Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  Sargent established himself in the artistic community as well, seeing several Americans who had been students with him in Paris and who had returned home to the East Coast. James Beckwith, his former roommate, was in New York seeking to further his career. Sargent had been approached by so many New Yorkers about commissions that he felt he would have more than enough work to pay the rent on a modest studio. He asked Beckwith to help him locate a suitable space. His new address, on fashionable Washington Square, would be convenient for his high-society clients.

  Before Sargent settled in here, the Boits, his old friends and patrons who had been supportive in the early days of his career and throughout the Madame X debacle, invited him to visit them in Boston. They hoped he would have the time to paint Mrs. Boit. In November, Sargent put New York on hold and moved to Boston, where he rented a studio, unpacked his paints, and applied himself to painting not only Mrs. Boit and the sons of the magnate J. Malcolm Forbes, but also the irrepressible Isabella Stewart Gardner.

  Mrs. Gardner would be a challenge. Unlike Amélie, Gardner was neither young nor exotically beautiful. She was forty-seven, short, with an unremarkable face. But she was blessed with a voluptuous figure, a tiny waist, and a generous bosom that she loved to flaunt. She encouraged Sargent to devise a pose that emphasized these features.

  With Gardner standing in front of an intricate, multicolored tapestry whose pattern framed her head like a halo, Sargent pushed and pulled her into a position that was, in its own way, as forced and artificial as Amélie’s in Madame X. Gardner faces the viewer in a simple black gown that outlines every curve. She appears to be bending ever so slightly at the waist, an almost indecent move that thrusts her buttocks back and her bosom forward. Her gown’s plunging neckline draws the eye directly to her breasts. Gardner wears her signature piece of jewelry: the strand of South Sea pearls that her husband had purchased early in their marriage. A painter might have been expected to place the necklace around her throat to attest to her wealth, but instead Sargent wrapped the priceless pearls around Gardner’s waist, to call attention to her figure.

  Gardner invited Sargent to stay at her lavish Beacon Street home while he was working on her portrait. He moved in, and although her husband was always there, Sargent’s presence set Boston tongues wagging. They assumed he and “Mrs. Jack” were having an affair. She took pleasure in the rumors and did nothing to dispel them—after all, they accorded with the outrageous reputation she cultivated.

  Sargent worked through the Christmas holiday and finished the portrait in January 1888. Gardner loved the painting and repeatedly tried to make Sargent agree that it was his best work, perhaps competing with Madame X for his attention. She wanted more than a mere artist-client relationship with Sargent: she wanted to be his patron, muse, and intimate. He was the first painter whose works Gardner wanted to collect. She coveted El Jaleo, a painting far too large to fit comfortably in most homes, and envisioned building a Venetian-style palace to house it.

  Sargent’s success in America culminated with his first one-man show, which opened in January 1888 at Boston’s prestigious St. Botolph Club. He selected twenty pictures for the exhibition, including El Jaleo, Isabella Stewart Gardner, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and a selection of studies of Venice. The show was an undisputed success, attracting more than thirteen hundred people in its two-week run. That winter, from Back Bay drawing rooms to Cambridge studios, Sargent was the chief topic of conversation among Bostonians. Critics lauded his style and refinement.

  Of the works exhibited, Gardner’s portrait gained the most notice. The Boston Herald called it “the gem of the collection.” But Gardner’s husband, a plain-speaking man, was not happy. When his wife asked his opinion, he grudgingly admitted: “It looks like hell, but it looks like you.” Sargent had captured Isabella Gardner’s spirit, but not in a way that pleased Jack Gardner. He was disturbed that men had been making lewd remarks about his wife since the portrait was first shown. At his club, he overheard someone saying that Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner so that one could “see nearly all the way down to Crawford’s Notch,” comparing her cleavage to a New England mountain resort famous for its plunging slopes. Gardner, who threatened to horsewhip anyone else who made such a comment, eventually withdrew his wife’s portrait from St. Botolph’s and refused to let it leave his home.

  Here again were all the ingredients of the Madame X scandal, principally a daring and suggestive portrait of a society woman. But things did not play out that way. It appeared that in this case the offended husband was the only person who minded that the painting was a little risqué.

  After triumphing in Boston and finishing his other portraits, Sargent returned to his New York City studio at the end of January to start on a new wave of commissions. For four months he painted such luminaries as Mrs. William Henry Vanderbilt and Mrs. Benjamin Kissam. These women were the elite of New York society, grandes dames of prominent families who made Mrs. Caroline Astor’s list of the four hundred people important enough to enter her ballroom.

  Sargent’s professional and personal calendars were booked for weeks. He now had plenty of friends in New York, and he was making new acquaintances every day. Sargent usually got along famously with his sitters, who often became his friends. Even after he left Newport, the Marquands continued to invite him to visit.

  Among Sargent’s new friends was the architect Stanford White, whose expansive artistic vision enabled him to design everything from picture frames to summer homes for the rich to the Washington Square Arch, a Greenwich Village landmark. Sargent and White had met in Paris and had admired each other’s work. White and his partner Charles McKim recommended Sargent to their wealthy clients, convincing them that no mansion would be complete without a portrait by him. Their firm, McKim, Mead, and White, was in the process of completing blueprints for the Boston Public Library, and White and McKim invited Sargent to design the building’s murals.

