Sargent continued struggling with what he termed “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau.” He realized that there would be no routine for—and possibly no results from—the difficult job ahead. He was able to turn out gemlike sketches and studies of Amélie, but he became paralyzed whenever he tried to work on her formal portrait. He was blocked. The most basic decision, even the size of the canvas, eluded him. He waited for inspiration, but it just didn’t come.
Sargent tried to maintain his sense of humor, at least when communicating with Albert de Belleroche. “Dear Baby,” he wrote, “Despite the ridiculousness of conversing with a child, here I am answering your letter. But please don’t write me anymore! Oh no. I am still at Paramé, basking in the sunshine of my beautiful model’s countenance. Mme. Gautreau is at the piano and driving all my ideas away.” Sargent illustrated the letter with an impish pen-and-ink drawing of Amélie’s head peeking over the top of a piano, presumably playing the annoying tune.
Sargent, frustrated and discouraged, needed a change of scenery. Nothing had happened the way he had anticipated when he agreed to paint Amélie at the château. After weeks of false starts, he had run out of ideas for the portrait. Amélie, whom he hoped would be his muse, was not particularly interested in him or his painting. Her looks, which at first had been inspiring, if challenging, were proving downright difficult. Hoping to clear his head, Sargent returned to Paris in mid-July.
The city was crowded with people who had come for the Bastille Day festivities. Sargent persuaded Belleroche and another artist friend, Paul Helleu, to accompany him to Haarlem to see paintings by Frans Hals; there was a night train from Paris. Sargent had made the trip before and had found it enlightening. Artists often traveled such distances to see works they had read about; these trips were an important part of their education. In Sargent’s case, travel was a natural and necessary part of his life, just as it had been in his childhood. His letters repeatedly refer to trips he had taken or trips he was planning.
Night trains, with their fully appointed dining rooms and sleeping cars, offered a romantic form of transportation. Belleroche sketched Sargent while he was sleeping in his berth, producing an intensely personal vision of the artist at his most vulnerable and exposed.
Although Sargent had been consumed by Amélie’s image and personality for the past few months, Belleroche had never really left his mind. There is a small Sargent pen and ink drawing of a head that for years had been thought a sketch for Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast. The head is turned at the same angle as Amélie’s in the painting. One image fits perfectly over the other. But a recent theory holds that the head in the sketch belongs to Albert de Belleroche. Sargent had started to draw Amélie, as faint marks on the paper indicate, but he transformed her into Belleroche, shortening the ears and nose and adding more masculine touches.
John Singer Sargent, Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, 1883
John Singer Sargent, Head in Profile of a Young Man, c. 1883
Sargent’s drawing at right has been thought a preparatory sketch for Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast. But Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray propose that Sargent turned Amélie into Albert de Belleroche, merging both objects of desire, woman and man, into a single image. While Sargent was sketching and painting Amélie, he was also thinking of Belleroche. (Madame Gautreau: [P2w41]. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Head in Profile: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of Miss Emily Sargent and Mrs. Francis Ormond [through Thomas A. Fox], February 18, 1931)
Sargent was in fact thinking about Belleroche when he was painting Amélie. With a few quick pencil marks, he merged one obsession with another. True, there was a distinct physical resemblance between Amélie and Belleroche, at least in the way Sargent sketched and painted them. Both subjects had fine, albeit exaggerated features, and looked dreamy and enigmatic in their poses. This provocative theory suggests Sargent’s emotional confusion in the summer of 1883. His blending of the two images was not just a drawing exercise. As the art historian Dorothy Moss puts it, Sargent saw a “woman in a man and a man in a woman.” He drew Amélie and Belleroche over and over, using his art to express his obsession with the two people he desired most.
If Sargent was torn between desires, the excursion to Haarlem pushed him in Belleroche’s direction. By the time he left his friend in Paris and returned to Amélie in Les Chênes, Sargent’s feelings for her had changed. His romantic haze lifted and his artistic block disappeared. Sargent was back in control: he knew exactly how to paint her portrait, and he was ready to begin.
