An Artist in her Own Right

by Ann Marti Friedman

  I was pleased when Charlotte invited me to attend one of her sister’s Thursday studio afternoons. I felt a mounting sense of excitement all week and could hardly eat lunch that day. I was rather intimidated at the thought of meeting Madame Benoist, whose portrait of Empress Marie-Louise had been shown at the last Salon. A smart manservant answered my timid tap on the door of the Benoist residence. He led me to the top floor of the house and stopped before a door behind which I could hear women’s voices. “Entrez, Madame!” he said with another bow. “I regret I cannot take you in, but men are not allowed.” Startled, I hesitated. “Entrez, entrez,” he urged, almost smiling. I plucked up my courage and walked in.

  A burst of light, color, warmth and fragrance flooded my senses. Even now, almost thirty years later, I can close my eyes and inhale the deep, rich rose perfume exuded in the dead of winter by bowls of potpourri, candles scented with attar of roses, and the perfume worn by Madame Benoist herself. Draped everywhere were fabrics and shawls in rose colors – reds, oranges, yellows, and pinks, with here and there the deep green of stems and leaves. Turbans and great ostrich plumes were scattered among them. Candles flickered on tables and shelves. A corner stove gave off welcome heat, and a teakettle boiled gently upon it. An old-fashioned Turkish-style divan stood against one wall with several chairs in front of it; a round table in their midst bore a plate of cakes and several cups and saucers – whose floral pattern I was sure would prove to be rosebuds. Wide-eyed, I took it all in. Easels were there, and a model’s stand, sketches for her best-known paintings, plaster casts of ancient sculptures, colors, sketchbooks, and chalks, all the things with which a studio needed to be furnished, and the smell of turpentine could be detected even under the scent of roses. But the setting was intensely feminine, affirming that womanhood and serious art were not mutually exclusive. This was a far cry from the “virtuous” Spartan simplicity of the bare wooden surfaces of Taunay’s and David’s studios. I drank it in with a quickening sense of delight. I smiled. I threw back my head and laughed, opening my arms to embrace it. The four women at the end of the room, who had been smiling at my childlike wonder, joined me in laughter. Encouraged, I swept up a vast shawl of embroidered, fringed silk and wrapped myself in it, executing a pirouette. In this I was joined by the others, and we spun round the room like dancing couples seen from a balcony, drawn by an invisible centrifuge, until we all ran out of breath and stood laughing. Madame Benoist cast aside her orange silk and came to welcome me with a warm kiss, saying to her sister, “You have brought us une femme d’esprit!”

  A woman of spirit: I considered the words, savored them. I would not have said that they described the Madame Gros I had become. But they suited very well the youthful Augustine I once had been. “Yes,” I replied, “a woman of spirit!”

  The others nodded in approval. Charlotte introduced me formally to Madame Benoist – or Marie, as I was instructed to call her, and to Marie’s youngest daughter, also named Augustine, a girl of twelve who seemed older than her years, as if she spent all her time in adult company. The fourth guest was Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont, who liked to be called Josée. She and I were the same age and she was to become my closest friend. Josée had curling red hair and freckles that defied all her attempts to fade them with beauty creams. She had never married. No man would put up with her independent nature, she said. With no family money or state patronage to rely upon, she nonetheless earned her living as an artist, specializing in classical landscapes. My mother and mother-in-law would have sighed in despair at this folly, but Marie and Charlotte were looking at her with admiration, so that I felt free to do so too. We were all part of the sisterhood of femmes d’esprit.