  Sargent returned to England in May 1888. His father, who had suffered a stroke in January, was very ill. Mary Sargent and her daughters fussed over him, and Sargent rented a summer house in the English countryside for himself and his family. His American tour, and all those portraits painted in a concentrated period, had left him exhausted. In England he cleared his head by painting plein air pictures, often setting up his easel on a boat and drifting down a river, just like Monet, the artist he admired more than anyone else.

  Sargent returned to London in the fall. Word of his success in the United States had reached Europe. He was now able to command fees as high as $3,000 a portrait, a substantial rate for an artist of thirty-two. He was a new man, prosperous, confident, and firmly established in an affluent world—on both sides of the Atlantic—and could enjoy the security, recognition, and comfort he had always wanted. Sargent’s international success was confirmed even in Paris, when he was invited to serve, with Monet among others, on the jury for the 1889 Salon.

  Four years had passed since the disastrous showing of Madame X. Gérôme and Bouguereau still ruled at the academy, but the artistic climate in Paris was less divided as modernist artists made their way to the forefront of the creative world.

  Fitzwilliam Sargent lived just long enough to see his son’s success. He died in England in April 1889, without realizing his dream of returning to America. After his father’s death, Sargent stepped fully into the role he had been anticipating since his first days as an artist: he became the patriarch and the sole support of the Sargent family. Mary, Emily, and Violet were in his care. Violet, now a young woman, was thinking about love, marriage, and a future of her own, but Mary and Emily would be his dependents, with him for the rest of their lives.

  Madame X continued to occupy center stage in Sargent’s Tite Street studio, watching over an endless procession of lords, ladies, society matrons, and tycoons who came to have their portraits painted by the famed artist. The caricaturist Max Beerbohm depicted the parade of well-dressed women outside Sargent’s studio, anxiou
sly awaiting their turn at immortality.

  Yet no matter how many women he painted, with their beautiful faces, elegant poses, and fashionable gowns, Sargent kept returning to one image from the past: Madame X. In 1901, he painted Ena and Betty Wertheimer, the grown daughters of Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy English art dealer. The portrait shows two lively, dark-haired young women in evening gowns: Betty wears red velvet, while Ena is in white. An X ray of the painting ordered by London’s Tate Gallery reveals that Sargent originally painted Betty’s strap to fall from her shoulder, just as in Madame X. This was probably a playful gesture on Sargent’s part. Betty Wertheimer was known to have a good sense of humor, and Sargent always looked for ways to amuse his sitters. Although he repainted the strap, the fact that he painted it fallen suggests his state of mind: Madame X’s strap was no longer a painful subject to him, and he was still thinking about Amélie.

  John Singer Sargent, Three Profiles of Madame Gautreau, 1906-1913

  Sargent was still thinking about Amélie years after he painted her in Madame X. He was a successful artist living in London when he sketched these three versions of her unforgettable profile. (Courtesy Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, Photograph by David Mathews. Image copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

  Indeed, sometime between 1906 and 1913, Sargent doodled Amélie’s image on a piece of paper. He seems to have been working from memory when he drew her famous profile three times. He crossed out the first one, left the second completely visible, and blacked out the chin on the third. The drawings were done after Sargent had started exhibiting the painting.

  By 1907, Sargent had painted somewhere in the vicinity of 550 portraits. He had been a professional artist for more than thirty years and his enormous body of work included portraits, subject paintings, and landscapes; oils, drawings, watercolors, even sculptures for the massive Boston Public Library project; yet Sargent was best known as a portraitist. While his fervent wish in 1884 had been to join the top tier of French portrait painters, now that he was perhaps the leading portrait painter in the world, he wanted nothing more than to move on to what he considered more creative work. Of the portraits he felt forced to do, he said, “I abhor and abjure them, and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes.” Sargent derisively spelled the word “paughtrait,” and declared “No more mugs!” to whoever would listen.

  The more he announced that he was through with portraits, however, the harder people worked to change his mind. One wealthy couple booked a hotel room adjacent to his, hoping to stage a “spontaneous” meeting that would give them a chance to plead their case. Sargent did his best to sidestep such requests, satisfying insistent admirers with quick charcoal drawings in lieu of dreaded oil.

  In spite of his wishes and his accomplishments, Madame X was still, without question, his most famous work. Museum curators begged him to sell it, but he consistently refused. He sent the painting to exhibitions: it traveled to Italy in 1911, and to San Francisco four years later for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

  After the San Francisco fair ended in early December 1915, instead of making arrangements to ship the painting back to London, Sargent sent a letter to his friend Edward Robinson, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, mentioning that the portrait of Madame Gautreau was in the United States. Robinson had expressed interest in purchasing Madame X a few years earlier, when he was at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Sargent was inclined to let the painting stay in America, he wrote, if a museum would be interested in buying it. He asked £1,000 for it—about $5,000, and substantially less than his fee for portraits at the time—stipulating that, “on account of the row I had with the lady years ago . . . the picture should not be called by her name.” The Metropolitan accepted Sargent’s offer and conditions, and the painting was sent from San Francisco to New York, where it was installed in the museum. There, for the first time, it became known officially as Madame X.

