Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  While Sargent called himself an American and had an American passport, he had been born in Italy and had never even visited the United States. His expatriate parents had been in perpetual motion for more than twenty years, moving from one European city to another in pursuit of milder weather, better health, cheaper accommodations. Sargent’s lack of an accent was due to his frequent relocations as a child: he had lived in so many European cities while he was growing up that he never had time to acquire one.

  His father, Fitzwilliam Sargent, was a successful doctor who came from a large and established Philadelphia family. In 1850 he married Mary Newbold Singer, who had goals that could be accomplished only in Europe: she dreamed of living in an environment that would be more hospitable to her artistic talents: she sketched, painted, and played the piano. When her first child and namesake was born in 1851, Mary was forced to concentrate on more practical matters. The Sargents adapted to a life of respectable domesticity, until little Mary’s death at age two. Her mother suffered a physical breakdown and convinced her husband that Europe was the only place where she could recover.

  With the $10,000 that she had inherited from her father in 1854, the Sargents began Mary’s long-desired journey. She loved traveling. She wanted to see and experience everything Europe had to offer, and she had no interest in assuming the monotonous life she had left behind in America. So she convinced her husband that they should spend the summer in Geneva and the winter in Rome, visiting spas regularly to tend to her delicate health. Soon she was so addicted to travel that as soon as she arrived in one place, she was already thinking about the next destination. Dr. Sargent seems to have never guessed that she might be exaggerating her symptoms of illness to avoid returning to America.

  The Sargents traveled from Florence to Nice to Rome, and back. Unlike typical Americans on a grand tour, they were drifters, mindful of their fixed income, forever trading one temporary address for another. They economized by visiting fashionable places in the off-season, hiring second-rate servants, and moving to cheaper locations whenever life became too expensive.

  The Sargent’s second child, John Singer, was born in Florence on January 12, 1856, a strong and healthy boy. The next year, another daughter, Emily, was born in Rome. Traveling was more difficult with the larger household, but Mary could not be persuaded to stop.

  The peripatetic lifestyle left Dr. Sargent feeling restless and lonely. He missed his Philadelphia medical practice. John and Emily had to learn to be best friends, playing and studying together since their unpredictable itinerary made regular friendships and formal schooling impossible. They were tutored by their parents: Dr. Sargent gave his children natural history books and Bible stories, and Mary taught her specialties, art and music. Both children were bright, and quick, open to the new languages, cultures, and histories of their ever-changing environment. At its best, the Sargents’ lifestyle was rich in experience.

  In 1860, when she was not yet four, Emily suffered a serious accident that damaged her spine. The Sargents never discussed the incident, keeping the details of her condition to themselves; family members believed that Emily had been dropped by a nurse. Her parents consulted doctors, who recommend a drastic course of treatment that included long periods of complete immobility. Emily stayed in bed for years, and when she finally got up, her body was misshapen and she had to relearn the fundamentals of movement, such as how to walk.

  In 1861 a fourth child was born, Mary Winthrop, called “Minnie.” The Sargents continued to travel, moving four or five times a year, setting up house in, say, Nice only to dismantle it a few months later to go to London. On gay evenings when money was good, Mary entertained the new acquaintances she had collected. John befriended the children of other expatriate families, including Ben del Castillo, who was distantly related to the Avegnos, and Violet Paget, who would later call herself Vernon Lee. When money was tight, the family’s accommodations and lifestyle declined accordingly.

  Fitzwilliam Sargent thought about America constantly and wrote to his relatives with great longing, wishing for a reunion. But whenever he broached the subject of a return to the United States, Mary dismissed him with one excuse or another, usually claiming that she and the children were not healthy enough to make the trip.

  Health, not surprisingly, became Dr. Sargent’s obsession. His letters described in detail each family member’s physical condition at the time of writing, as if his wife and children had become the patients who were denied him when he gave up his practice. He wrote that Mary was “improved,” Emily was “weak,” and the family in general suffered from “rather delicate health.” His diligent observations could not forestall tragedy. In 1865, only four years old, Minnie Sargent died.

  John was the only healthy child in his family. His size and robust constitution made him a good athlete: he enjoyed sports and physical activity and, like his mother, hated to sit still. Dr. Sargent, a patriot who wrote a pamphlet entitled “England, the United States and the Southern Confederacy” to show his support for President Lincoln and the Union army, fondly imagined his strapping son growing up to be an officer in the U.S. Navy.

  But John had other plans. His interests were those of an artist, not a soldier. By the age of thirteen, he was spending hours in museums studying the works of the old masters. He took a notebook with him everywhere, and filled its pages with images from life done in pencil and watercolor. Mary’s friends in the art world were impressed by the boy’s talent and urged the Sargents to arrange for him to have professional training.

  As the family moved through Spain, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, Mary had two more children; Fitzwilliam Jr., who was born in 1867 and died two years later, and Violet, born in 1870. The death of one child seems to have brought the birth of another. The Sargents’ financial resources were increasingly strained, and so they moved to the affordable destination of Brittany, an area Violet later called “the land of rocks and cheeses” because of its stony terrain and omnipresent dairy products. The Sargents rented a small house in St.-Énogat, a suburb of the busy resort town of St.-Malo.

