As he crossed the country by rail, curiosity seekers flocked to each station, craning to get a look at this flowery character through the train windows. A popular tune of the day went:
Oscar dear, Oscar dear,
How utterly flutterly utter you are.
Oscar dear, Oscar dear,
I think you are awfully wild, ta-ta.
During his yearlong tour, Wilde gave dozens of lectures—on “The Decorative Arts” or “The English Renaissance”—in New York and Boston but also in smaller locales, such as Atchison, Kansas. In a rough Rocky Mountain mining town he lectured on “The Ethics of Art,” reading passages from the autobiography of the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. He told a reporter: “I would dignify labor by stripping it of its degradation, and that by developing all that is beautiful in the laborer’s surroundings and opening his eyes to it. Ah! I would speak to the hard-working people, whom I wish I could reach through the prejudice that shuts them and me away from each other.” In order to reach those people, he descended a mineshaft in a rickety bucket “in which it was impossible to be graceful,” and deep underground drank whiskey with the men.
Another lecture, on “The House Beautiful,” offered instruction on aestheticizing the American home. No plain marble tables. No stuffed birds. “Have nothing in your houses that is not useful or beautiful,” Wilde demanded. There was far too much glaring white and dreary gray used in American interiors, he moaned. Pianos were melancholy. The revolving stool “should be sent to the museum of horrors.” He was no fan of hat racks, brightly painted ceilings, or bad art. “Poor pictures are worse than none.” On the subject of fine china he was adamant. “There is nothing so absurd as having good china stuck up in a cabinet merely for show while the family drink from delft,” he raved. “If you can’t use good old china without breaking it, then you don’t deserve to have it.”
Often during his trip, reporters claimed to have seen Wilde carrying around a sunflower, or a lily, or even gazing into a box of violets in order to compose himself. Flowers were his refuge, and he reserved his worst condemnation for their silk or paper imitators. “Of all ugly things,” he told his American admirers, “nothing can exceed in ugliness artificial flowers.”
In her apartment at Versailles, King Louis XV’s pretty, pale mistress Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764) woke and drifted toward her vanity table, artfully stage-set with porcelain paste pots and pomade and creams, lacquered powder boxes and swansdown powder puffs, ribbons, pompons, and lace. She did a preliminary round of primping, applying a foundation base of lead white to her skin, as was the fashion, and a dab of rouge, while her maid half-styled her hair. Then, at eleven o’clock, after an impressive number of noblemen, artists, and writers, including Diderot and Voltaire, had clustered around, she applied her makeup again, as if for the first time, demonstrating how she put together her look. Voltaire (1694–1778) composed these lines in honor of their mornings together:
Pompadour your divine pencil
should draw your face.
Never would a more beautiful hand
make a more beautiful work of art.
Others appreciated her artifice less.
“The second toilette is nothing but a game invented by coquetry,” grumbled a critic. But it wasn’t merely Pompadour’s charm or beauty that lured a flattering crowd. Just like the king at his lever, she went through her morning routine for the audience, sitting in her frothy negligee while a maid powdered her hair. She applied a streak of eyeliner and dusted her cheeks with several thick layers of rouge. Even her most important guests stood, and she rose only to greet princes of royal blood and cardinals. As the king’s official mistress, she held enormous sway. “The ministers tell her ahead of time whatever they have to say to the King,” noted the Austrian ambassador. “He himself wants it that way.” She brokered deals, and the men asked her opinion about everything. She was, as one of the aristocrats put it, the “oracle of the Court.” “She decides, she arbitrates, she looks upon the ministers as hers.”
Of course, the king’s ministers weren’t hers at all, though attendance at her morning toilette outshone that at the queen’s. She was born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, a bright and rosy bourgeois beauty with an eye for architecture and an easy way with the artists and thinkers who were around her. After their affair began in 1745, the king elevated Pompadour to marquise and installed her at Versailles as his official mistress. She was the ultimate arriviste, as her makeup made abundantly clear. Ordinary eighteenth-century Parisiennes dabbed rouge on their cheeks, simulating a healthy blush. That was not the Versailles way. The courtiers’ intense, garish makeup was wholly artificial, and heavy rouge was reserved for the elite. On arriving at Versailles, the Austrian Marie-Antoinette (1735–1793) adopted the flaming-red-cheeked custom. Louis XV even decreed that his daughters should wear rouge, when they were old enough. “It is well known that rouge is nothing more than the mark of rank or wealth, because it cannot be supposed that anyone has thought to become more beautiful with this terrible crimson patch,” a detractor sniped in 1750.
When the king was no longer interested in Pompadour as a lover, he realized that he’d come to rely on her political craftiness in ways that could not be undone. In the late 1750s, when Pompadour suffered fevers, migraines, palpitations, and even seizures, she commissioned several portraits by painter François Boucher (1703–1770) to remind the world of her former glory. In 1758, Boucher painted her posed in full regalia, pink roses blooming on her green gown and on her cheeks. The next year, he painted her again, this time as the quintessential mistress, glowing and pink-cheeked, her dainty brush loaded with rouge as she sat at her vanity table.
