner Museum Archives.

  211His own studio wouldn’t do: Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 144. Sargent wrote to William Merritt Chase, “The gas man tells me he cannot bring more light into the studio than the two little jets that are there. Would you be willing to lend your studio for the purpose and be our host? We would each of us invite some friends and Mrs. Gardner would provide the Carmencita and I the supper and whatever other expenses. ” Sargent later wrote to Belle, “I will ask very few people and must keep extremely dark about it, as hundreds would want to come.” Sargent to I. S. Gardner, [late March], 1890, Gardner Museum Archives.

  212“rude gesture”: Corinna Lindon Smith, Interesting People: Eighty Years with the Great and Near-Great (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 118, and Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 144, recount Sargent’s own recollection that Carmencita threw the flower in Gardner’s face and Joseph Smith picked it up and put it in his buttonhole to deflate the tension. Charteris, John Sargent, 111–12, and Mount, John Singer Sargent, 1957 ed., 146, recount a different version: that the flower was thrown at Sargent, not Gardner, and he put it in his buttonhole.

  212$1.6 million tax-free dollars: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, eds., Eye of the Beholder, x.

  212Harmony in Blue and Silver: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 135. “This is my picture,” she told Whistler, “you’ve told me many times that I can have it . . . and now I’m going to take it.” Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 198–99.

  212surrogate: Carter, Gardner and Fenway Court, 134–35.

  213value of the painting: Ralph Curtis to I. S. Gardner, August 12, [1901?], Gardner Museum Archives. An expert “says your Concert [which cost 29,000 francs] is now worth easily between 150 & 200 thousand! Tell Georgie [her nephew] he can’t make investments like that in State Street!” Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 149. The painting cost 29,000 francs.

  213three-dozen: There is some dispute about the number of surviving Vermeers; perhaps thirty-four or thirty-five can be reliably attributed to him.

  213“utterly impenetrable”: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 149. Quoting Sellars.

  213“How much do you want a Botticelli?” . . . “getting the best terms”: Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 39–40.

  213earl of Ashburnham: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 69.

  214£3200: Cohen, Berenson, 119. Puts the price at £3200 or $16,000.

  214“It would be a pleasure to me”: Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 39.

  214undergraduate at Harvard: Cohen, Berenson, 27, 37, 39. “Harvard was an anxious pinnacle of achievement” for the young Berenson, “bestowing on him a status he coveted while constantly threatening to take it away.”

  214“Berenson has more ambition”: Ibid., 46–48.

  214“I shall be quite picture wise then”: Ibid., 69.

  215Italian art forgers: Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels, eds., Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from Her Letters & Diaries (London: Victor Gollancz, 1983), 82. Cohen, Berenson, 86–88.

  215“ear and toenail”: Cohen, Berenson, 68.

  215pressures from every side: Ibid., 116.

  215his attributions have stood up: Walter Kaiser, “The Passions of Bernard Berenson,” New York Review of Books, November 21, 2013.

  216enormous ego: Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 26. Refers to Gardner’s “cosmic and insatiable” ego.

  216secret arrangements: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, xi–xii. Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 36. Strachey and Samuels, Mary Berenson, 76. “Business complications with Mrs. Gardner—Bernhard was simply awfully worried and felt at times almost suicidal,” Berenson’s wife, Mary, wrote in her diary on June 23, 1898.

  216“He is dishonest”: Richard Norton to I. S. Gardner, September 14, 1898, Gardner Museum Archives.

  217“Law Courts”: Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 177.

  217“They tormented each other”: Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 44.

  217“Serpent of the Charles”: Ibid., 43.

  217“Cable immediately”: Tharp, Mrs. Jack, 176–77.

  217“unsur
passable”: Chong, Lingner, and Zahn, Eye of the Beholder, 63.

  217“I had to put on the praise”: Ibid., 44.

  217“Rembrandt left me cold”: Ibid., 147.

  217together Berenson and Belle: Ibid., xi.

  217Berenson wrestled with his conscience: Bernard Berenson, Sketch for a Self-Portrait (New York: Pantheon, 1949), 38. “I cannot rid myself of the insistent inner voice that keeps whispering and at times hissing, ‘You should not have . . . let yourself become that equivocal thing, an “expert.” You should have developed and clarified your notions about the enjoyment of the work of art.’ ” He continued, “I soon discovered that I ranked with fortune-tellers, chiromancists, astrologers and not even with the self-deluded of these, but rather with the deliberate charalatans,” 43.

  218Villa I Tatti: Cohen, Berenson, 98, 138.

  218“magnificent Persian rug”: Sargent to I. S. Gardner, [n.d.], 1894, Gardner Museum Archives.

  218J. P. Morgans: Smith to I. S. Gardner, March 23, 1903, Gardner Museum Archives. Joseph Lindon Smith called J. P. Morgan “that king of indiscriminate buyers.”

  218“Please grab”: Hadley, Letters of Berenson and Gardner, 101.

  218“Don’t mention it to a soul”: Richard Norton to I. S. Gardner, June 19, 1898, Gardner Museum Archives. “Six months hence it will be impossible to get her. It is possible now but it must be done quickly & silently. . . . Telegraph at once as every day counts—merely say ‘Go ahead.’ ”

  219“Don’t gasp. It is true”: Ibid., September 1, 1889, Gardner Museum Archives.

  219“Yes relief”: Ibid., October 25, 1898, Gardner Museum Archives.

  219“Patrizzi” . . . “Drapery”: Ibid., November 8, 1899, Gardner Museum Archives.

  219“Ditch”: Ibid., December 30, 1898, Gardner Museum Archives.

  219“When therefore, this lovely thing”: Smith to I. S. Gardner, November 30, 1902, Gardner Museum Archives.

  219ever-resourceful Smith: Smith to I. S. Gardner, November 4, 1904, Gardner Museum Archives. Plaster and paint would “prevent our greedy Government from extracting much in the way [of] duty. . . . You and I and he alone know this—so ‘burn this letter.’ ”

  219“household effects”: Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 53.

  219“constant persecution”: I. S. Gardner to “A” [A. Piatt Andrew], January 9, 1908 from Fenway Court, Gardner Museum Archives.