  While the move may have eased the family’s financial stress, they weren’t quite happy. Mary’s social ambition had never abated, and even the successful salon she organized in St.-Énogat did not satisfy it. Dr. Sargent, though pleased at having settled somewhere, was unhappy with the continued nomadism. He wanted his family to establish permanent roots.

  While neither Mary nor Fitzwilliam Sargent had achieved the adult life they had wanted, they were sensitive to their talented son’s needs. In 1874, acting on their friends’ advice, and knowing that the capital would offer the best instruction, they moved to Paris to find an art school for him. John had admired Carolus-Duran’s work, and after one meeting with the artist he made up his mind to study at his atelier. Carolus-Duran judged John’s portfolio accomplished and promising; he accepted him as a pupil on the spot and straightforwardly told him that although he had to unlearn some things, he showed great potential.

  Sargent was enthusiastic about his acceptance into the studio. Yet he must have felt apprehensive too. His mother had instilled in him a rigorous work ethic, and he knew he didn’t fit in with the high-spirited and self-consciously bohemian students, who would stage sponge fights in the studio and tease each other with pranks. Sargent was shy and taciturn. He dressed formally and was very serious about his work.

  His classmates could easily have ostracized him for being different, but instead they treated him with great respect. His painting astonished them. Sargent’s work, his classmate James Beckwith wrote in his diary, “makes me shake myself.” Another student described Sargent as “one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across; his drawings are like the old masters’.”

  Sargent was always the first to arrive at the atelier on Monday mornings, beating the other students to the best spot to position his easel. When Carolus-Duran’s class was finished and the model dismissed for the day, Sargent would talk other students into po
sing for him so he could keep painting. In the evenings, he would study drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts, then, after a hasty dinner, attend a night class with the artist Léon Bonnat.

  When he wasn’t in school, Sargent would join Beckwith and other new friends to visit museums and galleries, and to hear concerts. He still lived with his family, who had an apartment on the Right Bank, and he often brought fellow students home for family dinners and entertainments. Mary was delighted: she finally had the salon she had always wanted.

  Sargent gradually grew accustomed to the company of rowdy young artists. In a letter to his childhood friend Ben del Castillo, he described a lively evening of celebration and camaraderie at Carolus-Duran’s atelier. “We cleared the studio of easels and canvasses, illuminated it with Venetian or colored paper lanterns, hired a piano and had what is called a ‘devil of a spree.’” After years of occupying a narrow and hushed world consisting only of his immediate family, Sargent was awakening socially.

  His social life never interfered with his work, however. He remained the most dedicated artist in his class, practicing long hours to master his technique. Although the other students in Carolus-Duran’s group tried to follow their teacher’s precepts, Sargent was the one who fully absorbed them and made them his own. When he took the École des Beaux-Arts’ rigorous month-long entrance exams, he passed them on his first try. He placed thirty-seventh in a group of 162 aspirants, an extraordinary accomplishment for an American.

  Sargent traveled to Brittany to summer with his parents and his two sisters when the atelier closed for the season in 1875. But when his parents decided to stay in St.-Énogat for the winter to save money, he returned to Paris alone. His experiences as an art student had given him the confidence to live independently. He was on the right track professionally, with Carolus-Duran guiding him toward a lucrative career in portraiture. Sargent felt stir-rings of ambition, and he was ready to face every young artist’s greatest challenge: his first Salon.

  A Smashing Start

  As a fledgling artist, Sargent had to make decisions about what he would paint, and how he would paint it. The year 1876 was important in terms of making these decisions, because the Parisian art world was offering alternatives to traditional academic, color-within-the-lines painting. The nineteenth century, an age defined by revolutionary spirit, saw art movements that challenged conventional aesthetics. Realism, pioneered in France by the rebellious Gustave Courbet in the 1850s, called for a dramatic shift in painting. Realists wanted to replace the academy’s sanitized historical, mythological, and genre scenes with penetrating depictions of everyday life, including peasants and laborers at work. They did so in a direct way, without idealizing or glorifying the common man’s condition, and thus prompted detractors to call their work offensive and ugly. In time, Courbet inspired another generation of artists to start their own controversial movement: Impressionism.

  At the second Impressionist exhibition, at the Durand-Ruel gallery, Sargent had the chance to meet in person Claude Monet—one of the crop of “Impressionist” painters who were revolutionizing art with their ideas about light, form, and perspective. Although many artists and art lovers were enthusiastic about the new movement, these rebels, including Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Édouard Manet, had more opponents than supporters.

  Conservative artists, upholding the standards of the academy, considered the Impressionists to be amateurish and vulgar, and their work anarchist rubbish. But these ground-breaking painters held firm, united against the repressive academy that condemned their spontaneous approach to painting. While the Impressionists were (and are) categorized as a group, they were in fact a non-movement movement. They shared a common revolutionary spirit, but they each had an individual style. They were linked by their desire to paint life as they saw it (albeit each from a distinct viewpoint), rather than as something idealized. They also took painting out of the studio, favoring plein air, or outdoor, scenes that did not rely on arranged props, backgrounds, and lighting.