By then she’d given up performing her toilette for visitors, and instead greeted them while seated at her loom.
With their toes in the sand, ancient Romans thought they’d reached Olympus. Then, as now, lazing in the sun at the shore was one of life’s chief pleasures. The Roman elite maintained dozens of villas along the coast, including those at splashy Antium (modern Anzio), a spot favored by the good-time emperors Caligula and Nero. But when the empire collapsed, lounging at the beach went with it. Over the next millennium, modesty ruled across Europe’s beaches. Visitors to the English seaside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were subjected to bathing machines, booths wheeled into the water by attendants so that the boxed-in bather could remain primly hidden inside. Even into the late nineteenth century, the idea that French men and women might dip themselves along the same stretch of sand shocked the English.
Over the years, solar enthusiasts, Scandinavians, and the medically adventurous crowed about the health benefits of sunlight, but the beach never regained its former glamour until the early 1920s, when a small coterie of chic American ex-pats made Saint-Tropez what it is today. First came songwriter Cole Porter (1891–1964), who rented a chateau in Antibes in the summer of 1921, when the summer was still considered off-season. Two years later, a couple of Porter’s guests, the Murphys—the handsome heiress Sara Murphy (1883–1975) and her socialite/painter husband, Gerald (1888–1964)—struck out on their own and turned summer along the Côte d’Azure into a way of life. At Villa America the Murphys created a series of sumptuous and sunny tableaux vivants for their guests, as if summering were an artistic calling. They believed that “only the invented part of life was satisfying,” Gerald explained, “only the unrealistic part.”
“When we went to visit Cole, it was a hot, hot summer, but the air was dry, and it was cool in the evening, and the water was that wonderful jade-and-amethyst color,” he remembered. “Right out on the end of the Cap there was a tiny beach—the Garoupe—only about forty yards long and covered with a bed of seaweed that must have been four feet thick. We dug out a corner of the beach and bathed there and sat in the sun, and we decided this is where we wanted to be.” Most days, at eleven o’clock the Murphys hosted guests such as Pablo Picasso (with whom Sara may have had an affair) and his first wife, Olga, along with F
. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, or Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, for an excursion down to the beach. While the children did exercises with Gerald and romped in the surf, the Murphys paddled around in a canoe, served sherry, sunbathed, and swam. When everyone was worn out, they all went back to Villa America for a lunch of omelets, a salad from the garden, and local wine, served on the terrace under the linden tree. Afterward, there was a costume party or a treasure hunt for the kids. The Murphys took their leisure seriously.
“I could stand it for about four days,” American novelist John Dos Passos (1896–1970) said of his time as a guest there. “It was like trying to live in heaven. I had to get back down to earth.” Others were smitten. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas came to stay. The Stravinskys took a house in nearby Nice. Cocteau and the opium-loving crowd found their way to Villefranche. Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes settled in at Monte Carlo. The rest of the society types whom the Murphys hoped to avoid followed, slicking their newly bared skin with the first suntan oil, Jean Patou’s Huile de Chaldée, and soaking in the rays. “It was delicious,” remembered Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge (1904–1992), who boldly took his new bride to the Riviera for their summer honeymoon. “We immediately started sunbathing, exaggerated sunbathing. It was a study, it took time, hours and hours of sunbathing.”
When the sun is high, a shady garden grotto offers quiet respite and a poetical spot in which to ponder life’s mysteries. The earliest garden grottoes were ancient Greek and Roman holy shrines thought to be mystical passageways to the underworld or the stony homes of nymphs and muses. During the Renaissance, fanciful gardeners revived the style. The Italian poet Petrarch called the rocky garden grotto at his retreat near Avignon one of the essentials of a life of leisure. “Hither I retreat during the noon-tide hours,” he wrote to a friend. “I am confident it much resembles the place where Cicero sometimes went to declaim. It invites to study.”
One of the most influential grottoes was the one Sir Francis Bacon’s secretary Thomas Bushell (1593–1674) built around a craggy twelve-foot rock full of nooks and dripping water at Enstone in Oxfordshire, England—the grotto soon to be known as the Enstone Marvels. Reports of the mighty rock and its wonders made their way to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta, who paid a visit one afternoon in 1636. They were impressed with the spring-fed waterworks, the Neptune fountain, and by Bushell’s apartment above the grotto—a little hermitage all draped in black, “representing a melancholly retyr’d life like a Hermits,” said Bushell. The queen gave him an Egyptian mummy to decorate his tiny retreat. Unfortunately, it moldered in the damp.