  So vivid is my memory of that afternoon that I can hear again the rattle of the teakettle lid, drops hissing on the stove, Marie’s laugh as she lifted it and poured the water into the waiting teapots. Eagerly we took our seats. Josée, to my fascination, sat back in the Turkish divan, stretched her legs out and kicked off her shoes, with an air of being at home with such informal comforts. She saw my look of astonishment and beckoned to me to sit beside her. I hesitated only a moment, then joined her, removing my shoes as she had done and wriggling my toes to emphasize their freedom. Charlotte handed me a cup of rose-scented tea and I inhaled deeply its perfume. Young Augustine – whose scent, I recall, was tea rose – handed round the cakes. I half expected to find they too were rose-scented, but they were ordinary cream-filled cakes, bland and slightly sweet. Their sensuous delight, I discovered, came from licking the cream in the manner of children who know how to get at the essence of a treat. The others were doing the same – the cakes had been chosen to bring about that response, both sensual and childlike, behavior I had never seen encouraged before – quite the opposite, in fact. Marie winked at me and said, “Here we create our own rules.”

  Talk turned, as it always did, to painting: what canvases Marie and Josée were working on, what commissions they had in hand, what ideas they had for works to undertake without one. Charlotte, relieved of the responsibility of supporting the family now that Larrey had been paid in full, spoke of portraits of friends. I told them about my latest arrangement of pots, pans, and dead fish. Talk then turned to the Salon. There would be not be one that year, but they were already looking forward to the Salon of 1814.

  “And you, Augustine – what are you planning for the Salon?”

  I was startled. “I have no plans at all. I’m not ready yet.”

  “Nor will you be,” admonished Josée, who had shown at the Salon of 1812, “until you strive to, and then present yourself as an artist before the jury. They won’t take you seriously until you take yourself seriously.” She was no longer lounging at her ease but sitting upright, turning to speak intently in my direction, looking me in the eye. Instinctively my spine stiffened and I, too, sat up, unwilling to be caught at a disadvantage. For a moment I knew the thrill a soldier must feel when his general gives his speech in the bivouac the night before a battle. “Well?” she prompted.

  A dozen reasons rose to my mind. I had no proper studio and little money of my own to spend on supplies. My mother-in-law would not be pleased that I aspired to the Olympian realm she felt belonged more properly to her son. My own mother would tell me I should give up girlhood dreams now I was married. And Antoine? Could I count on my husband’s support? I didn’t know – I had never before put it to the test. But I knew that Josée would consider them mere excuses, not reasons.

  “Well?” she prompted again.

  I drew in a big breath and took the plunge. “A still life,” I said, pointing to an arrangement of pink and orange shells and grey-green leafy corals on one of the studio tables. “I will submit a still life to the Salon.” I sounded more certain than I felt, but I had made a pledge I could not go back on. At least, unlike yesterday’s herrings, the shells did not balefully reproach me with glassy eyes.

  “Brava!” Josée said in approval. The others applauded.

  “We will help you to be ready,” Marie said. Charlotte, who had shown at the Salons de la Jeunesse in her youth, nodded. Augustine looked puzzled at the fuss – sending paintings to the Salon was something she’d seen her mother do all her life.

  “I wonder what Antoine would––” I started to say, but a commotion from the others cut me short.

  “We don’t mention our husbands here,” Marie explained, “by the rules of the house. The next time you do so, you shall pay the fine, one franc.” I must have looked puzzled, for she continued: “This studio is a space where women exist in their own right.”

  “So that was why the butler could not show me in.” I gave a hoot of unladylike laughter at the thought of that haughty personage being barred from even knocking on the studio door.

  “Why, Augustine, you’re a merry one!” Charlotte exclaimed. Merry? Me? This made me laugh all the harder, and the others joined in.

  A little clock chimed the hour in silvery tones. Abruptly, Marie stood up and began to clear
away the cups and plates. “It’s time to work, mes filles. We have much to do.” We picked up our pads and pencils and each chose a corner of the studio to sketch. I settled down to begin my acquaintance with the seashells.

  So began the best eighteen months of my life.

  The persona of Merry Augustine allowed me to bring out and develop a side of me I had never known before. I had been, in turn, the dutiful daughter, the serious painting student and aspiring artist, the newly grown-up young woman anxious to impress a handsome soldier, the grieving woman old beyond her years who had lost her sweetheart and her father in rapid succession, and the young wife out of place in a middle-aged household. Not until now was I encouraged to be a happy, laughing young woman. I reveled in it. I shook my hair loose, walked with a dance in my step, raised my voice, argued with gusto, laughed belly laughs, and expressed my opinions with vehemence. This carried over into my art – I painted more freely, applied colors more daringly, took risks.