  Sargent had heard of the controversial artists: the advantage to studying in Carolus-Duran’s relatively progressive atelier was that new approaches to painting were explored along with the old ways. Sargent was encouraged to experiment, and since Carolus-Duran was friendly with Monet, it is no wonder that some of his experiments show elements of Impressionism.

  At the same time that Sargent was absorbing new ideas about color and movement, he was learning that art was big business. Talent alone rarely catapulted a living artist to success. A working artist in Third Republic Paris required keen commercial instincts and a sound business plan. Carolus-Duran set an excellent example for his protégé, who knew that his teacher’s career had advanced in no small part because of his ability to maneuver through society as a well-paid portraitist.

  Sargent needed to make money. His family depended more and more on him financially. His mother and father were getting older. Emily, his childhood playmate and companion, would never leave home; her ill health had turned her into a spinster. Violet was still a child. As the only son and the only healthy and productive member of the family, Sargent understood that it would be his responsibility to support all of them, emotionally as well as economically. He would have to command sizable fees. He decided on a career painting portraits.

  Portraiture, an established genre for hundreds of years, evolved to fulfill a basic human need, providing people with likenesses of their loved ones. This was especially important after a death, when mourners wanted a way to remember the deceased. A generalized depiction of a face—a vague rendering of features and coloring—would never do. Even early portraits, however primitively rendered, had to emphasize a subject’s individuality. The Grove Dictionary of Art defines a portrait as an image in which “the artist is engaged with the personality of his sitter and is preoccupied with his or her characterization as an individual.” The challenge for portraitists has always been to find their own way of conveying that individuality.

  In the eighteenth century, artists elevated portraiture by making it grand and heroic. Commissioned by the royal or the very rich to create artistic testimonials to power, wealth, beauty, and status, painters made their subjects took larger than life. But patrons discovered that a portrait did not have to be physically big to be effective. Miniature portraits, called limnings or “paintings in little,” also became popular. The word miniature, in this case, had nothing to do with the diminutive size of the portrait. In the past, illuminated manuscripts with their small illustrations—often a depiction of the patron who had commissioned the work—were created with a red lead pigment called minium. When these illustrations evolved into freestanding portraits, the term minium turned into “miniature.”

  Executed with fine brushes in watercolor on vellum, or in oil on enamel and ivory, miniatures were practical forms of portraiture because, mere inches long, encased in delicate frames, they could be held in the palm or worn as jewelry. They were also easy to transport, and proved especially useful in negotiating marriages: they could be sent to prospective brides and bridegrooms, and their parents, to show what the betrothed might look like.

  The silhouette, a profile traced onto and cut from black paper, was a simple alternative for people who could not afford other forms of portraiture, which, in the eighteenth century, was still an expensive proposition. They were named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French government official who in 1759 imposed such harsh economic demands that his name became synonymous with anything done very cheaply. The quick outlines, created at virtually no cost, came to be known as portraits à la Silhouette. A clever artist could create likeness even with such rudimentary tools as paper and scissors. Parts of these silhouettes, for instance the lips, were sometimes colored to add life to the image.

  A more technologically advanced method of obtaining an image of a loved one was announced in France in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. With the arrival of photography, portrait m
iniatures fell out of favor; this new process captured images quickly and accurately. Posing for a photograph was far less tedious—and less expensive—than sitting for a portrait.

  With wider prosperity in the nineteenth century, however, and the rise of the bourgeois, more and more people wanted to announce that they were wealthy enough to have their portraits painted. A portrait was a sign that one had arrived, socially. What people wanted above all was a portrait that was flattering. While serious artists were advised not to idealize their subjects on canvas into looking completely different from their real-life counterparts, they were expected to create portraits that enhanced the subjects’ best features.

  In the past, that enhancement might involve depicting subjects in classical or mythological settings, clothing them in fanciful but emblematic costumes, or seating them before garden backgrounds. But a new movement in portraiture in the late nineteenth century presented subjects more realistically. Painters like Léon Bonnat, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Carolus-Duran showed people in real settings, with an “increased sense of life and personality.”

  With his penetrating eye and quick hand, Sargent was especially qualified for a career as a portraitist. At this early stage in his career, he was already demonstrating his versatility, his talent at working in the style of the old masters, like Velázquez, and the new renegades, like Manet.

  In the late spring of 1876, Sargent traveled to the United States. An American by birth, the twenty-year-old was required by law to visit the United States to maintain his citizenship. He left Liverpool in May with his mother and Emily. Dr. Sargent stayed behind to take care of six-year-old Violet, who was thought too young for such a long trip. Mary Sargent, who had resisted making the trip west for at least the past twenty years, was now going home, while her husband, who had always yearned to be reunited with his family in America, was remaining in Europe. He had to comfort himself knowing that his son and daughter would finally meet their American relatives.