That’s how it went, day after day, week after week. Painting and scraping, painting and scraping. Sargent worked with amazing speed. He’d look at me a second, then dash a few brush strokes onto his canvas and glance at me again. From time to time, he’d dart to the back of the room so he could see how the light played on my figure from a distance. He’d squint at me for a few moments before running forward to apply more paint to the canvas.
For me, the ordeal was almost unbearable. My twisted right arm felt as if it would fall off. My back ached from standing for hours, and my eyes burned from staring out the windows into the full sunlight, which I had to do to keep my profile to Sargent.
On most days, I posed for three hours, from ten to one. In the afternoons, I took walks in the woods with Louise to collect wildflowers. Sargent usually used this time to paint the portrait’s background. One day, as my daughter and I sat on a log by a stream, Sargent strolled by. In one hand, he carried a large butterfly net, and, in the other, a metal box, where he placed the creatures he caught after carefully asphyxiating them with the smoke from his cigar.
I often felt like one of those butterflies caught in Sargent’s net. During my posing sessions, he let me take a break for only fifteen minutes every hour. Usually at this time I played the piano. Though Sargent himself was an accomplished musician, he told me I played better than he did, so he’d relax by letting me entertain him. Often I played Beethoven, sometimes Haydn and Chopin. Once, I made the mistake of playing a sonata by Mozart, a composer Sargent disliked.
“Really, Madame, you should learn some Wagner,” he said.
“I don’t care for Wagner.”
“You should. Through its harmonic complexity, his music captures what is deepest about the human condition.”
“And what is most unmellifluous.”
Sargent looked annoyed. Richard Wagner was one of his musical gods. While I was socializing in Dinard that summer, the artist spent many evenings playing Tristan, Die Walküre, and Parsifal at the home of Judith Gautier, a writer and Wagner devotee who lived in a seaside house in Saint-Enogat, a short carriage ride away. Madame Gautier was the daughter of Théophile Gautier, and the estranged wife of Catulle Mendès, a writer and critic. I met Judith Gautier once at a Pasdeloup concert in Paris. Dressed in a huge caftan, she was overweight and shapeless, but her face was beautiful, as pale and shimmery as the moon. Her friends called her “the white elephant.” In her thinner days, Madame Gautier was rumored to have been the lover of Victor Hugo and Wagner himself. I thought there was something sexless about her, as indeed there was about Sargent.
He was a priest of art, as celibate as a monk. Though the only nude drawings I saw in his studio were of men, I don’t think he was an invert. I’m sure the idea of sleeping with a man would have been as horrifying to him as the idea of sleeping with a woman. Perhaps more so.
I never felt for a moment that Sargent desired me. He didn’t see me as a human being, only as elements of his art. He was fascinated by my blue-white skin, the kind of skin Colette once described as milk in shadow. But he was having great difficulty capturing it.
“I’m painting paint!” he complained one day. “And the paint I’m painting keeps changing. One day you’re the color of the blotting paper at Guiton’s papeterie. The next, you’re a chlorate-of-potash lozenge. If you’re going to mix your own powder, I wish you’d keep it the same color.”
“So when you look at me, you think of paying bills and gargling?”
He didn’t answer. He was absorbed in studying me. “Maybe I’d have better luck if I could see your natural color. Could you try removing your makeup?” he asked.
I was reluctant. I wanted to decide the face I’d present in the portrait. Why should I let this artist see every vein and pore in my skin?
“I’ll scrub it off, if you promise not to portray me without powder,” I said.
“First, let me see your face,” he insisted.
Grumpily, I retired to my room and wiped a wet cloth over my face, neck, chest, and arms.
When I returned, Sargent took a long look at me. “I’ve never seen such white skin,” he said.
“When I was a girl, my mother took me to a doctor who gave me a concoction mixed with arsenic to make me even whiter.”
“He gave you poison?”
“I know. It made me sick, so I refused to take it.”
Sargent strolled to the table where he had set up his supplies and began mixing colors.
“You promised you wouldn’t paint me without makeup,” I protested.
