An Artist in her Own Right

by Ann Marti Friedman

  “I can’t take Maman into my home,” I told her. “Not with Maman Madeleine in charge of the household.” Pauline gave me a surprised look. “Oh yes,” I told her, “I’m Antoine’s wife, but it’s never really been my house. Antoine’s always been happy with the way his mother manages things and never wants me to change them. Every change I’ve tried to make in eleven years has been countermanded by one or the other of them. When I married him, I didn’t realize just how much I’d be marrying her as well.” I took a large gulp of the wine and said, “I sometimes wonder just why he married. Because he wanted a wife? Or because he thought his mother needed an assistant to make sure all the work was done to her dictates?”

  “Augustine! Surely he loves you?”

  “As best he can, after his mother and his Emperor and the late Empress and his best friend Girodet and…”

  “Tine! Surely he’s not one of those!”

  “In bed, no. Emotionally, yes, like the rest of Monsieur David’s students. Thank God that dreadful man has been banished to Brussels!”

  “Oh, Tine, I never guessed.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing I want to admit even to myself, much less to a sister whose marriage has been so happy.” Tears of self-pity welled up, but I refused to give in. “Enough. I did not meet with you to talk about my problems, but to see how I could help with yours. If I cannot bring Maman to my house, as things are, how can I help you?”

  I helped by visiting Maman four or five afternoons a week. Often Pauline took this opportunity to go out or to give time to her children, and Maman and I were left on our own. When she was in a good mood, she would talk about her childhood and youth and the days when my father came courting. It was then that she told me about the night the Bastille fell. I heard tales of my grandparents that I had not heard in years. Her face would be animated and I would catch a glimpse of the girl she had been.

  Antoine sometimes came with me. He painted a portrait of her asleep in her armchair. It was highly gratifying for Maman to be painted by an artist of such eminence even if she could not see it. Painting her brought out a different side of him, the portraitist flattering the client, jovial and easy to get along with. It was a role he found easier than son-in-law.

  As her condition progressed, however, black days of self-pity became more frequent. Her loss of sight was her principal complaint; she lamented the loss of colors, of seeing what went on around her. She complained about how difficult it had become for her to do the simplest things – drink a bowl of soup, dress and undress, or use her chamber pot. Her sense of isolation grew so intense that she complained of being abandoned even when Pauline, Jacques and I were present. Assured of our presence, she would ask why her friends Sophie and Beatrix had deserted her. When we gently reminded her that they had died some months before, she envied them. She alternated between wishing she, too, were dead and accusing us of longing to be rid of her. It became harder and harder to reassure her, not to mention ourselves, that we loved her and wanted her still with us. She countered our assertions by saying that she knew she was a burden in our lives, and it would be better if she were out of it. It was chiefly for my sister’s sake I persevered.

  I paid dearly for the privilege of this familial duty – with my painting. The friendships I had formed in Marie’s studio slipped away as I was drawn into the world of my sister’s household. Once, when I missed a visit to Maman to see Josée, my mother’s laments drove me nearly mad. She no longer rejoiced I was an artist but resented it and tried to make me feel guilty for being able to see. My sharp reply annoyed Pauline: now she would have Maman’s complaints about me to deal with on top of everything else.

  I tried to be content with “keeping my hand in,” by sketching in the Tuileries gardens on my trips to and from my sister’s home, but it was painful not to have anything to send to the Salon in 1822. That was the year of Delacroix’s first great success, Dante’s Boat. He had chosen a scene from the Divine Comedy: the boatman Phlegyas taking Dante and his guide Virgil across the River Styx, while the souls of the damned attempt to climb on board and one bites the stern of the boat in frustration. The conception was unlike anything else at the Salon. He had clearly benefited from his study of classical sculpture as well as of Géricault’s heroic nudes. I could not find any trace of Antoine in it. Antoine, however, admired his use of color, particularly the tiny rainbows he had inserted into the drops of water seemingly flecked onto the canvas. I was boiling over with envy for Delacroix’s accomplishment.