The Flying Dutchman
Sargent would now make up for lost time. He decided on a full-length portrait of Amélie, 82⅛ by 43¼ inches, since a smaller painting would get lost in the thousands of entries that decorated the Salon walls. An oversized work had a better chance of being seen, and accordingly, some of Sargent’s recent Salon works had been enormous. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit was 87⅜ by 87⅝ inches, and El Jaleo 94½ by 137—impossible to miss. Sargent wanted the same visibility for his latest work.
Amélie’s position in the painting would be dramatically different from that in any of the preliminary sketches, where she had sat prettily on a couch or stood decorously at a window. Instead, he condemned Amélie, who hated remaining motionless, to one of the most tortuous poses in art history. He had her stand with her right arm leaning tensely on a table that was just a little too short to be a comfortable source of support. Her face turned sideways to draw attention to her remarkable profile, while her body pointed to the front. The muscles of her neck strained to keep her head at its awkward angle.
Sargent’s plain-weave canvas was primed probably with gray oil-based paint, as were most of his portraits at the time. This particular shade of gray was made by mixing ivory black and lead white in linseed oil; the combination gave a coolness to the painting even after colors were applied over it. Sargent was generous with his paint, and he kept his palette heavy with pigments he combined with various mediums. Whites and other pale colors were mixed with poppy-seed oil because it did not yellow as quickly as linseed oil, which was reserved for darker colors.
Sargent planned to surround Amélie’s figure with a dark, simple background, as he had done in Mrs. Harry Vane Milbank and Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast. It was difficult, however, to find a background color that complimented Amélie’s pale skin. Sargent settled on a mixture of ivory black, Mars brown, and a generous quantity of medium. He knew that this combination would produce a background resembling the brown in the works of Van Dyck and other masters.
Amélie’s unusual pallor presented other technical challenges; his work would be judged in large part on how well he rendered her skin. Sargent wanted to paint Amélie’s white flesh realistically, but in some lights it was mother-of-pearl while in others it was a sickly lavender. Candlelight, though it softened the effect of her makeup, was too dim. Sargent needed strong light, yet he feared it might be unflattering. He tried his usual approach to flesh tones, using lead white, vermilion, bone black, rose madder, and even viridian green. Against the dark background of the painting, Amélie’s skin looked macabre, corpselike, and her red-tipped ears inflamed.
Sargent fussed and fussed with his paints for a solution, as Amélie struggled to maintain her pose during endless sessions. One day, the jeweled strap of her dress slid off her tense shoulder. She may have tried to shrug it back into place. But Sargent, a genius at identifying the gesture or signal that revealed his subject’s essence, assured Amélie that it was exactly what the portrait needed to distinguish it from other paintings of beautiful women in evening dress. Pozzi’s fingers at his belt exposed the eager womanizer within, while his hand at his heart said he worshipped beauty. Similarly, Amélie’s fallen strap, which called attention to the exquisite shoulder above, was enticing. Her profile, and her eyes averted into the distance, said she was unattainable. What did she think of Sargent’s daring idea? Was she worried
that people would find the painting risqué? After all, she must have known of the Olympia scandal. Even though Amélie wanted to be outrageous, there was a fine line between fame and notoriety, and no one, not even she, would have wanted to cross it.
From Amélie’s own words, though, it is apparent that she felt nothing but admiration for her portrait. In a note she asked Sargent to include with a letter to their friend Madame Allouard-Jouan, Amélie wrote: “Mr. Sargent a fait un chef d’oeuvre du portrait, je tiens à vous l’écrire car je suis sûre qu’il ne vous le dira pas.” Sargent, she believed, had created a masterpiece. She was anxious to tell her friend this, as she was sure Sargent himself would not tell her. Even in its unfinished state, Amélie loved her portrait. Sargent’s approach was bold, even risky, she knew. But her own calculated risks had served her well in the past.