“I know, Madame. I think I have a clearer idea what to do. You can reapply your powder now.”
With my face redone, we began working again. But after twenty minutes, Sargent threw his brush down. He flopped into a chair and held his face in his hands. “Damn,” he said, using the only swear word he allowed himself. “I can’t do it. You’re unpaintable.”
Sargent decided he needed to get away, to take a vacation from my portrait. The next day, he left for Paris, then a brief trip to the Netherlands. But the excursion did little to settle him. When he returned, he was more agitated than ever. Studying portraits by Frans Hals in the Haarlem museum only made him despair of ever painting a masterpiece himself.
To add to his vexations, Mama had arrived for a visit, and she insisted on attending my sittings. She was full of complaints about the portrait. She didn’t like the dark, plain background, the pose, the skin color. Above all, she objected to the fallen shoulder strap.
“You must paint it in place!” she insisted.
“Oh, Madame, a trifle like that you can do yourself when you get the canvas home.” Sargent winked at me.
Mama glared at us. “And what makes you think I’d ever hang this picture in my house?” Her voice was shrill. “Look at the skin tone. She looks dead, two-dimensional. Can’t you put some color in besides that sickly purple-white?”
“Mama, this isn’t a commissioned portrait. Will you leave Monsieur Sargent alone?”
Sargent sighed heavily and put down his brush. “I’m working on the color,” he wearily told her. “The picture is far from finished, Madame Avegno. You must wait to pass judgment until you see the completed work.”
“I’ll feel the same then,” she snapped. With a great swish of her silk taffeta skirt, she strode out of the room.
Sargent dipped his brush into a hill of brown paint. “I’m beginning to regret you have a mother,” he confessed.
“I regretted it a long time ago.”
That evening, Sargent went to Saint-Enogat to visit Judith Gautier. At nine, just as the sky was turning from orangy-pink to deep blue, the maids lit the paraffin lamps in the dining room and Mama, Madame Gautreau, Millicent, and I took our places around the long polished wood table. A moment later, the footmen brought in the first course, soupe de cresson.
“I like it when Monsieur Sargent isn’t here, because then there’s more food for the rest of us,” Millicent chirped. It was true. Sargent had a gargantuan appetite. I’ve never seen anyone, even Gambetta, consume so much at one sitting, though at this point in his life he remained slim. At meals, Sargent looked lovingly at the food as it was brought in, and began to attack it as soon as it was placed in front of him.
Just as the maids cleared the second course, a delicious suprême de volaille, one of the footmen announced Sargent. The artist walked into the dining room carrying a small wood panel in one arm and a paint box in the other.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, addressing Pierre’s mother. “For some reason, I feel inspired tonight. Madame Gautier and I dined on the terrace; perhaps the sea breeze blew some fresh ideas through my head. Would you mind if I made an oil sketch of your daughter-in-law while you enjoy dessert?”
“If you must,” growled the old lady.
Sargent moved his chair next to mine, and after setting up his palette, he began to paint. Night had fallen, and the room was bathed in warm, golden lamplight.
Millicent had
been watching Sargent closely. Now she spoke up. “Monsieur Sargent, in honor of your absence tonight, I ate two servings of chicken, yours and mine.”
“I’m so very glad it didn’t go to waste,” said Sargent without taking his eyes off me.
I picked up my champagne glass, raised it in Millicent’s direction across the table, and said, “To Millicent, who has the great appetite of the great painter John Singer Sargent.”
The poor woman rose from her chair and, nodding dramatically, bowed deeply to each person at the table. Mama stared down at her lap, and Madame Gautreau looked apoplectic with rage, though she said nothing.
An hour passed, and the three women went to bed. I continued to pose for Sargent until I couldn’t keep my eyes open another moment.
“Please let me go to sleep,” I begged.
“Very well. I can finish this tomorrow.”
I slept through breakfast the next morning. When I came downstairs, Mama and Sargent were chatting in the parlor. They both looked happy and relaxed. My portrait sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. On the easel was the oil sketch that Sargent had done the night before.