  Antoine moved away to look at other works, but while I continued to examine the painting, Delacroix came to stand to one side of it to collect congratulations. I introduced myself to him a second time, reminding him of the first time we had met, also in front of a painting of a boat. His face clouded. Théo was very ill, he told me quietly, tubercular disease compounded by a series of riding accidents. He had not sent anything to the Salon but had embarked upon a remarkable series of portraits of the insane.

  I was no longer in love with Géricault – that passion had burnt itself out – but I regretted deeply that so great a talent should be short-lived. I knew what pain Delacroix must be feeling at the prospect of losing his friend. I extended my hand, intending to put it lightly on his arm, but he grasped it firmly in both of his for a moment.

  When I had recovered my composure, I left the Salon Carré to go in search of the smaller works amongst which mine used to hang, but that felt even worse. There were a fair number of women artists among them, other women who no doubt had domestic obligations of their own but who managed to make time to paint and draw and submit their work. I was jealous of them, angry at myself, my sister, my mother, my husband, my mother-in-law, and my brother, who had been of so little help with our mother, using his studio as his excuse and his refuge. I had to leave before resentment choked me. I marched resolutely home, snatched up my sketchpad and pencils, and headed out again to the Jardin du Luxembourg. As the walk calmed my emotions, my thoughts turned from resenting others to planning what I would draw. I sat down at the Medici fountain but it failed to have its usual calming effect. I opened my sketchpad and, inspired by Delacroix, started to draw demons of the kind biting Dante’s boat, internal ones – Envy, Disappointment, Despair – external ones – Maman, Henri, Pauline – giving vent to an interior landscape as I had never done before. I filled sheet after sheet, working in a trance. I came out of it only when the garden attendant approached me at dusk before locking the gate. My hands were almost black from the pencil. I washed them in the fountain and dried them on my petticoat. At home, they would be wondering what had happened to me, but I could not return yet, feeling as I did. I found a restaurant in the area of the Panthéon and sent a note that I was eating out. Gradually, as I worked my way through the courses of the meal, I regained my calm.

  When I looked at the drawings I had done, I was amazed and dismayed. They were tangible proofs of the darkness that had been seething inside me, now brought out into the open. Of course their execution was not as skilled as Delacroix’s – he was and is something exceptional – but they had life and power. Girodet might appreciate them, I thought, as his work so often hovered on the edge of the acceptable. Did I even dare to show them to anyone? They were so personal and not the sort of thing painted by a woman. Women drew subjects celebrating domesticity; my drawings vilified my family. Could I afford the alienation they would cause? Women are supposed to be the nurturers and supporters. Would anyone outside the family circle find these drawings any more acceptable? Or would I find myself labeled a madwoman, like those sad lost souls painted by Géricault? I shivered.

  What do you do when you have discovered the truth about yourself and know it to be unpalatable? I shut the sketchpad quickly – I didn’t have an answer for that, and I was too exhausted to think just then. I paid my bill and left.

  It had grown dark and the moon had risen, illuminating the Panthéon. The majestic bulk of Soufflot’s dome made me catch my breath at the beauty and dra
ma of the scene. Yet I knew what labor and anxiety the interior of that dome had cost Antoine over the past decade, and it was not finished yet. As if in response to my thought, the moon hid behind a cloud. I laughed ruefully and hailed a passing fiacre to take me back to the rue des Saints-Pères.

  When I got there, I found a note from Antoine: he was dining out with friends he had met at the Salon. He would not have noticed my upset state or my absence at dinner, nor wondered what caused it. He had been celebrating with other artists but had not invited me to join them. I was furious all over again and cut short Maman Madeleine’s lamentations at being left alone all day. I retired fuming to our bedroom.