In the next century, the grotto was a customary extravagance in every fine English garden. Poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), who set the fashion in landscaping, claimed one of the best, its walls covered with seashells in the ancient Roman style. His friend William Warburton (1698–1779) compared the shadowy hideaway to Pope’s best work, noting “the beauty of his poetic genius in the disposition and ornaments of this romantic recess.” Mirror shards and exotic gifts from friends studded the walls. The Dowager Duchess of Cleveland sent masses of amethyst. Another friend sent glimmering ores. A third gave pieces of lava from Mount Vesuvius and a fragment of marble from an ancient Roman grotto thought to have been home to the nymph Egeria. Friends sent fossils, crystals, petrified moss from the West Indies, gold from Peru, silver from Mexico, and Brazilian pebbles. Classical busts and urns were on display, as was a hummingbird’s nest. From a star-shaped mirror on the ceiling “a thousand pointed rays glitter and are reflected all over the place,” Pope wrote to a friend. Most spectacular of all, however, was that the dark grotto became a camera obscura when its doors were closed, with images of the Thames and the surrounding countryside projected onto the walls through a small aperture. It all created an “undistinguishable Mixture of Realities and Imagery,” according to a visitor.
Pope’s nineteenth-century biographers supposed that he’d overdecorated with friendly gifts he simply couldn’t refuse. But Pope loved the eclectic mix, putting off the day when the grotto would be finished, and continuing to embellish it until just before his death. “I am one of that sort who at his heart loves bawbles better (than riches),” he wrote to the Duchess of Marlborough, “and throws away his gold and silver for shells and glittering stones.”
For her part, another of the era’s great grandes dames, Frances, Countess of Hertford, judged her own grotto “much prettier than Mr. Pope’s,” as England’s passion for unusual seashells raged. Rare shells were sold at auction during the 1760s, and those who kept shell-decorated grottoes and elaborate shell temples spent small fortunes on the prettiest specimens, especially those from the West Indies. Margaret Bentinck, Second Duchess of Portland (1715–1785), constructed a cave studded with a thousand snail shells, and so obsessed over her collection that after her death everything she owned went toward covering her debts. Over a seven-year span, Sarah Lennox, Duchess of Richmond (1705–1751), with her daughters, created an artificial cave, designing intricate symmetries across its walls in a mosaic of shells and bits of mirror glass. Captain Charles Knowles carted an entire shipload of shells to complete the décor, while the floor was set with polished horses’ teeth.
The poets praised such efforts and applauded the ladies who spent their days plastering shells to the walls. “The beauties of this grott divine,” an admirer wrote in 1746 of Lady Fane’s grotto in Berkshire. “What miracles are wrought by shells, / Where nicest taste and fancy join.”
A breathtaking new skyline rose over Manhattan during the first half of the twentieth century. “It is demonstrable that small rooms breed small thoughts,” an American writer explained, describing in 1905 the view from atop the colossal twenty-two-story Flatiron Building. “It will be demonstrable that as buildings ascend so do ideas. It is mental progress that skyscrapers engender.” In Europe, it would have been unthinkable to overshadow hallowed cathedrals and monuments, even in the name of mental progress. But in the United States, audacious sky-scraping constructions seized the popular imagination, as did the men who built them. As pioneering beam walkers ventured into midair, the physical danger made the men seem superhuman. The London Daily Herald called New York’s steelworkers “classical heroes in the flesh.”
In 1925, construction crews raced to complete 350 new buildings across the city, a “chase up into the sky,” as The New York Times called it. Five years later, the city’s best workers, known as “sky boys,” were erecting the Empire State Building—sixty thousand tons of structural steel—at the rate of four and a half stories a week. Many were Caughnawaga Mohawks, recently arrived from a reservation near Montreal. Others were sailors with experience rigging tall ships. (The word “skyscraper” referred to a ship’s sails until the late nineteenth century.) Journalists and photographers ascended the buildings to find the skyboys more than a thousand feet in the air, strolling the latticed beams without hard hats, safety gear, or a care in the world. Riveters used their torches to light cigarettes. Crowds gaped from the windows all around them. It was the “best open-air show in town,” a reporter noted.
Of course, the men weren’t there to put on a show or to enjoy the altitude. “Yeah, it’s a nice view, but we ain’t got much time for that,” one of the steel-men told the Times. Still, at noon when the whistle blew and they sat down to “gulp down two sandwiches, coffee or milk, and pie,” they couldn’t help but enjoy the panoramic sprawl. Mobile cafeterias shuttled up and down the skeletal structure, and only a handful of men left the site for their lunch break. As one veteran steelworker quietly confessed, “hopping around above the steeples with nothing but a six-inch steel beam between you and an introduction to the angels” was a “joy-ride.” After all, if the skyboys didn’t love it up there, “instead of being steel-workers they’d be selling fish, or something,” he said. “It’s a romp.”
FOR CENTURIES JAPAN’S EMPERORS HOSTED lavish celebrations in April to savor the ephemeral blossoming of the cherry trees.
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The ritual began during the Heian era (794–1185), when an acute aesthetic sensitivity defined courtly life and slowly spread from the palace’s highest echelons to the commoners, and from the cities to the provinces. Elegance mattered, as did a heartfelt empathy for natural fragility, an ideal best represented by the cherry blossoms, which fell after some three days of flowering, a dicey period during which even a brief storm could wipe them out entirely, making their beauty all the more precious.
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