He had caught me reaching across the table with a glass in my hand, my profile silhouetted against a velvety dark background. The painting was suffused with golden light; the pink roses on the table were rendered with a few bold, impressionistic strokes. My skin looked flushed and healthy under the organza wrap I had worn over a black silk dress. In the portrait’s upper right corner, Sargent had inscribed, “To Madame Avegno, as a testimony of my affection, John S. Sargent.”
Mama was thrilled. “Mimi, look, isn’t it beautiful,” she said as I entered the room. “I was just telling Monsieur Sargent, this is the picture he should send to the Salon.”
Nine
The next afternoon, Sargent crated both pictures and made arrangements to have the oil on wood sent to Mama’s hôtel and the canvas sent to his studio. Then he, Mama, and I took the carriage to Saint-Malo and boarded a train for Paris, arriving at Gare Montparnasse near midnight. Before bidding us bonne nuit on the station platform, the artist turned to me. “If you can stand it,” he said, “I might ask you to sit once or twice more.”
“That would be fine,” I answered.
“I’ll be in touch.” Sargent tipped his hat and vanished into the crowd.
Months passed with no word from him. I had no idea what had become of the picture. Then one afternoon, while I was reading in the parlor, the doorbell rang, and a moment later Julie rushed in, her face bright and her eyes shining. “I’ve seen it!” she cried, throwing her gloves and cape onto a chair. I stopped reading and looked at her.
“You’ve seen what?” I asked.
“Your portrait. Carolus-Duran took me to Sargent’s studio this morning. It’s masterful, absolutely breathtakingly true. I have no doubt it’ll be the hit of the Salon.”
So Sargent had finished the portrait without my help. Why hadn’t he told me? After Julie left, I wrote him a note, and he wrote back saying that actually the portrait wasn’t yet complete. There were still a few improvements he wanted to make, and he’d let me know when he was ready to show it.
Finally, in February, he invited Pierre and me to his new studio to see it. We dropped by one evening on our way to the opera. Sargent had moved to an elegant house at 41, boulevard Berthier, not far from us. The artist lived in a small apartment on the ground floor and worked upstairs in a large studio, where Pierre and I found him. The walls were covered in William Morris prints and were hung with Sargent’s paintings. Long dark-green draperies, against which Sargent planned to pose his elegant clientele—the clientele he expected to rush to his door following the success of my portrait—fell from the ceiling. A couch, a few tables and chairs, and an upright piano made up the furnishings. Sargent displayed his most prized possessions near the door—a suit of Japanese armor and, in a glass-fronted cabinet, his collection of mounted butterflies.
My portrait stood like royalty in the middle of the room, in an enormous gilt frame attached to the easel. It looked larger than I had remembered, more taut and stylized. Since I had last seen it, Sargent had slimmed the contours of the skirt by painting out part of the bustle, and he had removed swatches of the train that had flowed out from my left hand.
“My God, it’s a masterpiece,” said Pierre, his eyes glistening. “She’s so alive. She looks like she’s about to turn and step out of the canvas.”
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” I echoed.
In fact, I couldn’t tell how I felt about the picture. Even after all my anticipation, it was overwhelming—on a cheery Parisian night, when I was dressed in finery and occupied with thoughts of the opera we were about to hear—to come upon a dramatic life-size picture of myself. My gaze seemed to be galloping frantically over the canvas, tripping over details. The woman in the painting certainly cast a glorious figure, but I couldn’t believe she looked much like me. Her visible eye was nothing but a black smudge, and her mouth a red blob. I kept coming back to the ear. It looked enflamed. My ears didn’t look that red in real life. Or did they? I’d have to study them in the mirror when I got home. Perhaps I should stop rouging them.
As I stood there staring at the portrait, a flash of vertigo overcame me. I reached for Pierre’s arm, and in that dizzying moment I did indeed see myself in the painting. For one confused instant, I wasn’t sure whether I was on the canvas looking out or standing in Sargent’s studio staring back.