  Antoine was surprised at finding me awake when he returned at midnight. “You waited up for me? That’s sweet,” he said absently. “It was a wonderful evening.” He went on to tell me about it, his voice slightly slurred with drink, punctuating the narrative with huge yawns. Girodet was there, of course, Gérard, Isabey with his son, Horace Vernet, Géricault and young Delacroix. They drank a toast to the Emperor’s memory (Bonaparte had died the previous year and it was safe to do so without being reported to the police) and went on to dinner at Le Grand Véfour in the Palais Royal. The wine continued to flow and the rabbit stew, made from game bagged that morning, practically leapt from the plate to the palate. He had been undressing all the while, folding his clothes neatly as was his habit, and now he slipped his nightshirt over his head and gave a last contented sigh in memory of a day well done. He still had not asked about me. He would be blissfully asleep in five minutes unless I spoke up now.

  “I know one artist who wasn’t there,” I began mildly enough.

  “Who?” He yawned, not much caring what the answer was.

  “Your wife.”

  His attention sharpened. “I looked for you when we left the Salon, but you had gone.”

  “Your note didn’t invite me to join you later, either.”

  “None of the others invited their wives.”

  “None of the other wives are painters. I don’t care about not being invited as a wife. But I am an artist.”

  “You’ve hardly painted at all since your mother fell ill, and you didn’t send anything to the Salon this year.”

  “Is that the true measure, the Salon? Is one not really an artist otherwise?”

  “Well, yes, but an amateur.” Too late, he realized the danger of this pronouncement; he looked horrified at what he had let slip out.

  “Even if there are good reasons for her not to paint, such as taking care of her mother?”

  “But it’s in a woman’s nature to make sacrifices to take care of others. Look at Charlotte.”

  “And you men count on it, don’t you?” I could not keep the sneer out of my voice. His using Charlotte as an example stung. All that talent and training gone to waste in supporting a husband who, however much he was a master surgeon on the battlefield, was a self-regarding braggart. Antoine disliked the man, yet he applauded Charlotte, who had also been a star pupil of David, for her sacrifices to take care of him. Antoine had no great fondness for my family, but he would take it for granted that I would make sacrifices on their behalf.

  And what sacrifices had he made on behalf of his beloved mother? I was about to ask when the unlovely answer hit me with all its unwelcome force. He had married me. He had given up his comfortable bachelorhood so that his mother would have someone to run her household and take care of her while he continued to turn his full attention to painting. He had given up his weekly visits to those accommodating women whose business was pleasing men, to take on someone who had dreams and ambitions of her own, who would expect to be considered, loved, and made to feel important. I was his sacrifice, and he had married me with a set of assumptions based not on who I was, only that I was a woman. Thirteen years of marriage, thirteen years of learning who I was, what talents and ambitions I had, three showings at the Salon, five years as a member of Marie Benoist’s studio group, countless hours of drawing and painting outside it – yet his assumptions remained as they had been on the day we met. My stomach lurched. I wanted to ask, who was this man I had married? – but I understood him all too well.

  “Augustine,” he said plaintively, “I don’t want to fight. It’s late, and we’re both tired” – or you wouldn’t be so bad-tempered, he meant – “can’t we leave this until another time?”

  As if you would understand better what I was upset about. “Yes, you’re probably right,” I said. We got into bed, and he was snoring peacefully within five minutes.

  It took me a long time to fall asleep that night. My dreams were disturbing – I was mounting the grand staircase of the Louvre, eager to see the next Salon in which my work once more appeared, but when I reached the top of the stairs I took a wrong turn and found myself wandering for hours through other galleries, unable to find my way. Sometimes the galleries had many paintings, the accomplishments, the fulfillments of other artists. But a long series of rooms had only curling picture wire hanging from the molding, dark patches on the wall fabric to indicate where paintings had once hung, floors gritty underfoot, and a general air of neglect. I hurried through, dismayed and frightened by the desolation I felt. When at length I managed to make my exhausted way to the Salon, it was closing for the day and guards were directing visitors to the exits. I caught only a glimpse of a well-filled gallery through an archway before I found myself again at the top of the stairs. The crowd was thick; I lost my footing and started to fall forward. Just as my temple made contact with the cold stone edge of a step, I jolted awake. My heart was beating rapidly, my breathing was shallow, and I was infinitely relieved to find it had all been just a bad dream. But its meaning was clear.