  I was not sick once in the whole of that time. I glowed with health. When I met up with old friends, they asked if I were pregnant. More than one wondered if I had taken a lover. Once I caught Maman Madeleine giving me a speculative look, as if she, too, wondered. I laughed out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of the idea and kissed her warmly on both cheeks, startling and pleasing her.

  It was the courage gained at the studio that gave me the ability to speak out so strongly to Antoine over Charles Legrand’s portrait that year – and to put into our lovemaking afterward a degree of enthusiasm I had not hitherto shown. It helped to break our marriage out of its routine of grave courtesy into something approaching passion, to the gratification of us both.

  Because talk of husbands was prohibited in the studio, I could not speak of this with my new friends, but I found myself speculating, sometimes, if it was the same for them. I giggled like a schoolgirl at the thought of their faces, were I to mention it, adding to the merriness of my demeanor. Josée said it was as if I were bubbling over with a joke inside.

  We met every week except when Marie was at her country house in September and October. In those months I went to Josée’s studio at 13 rue de Condé. Not as ornate as Marie’s, it still exuded feminine warmth. We drew and painted side by side and came to be fast friends. I admired the skill with which she painted her atmospheric but finely detailed classical settings. She turned her fierce dispassionate critical eye most often upon herself; to me, she always tempered her criticism with encouragement. We all – Josée, Marie, and I – reworked our subjects several times over that year, before we were satisfied.

  At first, I set the shells and corals in front of a neutral background – the colors were true, the forms beautiful, the details faithful (and quite a time I had mastering that lacy coral leaf!) – but the whole was lackluster in effect. My spirits sank, looking at it. Could I do no better than this? Fortunately Marie, correctly interpreting the sag of my shoulders, came to stand beside me. She did not waste time in recrimination but regarded the composition as a problem to be solved, a challenge to rise to. She stood back, assessing it with a shrewd, narrow-eyed glance. “Set them against a black background,” she suggested. “It will make your colors appear much more vibrant.” I am glad I took her advice.

  The studio was our refuge but we could not entirely ignore the growing unease in the city outside. The ban on mentioning husbands was lifted as Charlotte gave reports of Larrey’s movements with the Old Guard and Marie of Monsieur Benoist’s activities in the government. It became apparent as 1813 progressed into the dire winter of early 1814 that he among others were quietly negotiating with the Bourbons for their return and working to be assured of retaining or improving their positions in the government when this happened. Our talks helped us prepare for the changes ahead, while our work – drawing, sketching, painting – helped us to hold fast to our core selves through the upheaval around us. To our relief, the new government announced that the Salon of 1814 would take place as planned.

  Our talks grew more uninhibited as we grew bolder. I did not realize how much so until the day Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun joined us for one of her rare visits. The doyenne of women painters in France, she had known Gros since he was a boy. Charlotte, Marie, Josée and I proposed to paint heroic topics that should be shown but would not – army wives bringing up their children on their own; women gathered around the dispatches in the newspaper; women scanning the lists of the dead. Josée suggested a scene in a mercer’s shop, where a woman at one end of the counter would be buying a length of dull black cloth for mourning clothes while a soldier at the other end considered gold braid for his uniform. Charlotte proposed a variant on Marguerite Gérard’s sensation of the last Salon, The Letter, in which a young woman read a letter with bad news while seated in a comfortable upper-class interior, with a solicitous maid attending to her faint. Charlotte suggested instead a scene in which the notice of death would come to a woman in poverty with little food to feed the children. Charlotte knew military widows like these: hearing of her husband’s death was often the last straw for a woman who had been barely hanging on waiting for his return. As little as she herself had, Charlotte had tried to help them.

  I thought of Lucie’s sister hearing of the death of her husband. What if I were to paint that not on the small scale deemed appropriate for a domestic subject but life-size, like David’s Hector and Andromache – the story of another military wife whose husband has been killed and whose son is bereft?