The moment passed immediately. “Can I sit down?” I asked and plopped onto the couch without waiting for an answer. Sargent followed me to my perch. “I’m so pleased you like it,” he said. “As you can see, I’ve made some changes. The background was too gloomy, so I dashed a tone of light rose over it.”
“Maybe the ear is a little too red,” I said quietly.
Sargent raised his thick chestnut eyebrows and, with mock annoyance, grumbled, “Women always find something wrong with their portraits.” Then, in a serious tone, he added, “Maybe it isn’t perfect yet.”
He took a long look at me. I could see him thinking, trying to strike an idea. Then he began muttering to himself, “Something’s missing, something’s missing.” I happened to be wearing the diamond tiara that Pierre had given me in honor of Louise’s birth, and suddenly Sargent’s eyes brightened. “That crescent is just the thing!” he cried. “Don’t move, Madame Gautreau.”
Pierre and I watched as the artist mixed some light-colored paints, picked up his brush, and dipped it into a white mound on his palette. With one quick, elegant stroke, he produced my diamond crescent on the canvas. Then he jogged to the other end of the room and studied the picture.
“There. That’s it. A modern Diana,” he said.
About then, I was surprised to notice, leaning against the piano, an unfinished replica of my portrait. The background and skirt were incomplete, and my right shoulder was bare; Sargent had yet to paint the fallen strap.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A copy,” answered Sargent. “The surface of your portrait was so thick and overloaded from repainting it so many times, that I thought I’d start over. As you can see, I didn’t get very far.”
“What will you do with it?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps your husband would like to buy it?”
“I’ve got my eye on the original,” said Pierre. “We’ll talk after the Salon opening.”
He and Sargent shook hands, and Pierre and I went to the opera. Mozart’s Don Giovanni was on the bill, but I couldn’t get my mind off the portrait. Julie had raved about it, so I had expected to be thrilled, too. But I couldn’t shed a vague feeling of disappointment and foreboding.
Most of my concerns were precise and even petty. If I had known my skin was going to turn out so bluish, I wouldn’t have worn a dress that exposed so much of it. The picture was too stylized, I thought, like a heraldic figure on a coat of arms. I should have insisted on a more languid pose. And so on. Over the next few days, I r
egaled Pierre with my doubts and regrets. “Mimi! Stop it!” he finally shouted in exasperation. “Sargent is right. A woman can never judge the true worth of her portrait.”
Behind my specific complaints lay a deeper feeling, born of that shuddering moment of confusion when I had studied the painting in Sargent’s studio. He had caught me, and now in a small way he owned me. For one of the first times since my affair with Dr. Pozzi, I had the emptying sense of not being in control.
Still, I fought off those twitches of dread and didn’t even mention them to Pierre. Meanwhile, though no reporters had seen the picture yet, there was great anticipation about it in the press. Rumors had flown around town about Sargent’s mysterious Portrait of Madame ***, as the painting was listed in the Salon catalog. It was customary then not to identify the female subject of a painting in the title, but everyone knew it was I. As the opening of the Salon drew near, the society columnist for L’Illustration wrote, “Among the four thousand works soon to be unveiled, none are more eagerly awaited than the painting titled Portrait of Madame *** by John Singer Sargent. An American painter of infinite talent, Monsieur Sargent has triumphed in previous Salons not only with his portraits of beautiful women but also with a picture of a wild Spanish dance and another of aristocratic little girls in an antechamber. The current portrait, which he worked on for two years, is said to be a brilliant likeness of the stunning Virginie Avegno Gautreau.”
The advance notices enraptured Mama, who had suddenly decided that the portrait was brilliant after all. In her ear, the applause was already building for her splendid daughter. Having been deprived of giving me both a proper debut and a big society wedding, she intended to make up for it by throwing the most lavish pre-Salon party in the history of Paris.
Mama planned her fête for the night before vernissage, the grand social opening of the show. Historically, vernissage, or varnishing day, represented the moment when artists put the finishing touches on their pictures that already hung on the Salon’s walls. But it had evolved in my time into the season’s premier social event, when the gratin viewed the exhibit before the democratic hordes arrived for the official opening the next day.
I Am Madame X Page 22