Sargent now had a firm grasp of the overall look of the portrait, though he was still working on certain problems, such as the color of Amélie’s skin. He found a pleasant distraction in the arrival of Judith Gautier, who was vacationing in nearby St.-Énogat. Gautier was also an acquaintance of Amélie’s: the two women would have had many social occasions to meet, in Paris and in Brittany. One connection between them was through Pozzi. Sargent sketched the two women at Les Chênes, standing very close together with their arms around each other’s shoulders while they communicated some secret message—perhaps about Pozzi. Sargent titled the drawing Whispers.
When Sargent visited Gautier at her beach house, Le Pré des Oiseaux (the field of birds), he encountered an environment quite different from the propriety of Les Chênes. Gautier’s house, a compact villa separated from the beach by a balustraded stone staircase, exploded with her personality. Every corner was packed with souvenirs from Gautier’s travels and memorabilia of her many friendships.
Dominating one wall in her living room was a stained-glass window designed for her illustrious father. The front rooms, including the living room, overlooked the beach, while a sun porch at the back of the house offered a lovely view of the gardens. At the edge of the property was a small wooden pavilion that enchanted and amused many of Gautier’s visitors. Robert de Montesquiou called it a “cigar box.” Yamamoto, an artist visiting from Japan, had covered the interior walls of the pavilion with delicate painted blossoms. Le Pré des Oiseaux was a place where fancy ran free.
John Singer Sargent, Whispers, 1883-1884
The distinctive nose of the woman on the left and the hairline of the woman on the right suggest that they are, respectively, Amélie Gautreau and Judith Gautier. The drawing shows them sharing a private moment, perhaps at Les Chênes when Amélie was posing for Madame X. (Charcoal and graphite on off-white laid paper, 13 9 16 x 9 11 16 inches, 34.4 x 24.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Francis Ormond, 1950 [50.130.117]. All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Even the story of how Gautier got the house was filled with fancy. Her publisher, Albert Lacroix, apparently had committed the unforgivable sin of losing one of her manuscripts. By way of apology, he invited her to stay at his house in St.-Énogat. Gautier had such a good time there that she impulsively signed her name to a list of people interested in buying property in the area. She never gave the matter another thought until, sometime later, she was informed that the foundation of a house had been laid on the property and that she was expected to foot the bill. Le Pré des Oiseaux became her home for a good part of her life, and she never regretted the expenditure.
In 1883, Gautier was thirty-eight to Sargent’s twenty-seven, and he found the age difference alluring. She had an exotic presence, with a round, full figure and darkly expressive eyes. She wore her hair in a loose bun and dressed in Oriental robes made of sensuous fabrics. She was a worldly and experienced “woman of a certain age,” described by one critic as a “nun of art,” a woman who lived for art and artists. As she had done many times previously when in the company of an artistic man, Gautier focused her attention on Sargent and made him believe that he was every bit as interesting as those who had come before him.
An ardent Wagnerite, Sargent was elated to be in the company of a woman who had been so close to his idol. An inescapable suggestion of transference was at work here: for Sargent, Gautier was an almost physical connection to Wagner, as the woman who was one of Wagner’s major obsessions became his woman when they were alone together.
To judge from the number of times Sargent sketched and painted Gautier during her stay in St.-Énogat, they were alone together frequently. Charles Mount, a lively if not entirely dependable Sargent biographer, has suggested a convincing, but unprovable, reason for Sargent’s visits: namely, that Sargent and Gautier had a love affair that summer. Mount describes Sargent’s trips to Le Pré des Oiseaux like scenes from a farce, the artist running out the back door of the château at Les Chênes whenever he had a free moment and racing over the hill to Gautier’s house for a few moments alone with her.
This could hardly have been the case. St.-Énogat is several miles from the walled city of St.-Malo (which is itself a distance from Paramé and Les Chênes), and would have been a time-consuming trip by horse or by boat in 1883. Whenever Sargent arrived at Le Pré des Oiseaux, he expected to stay for a visit. Now that he was working more decisively on Amélie’s portrait, he had the time to do so. He was known to paint rapidly when inspiration struck, and he made efficient use of the moments Amélie stole from her busy August calendar.