  When I awoke again, it was full daylight. I had slept later than usual. Antoine had gone out, evidently not wishing to continue the discussion I had started, in which he had already made his opinions clear. Maman Madeleine would expect an apology for my brusqueness last night, and my sister and mother would expect one for my absence yesterday. No one would think of offering an apology for sapping my creative lifeblood with their demands. Any solution to be had for this situation, I would need to find for myself.

  I dressed quickly in clothes I did not mind getting dirty, and assembled a new portfolio of sketching paper, pencils and chalks, as well as the drawings of the day before. I was not yet ready to have the members of the household look at them, and I wanted to see them again with a more objective eye.

  I decided, on impulse, to visit Josée. I had not seen her for several months but now I wanted very much to re-establish our friendship and re-affirm my identity as an artist.

  The concierge confirmed that she was home, adding, “You’re just in time to say goodbye.”

  I wondered about that as I climbed the stairs to her studio. It had been cleared of everything but the landlord’s furniture and Josée’s clothes. She was packing the latter into a trunk and greeted me a little uncertainly, not her usual wholehearted welcome.

  “I just heard you’re leaving – are you moving to another address?”

  “No, I’m giving up the studio while I’m traveling.” Josée hesitated, eyes down, looking guilty as she wondered how to continue.

  I realized what her destination must be. “You’re going to Rome, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I was paid last week for the series of paintings I did for the Duchesse de Berry.” The young sister-in-law of the Duchesse d’Angoulême was a generous patron of women artists. “That and what I’ve saved will be enough.”

  “But it was going to be our trip!” My anguished reply was out before I could stop myself and reframe it as delight in her journey for her sake.

  “We started our plan because we could not wait for the men to take us,” she reminded me. “Then you had to care for your mother. I’ve seen you hardly at all these past two years and I realized I could not afford to wait for you, either. I need to take care of myself. No one is going to drop everything for me.”

 
I could hear the hurt underneath the stinging words.

  “When do you go? How long will you be gone?”

  “I have a place reserved on the Toulon coach, the day after tomorrow. I have enough to live on for a year, or even longer if I can find clients while I’m there. The English are particularly fond of souvenir portraits and views, and Monsieur Ingres has given me letters of introduction. So it might work out I can stay even longer.” Her eyes were shining. Clearly she had left behind the wistful travel plans we had begun in 1817. And she would be leaving me along with them.

  “I’m happy for you, Josée.” I was in fact sorry for myself rather than happy for her, but pride would not let me say so.

  She took something out of the depth of a wardrobe and held it out to me. “I was going to come to see you tomorrow to give you this.” It was our moneybox. “That’s your half of what we saved until you stopped – I mean, until you started taking care of your mother.”

  I would not take it from her. “Keep it as an emergency fund. You can give it to me when you come back. I won’t be going anywhere in the meantime,” I added wryly.

  “It’s not your money I wanted with me!” She thrust the box at me; I took hold of her hands instead. The box broke into a heap of coins and shards at our feet.

  We stared intently and unhappily at each other for a long minute. Gently, I let go.

  “I’m sorry, Josée. I wish with all my heart that I could have gone with you, but for now this money is the only part of me I can send. Bon Voyage,” I said softly, kissing her on both cheeks. “Bon Voyage.”

  I left as quickly as I could.

  Chapter 11

  Brussels, December 1823

  At last I had my chance to travel when I accompanied Antoine to visit Jacques-Louis David in Brussels in December of 1823. Visiting his beloved master was one of those rare circumstances that could persuade Gros to leave Paris. It was not the most comfortable time of year to spend three days each way in a public coach, but it was too cold to paint in the Panthéon or his studio. I think he took a sort of proud pleasure in proving his devotion by the hardship of the journey. He invited Girodet to accompany him but his friend was ill and had not maintained the close ties to his teacher that Gros did.