  Or on a larger scale still – what if I were to paint, as the pendant to one of Antoine’s five-meter-long battle scenes, a scene of the effects of victory at home? I put the question to the others in an excited voice. They laughed and applauded. “Brava!” Charlotte said, and poured another round of champagne into our glasses.

  “But who would give you a commission for it?” Vigée-Lebrun asked, bringing our flights of fancy to earth in her practical way. “Could you afford a thousand francs for the canvas and paint without one? And,” with a significant glance around the room, “where would you have the studio space for it? Works that size need to be hung on the wall of a palace or a museum. Who––?”

  “The King of England.”

  “The Czar of Russia.”

  “Francis II of Austria.”

  “King Bernadotte of Sweden.”

  “King Ferdinand of Spain.”

  We all laughed. Working for those patrons seemed as far-fetched as the painting itself.

  Vigée-Lebrun who thirty years before had been portraitist to Marie-Antoinette and her circle, smiled and turned her gaze upon young Augustine Benoist. “Perhaps in her time, but I fear not in this one.”

  Despite Vigée-Lebrun’s misgivings, I began to think about the subject I had proposed. How could I distill the scene to the telling details that would have the most impact? I thought, yet again, of the dying doctor in Jaffa and that figure’s ability to bring forth a powerful emotional response in the viewer. It was a daunting task. There were so few modern precedents for monumental scenes of domestic tragedy. The melodramas of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, so daring a half-century before, now seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. David’s wives, mothers and sisters of Greek and Roman heroes had been frank in the suffering caused by the loss of their menfolk, but their tears were shown to disadvantage compared to the stoicism of the men. Try as I might, I could not imagine my modern-dress scene as a monumental canvas. Its subject demanded handling on a more intimate scale, even if the problem was a national one repeated over and over. A woman’s weeping, except for the women of myth and history, simply was not heroic.

  But why should it be so? I had lived with the conventions of the hierarchy of subject matter all my life, in which classical history and Biblical subjects were the most highly regarded, domestic subjects much less so, and the still life on which I was working, at the bottom; but it was not until now that I had thought to question them.

  The grief of women is not ennobling – it is merely a fact of life. It does not spur a man o
n to heroic action; it reminds him he is mortal and that by following one loyalty he will betray another.

  Unwilling to admit defeat, Napoleon fought on. Larrey patched up the wounded as best he could. Paris continued to deny publicly that disaster was imminent, but to prepare for it privately.

  The strain took its toll on our marriage. Our closeness did not last. It took all Antoine’s energies to stave off acknowledging the inevitable. Even while the litany of defeats continued to grow, he daily climbed the two hundred steps to the Dome of the Pantheon to place his hero among the great monarchs of France. He had no energy and even less sympathy to spare for a wife who accepted reality, and still less did he want to listen to her advice. Antoine and I were never again to achieve that measure of intimacy and mutual appreciation that had been too brief an interlude in our marriage. More and more we judged each other by the shortcomings of what we were not instead of by the strengths of what we were.

  Tired of his rejection, I continued to find solace in the friendships in the studio and to throw my energies into my painting. I rearranged and repainted Marie’s shells and corals several times before I was satisfied. While I welcomed and adopted her advice to give my painting a black background, finding the right sort of deep, matte black for just the right effect presented a challenge in itself. Lampblack, made from soot, was the easiest to obtain and gave the best effect when wet but was too greasy and failed to dry properly, making the whole of the canvas a soggy mess; next I tried ivory black. It worked so long as I did not attempt to paint over it in lighter colors, to which it lent a crackled texture at odds with the smooth surface of the shells. More than once, I cursed my pigments under my breath. At last I was able to juxtapose the colors as I wanted. The painting was as good as I could make it. Even Antoine gave it a nod of approval, and Maman Madeleine paid it the ultimate compliment when she found nothing in it to criticize. She gave me renewed hope that it would pass muster with the Salon jury, of which Taunay was a member. I wanted him to be proud of me.