Sargent had, according to Mount, approached Gautier about posing for him, using the same line that had worked so well with Amélie: he was an “ardent admirer of her beauty.” Like Amélie, Gautier had refused other painters and also hated to sit still. Yet she made an exception for Sargent: his unusual talent, his combination of classicism and originality, would make her look distinctive.
Sargent’s most romanticized rendering of Gautier is A Gust of Wind, likely his first painting of her. In signature kimono, she stands at the top of the stairs leading from her house to the beach. She looks young, slender, and beautiful, a fresh flower on the bright landscape. But Gautier was not young, she was far from slender, and her beauty was definitely in the eye of the be-holder. As in Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, Sargent, a man infatuated, captured the essence of Gautier’s appeal in his painting: her power to seduce. Whatever fascinated Pozzi, Wagner, Victor Hugo, and other admirers was depicted on Sargent’s canvas. It was Judith Gautier idealized.
Gautier was for Sargent a fascinating alternative to Amélie. While Amélie was slim, Gautier was overweight. Amélie was a young woman with more attitude than experience, while Gautier had years of both. Gautier’s mature exoticism contrasted with Amélie’s petulant sexuality. Amélie, the “professional beauty,” was her own self-packaged work of art, while Gautier’s beauty was rooted in her character.
Sargent enjoyed the time he spent with Gautier, playing chess, discussing music and art, and painting and drawing her. Legend has it that one day, when he did not have a canvas large enough to accommodate the full-length portrait of her that he insisted on starting that very minute, Sargent tore up a kitchen table. He is not usually perceived as the kind of man who would chop up the furniture rather than delay the creative process. But this was his “summer of love,” perhaps the first and last time in his life when he allowed passion and impulse to rule his actions.
As had happened with Amélie, Sargent’s ardor for Gautier cooled. He replaced his idealistic visions of her with more realistic representations. A later painting shows a full-figured Gautier at her piano, no longer girlish and alluring, but bearing the weight of maturity. He began to think of his visits to St.-Énogat as tiresome obligations: in a letter to Madame Allouard-Jouan, Sargent complained of having to stay there when he would rather be on his way to Florence, but acknowledged that he would be thought a “brute” if he left.
As autumn approached, Sargent sought to free himself from romantic entanglements, real and imagined, and return to a more focused and structured life. �
��The summer is definitely over and with it, I admit it, is my pleasure at being at Les Chênes,” he confessed to Madame Allouard-Jouan. He had spent too many weeks there, drifting from one romantic obsession to another. It was as if he were on a quest, casting himself quite consciously in the role of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, the mythic seaman who sailed from port to port on an eternal search for the one true love who might release him from his curse of loneliness.
Like the Dutchman, Sargent was nomadic, rootless, and alone. But he was beginning to think he might be better off that way. The past months had shown him that his infatuations came and went quickly, often ending in frustration. A more successful artist than lover, he could capture his subjects on canvas much more readily than in life.
Sargent turned his attention to more practical concerns. He had completed enough of Amélie’s portrait to be able to work without a model. Sargent didn’t need her anymore. It was time for him to roll up his canvas—his usual method for transporting unfinished paintings—pack up his paints, and return to his studio in Paris.
Finishing Touches
In October 1883, with Les Chênes closed for the year, Amélie embarked on the new social season in Paris, and Sargent came home to utter chaos. After sharing lofts with other artists, he was unaccustomed to overseeing a studio the size of his establishment on the Boulevard Berthier. It was an expensive proposition for an artist with an uncertain income: in addition to rent and bills for art supplies, Sargent had to pay his servants, a cook and an Italian “majordomo,” whom he had hired in the spring, when he felt optimistic about his future. His staff proved troublesome—the manservant drank and made the cook cry. Their antics were distracting, and the new expenses amounted to more money than his income, which was not coming in as rapidly as he had hoped.
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