  Amélie had died the previous July, while the painting was hanging at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Perhaps it was her death that finally prompted Sargent to let go of the portrait that had been in his studios some thirty years. Sargent’s directive to the museum to leave Amélie’s name off the painting, however, defied explanation. When he first suggested the idea, Sargent had invoked his old disagreement with Amélie. But she and her family were hardly in a position to make a fuss. Both Amélie and her mother—the family members who had objected back in 1884—were dead. It was doubtful that Pedro, estranged from his wife for more than a decade before her death, cared about her name.

  Was Sargent trying to punish Amélie in some way? By removing her name from Madame X, he robbed her of a claim to immortality.

  Whether his true feelings for his subject had been love, obsession, or disillusionment, Sargent had no reservations about her image. In the letter he wrote offering the portrait to the Metropolitan Museum, he echoed the enthusiasm of a twenty-four-year-old Amélie. Madame X was a masterpiece, she had breathlessly declared in a letter. “I suppose,” Sargent told the museum director, “it is the best thing I have done.”

  Twilight of the Gods

  Sargent was sixty years old in 1916, when he sold Madame X to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was one of the most famous artists of his time, his works coveted by heads of state, museums, and collectors around the world. Journalists pounced on him for interviews, while museums and art schools, such as the Royal Academy of Art in London, competed for his advice and support. In 1917, he suspended his boycott of portraits to paint John D. Rockefeller and President Woodrow Wilson, having been approached with the argument that he was the only artist accomplished enough to depict the financial titan and the political eminence. England, Sargent’s adopted home, paid him the supreme compliment of offering him a knighthood. But Sargent politely declined, responding that he was “not one of His Majesty’s Subjects but an American citizen.”

  Upholding the Sargent family tradition, he traveled constantly. His yearly routine saw him spend winter, spring, and early summer in London, and move through Europe during the rest of the summer and autumn. His sister Emily was his hostess when he was at home in England and his frequent companion when he was abroad. Mary Sargent had died in 1906, finally liberating her older daughter from the full-time job of keeping her company. For the first time in her life, at almost fifty, Emily was free to pursue her own interests. She chose to spend her time managing her brother’s household, and painting—watercolors similar in style to her brother’s. Although she and Sargent never lived together, Emily became a welcome fixture in his life. In late middle age, the siblings resumed the close relationship of their nomadic childhood.

  Whether at home or abroad, Sargent led an active social life. Like Henry James, he went anywhere and everywhere. The artist rarely declined an invitation to join a dinner party; one hostess observed that she did not need to cultivate any other celebrities when she could get Sargent every day. Sargent’s prodigious appetite showed no signs of declining as he grew older. When he deemed the portions at his club too small, the husky Sargent resigned his membership and defected to a club that offered more generous servings.

  Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Sargent was very much in the public eye, the subject of magazine articles, reviews in newspapers and art journals, testimonials, and drawing room conversation. But no matter how often his name appeared in print, he remained extremely private in all personal matters, only occasionally revealing the scantest details by the company he was seen to keep. Unlike many other artists and intellectuals who recorded their every thought and impression, Sargent did not keep a journal. And his letters were notoriously terse. James and other friends often speculated about Sargent’s relationships with women. Flora Priestly, a Broadway friend and the subject of several Sargent sketches and paintings, was often suggested as a potential mate because he spent time with her over the years. But like Lou
ise Burckhardt, she was no more than a platonic friend. Sargent admired Priestly, but he never pursued a relationship with her, or, it seems, with anyone else.

  In 1918, during World War I, Britain’s Ministry of Information invited Sargent to visit the front in Boulogne as an official war artist. He was interested in observing the fighting firsthand, and confessed that he hoped to “have the chance of being well-scared.” But Sargent’s enthusiasm was tempered by his need to surround himself with his creature comforts. He traveled to the front with painting supplies, a camp stool, and a full wardrobe, and is rumored to have asked a military official if the war would be suspended on Sundays. Here was a man who had spent most of his life in a world built on proper routines and schedules; war was chaotic, unfamiliar.

  And yet his experience at the front brought him to create a memorable war painting. He had seen a group of soldiers, blinded by mustard gas, waiting in line at an infirmary for medical treatment. Back in London, Sargent rendered a nightmarish vision of the young victims in a large canvas entitled Gassed. With this painting he defied expectations regarding his ability: he could paint not only the socialite but also the soldier, and both in powerful, revelatory detail.

  After the war, Sargent divided his time between London and Boston, where, having completed his Triumph of Religion murals for the Boston Public Library, he commenced work on decorative murals for the rotunda of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Though in his late sixties, Sargent insisted on personally handling every detail involving his art, just as he had as a young man. He maintained his own studio, crated his own artwork, and even helped carry it to the street when necessary.