The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  Such was your manner in those days of early passion and our beautiful strangeness still one to the other. “And how can it surprise you when I declare finally that it is in thee that all my hopes for earthly happiness reside?” Your plea continues: “Allegra, please do not believe that I insist on a hasty and unconsidered answer. No, consider well in your own time. But on your answer, I believe in my deepest heart, depends our future happiness.”

  Yet, I do not want to give the impression that I was at leisure to spend much time in such memories and longings. Indeed, all that summer I had a queue of patrons, thanks to Tom. In my own work I had to continue my practice of attending to faces but filling in garmenture and background rapidly. Only with a rare, prosperous sitter could I afford to lavish more care on the figure, the hands, and any desired backgrounds. Working in Mr. Spooner’s studio, however, an altogether different practice prevailed, not only from the consistently higher station of his patrons, but for my role as student. And hardly a Thursday passed in his company that I did not learn something new or some limitation that I would have to overcome.

  Moreover, just watching Spooner at work was revelation in itself. Never had I seen a man so vigorous in his application of paint. I don’t recall ever seeing him sketch more than a few lines or volumes, and that seldom enough, directly on a canvas. I had witnessed an occasional study on a sketch sheet or board, but I had seen little else even of that nature. His customary manner was to let fly with brush, knife, and oils, to fill the canvas, after somber meditations, with the products of those meditations, and often, it seemed to me, more from memory than from the objects themselves. I believed at the time that he learned from Stuart the technique of mixing colors not on his palette so much as mixing them directly, impasto, on canvas and applying them in overlapping layers. Yet later I learned, from his conversation and instruction, that his techniques had been developed as well from the old masters—Rubens, Tintoretto, Rembrandt. From examining them carefully, that is to say, and from reading the accounts of such giants in Mengs and Mérimée.

  In point of fact, near the end of that summer, he began to grow impatient with the work I was doing to support myself, several examples of which I had shown him. He admitted that there was no help for it, that I had to survive by my own wit and gift, and that I was, as he would call me, his “young pioneer.” By that moniker I took him to mean that he found my wish not to marry again convenient for my own “autonomy and education,” as he called it. And he granted that my constant application of paint to canvas under any circumstances was less harmful than mill labor, farm chores, or schoolteaching. Moreover, he led me to believe that he admired my willingness to choose a relation to the world that in the world’s eyes was, to say the least, questionable.

  But without false civility he also insisted that there was nothing but distraction and artistic folly in the ornate costumes and stock poses beneath the “honest faces” of my commissioned portraits. He seemed to associate my folly on that score with the larger practice of obeisance to compositional and thematic formulae.

  “Where is the body and soul of the being in this painting,” he asked me one day, “unless you depict the truth—the freckles as well as the satins? And why should one settle for these mere textures?”

  “Do you not see the person and soul in the face, sir?” I asked him, more than a little hurt by this response to one of my recent portraits.

  “I’ll grant you that, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said. “There’s no denying your gift. Your likenesses are more than likenesses.” Then he began to frown. “But is that sufficient? Is face enough, and face stuck upon the canvas like a child’s cutout of the sun? To have the soul mirrored in the eyes or smile alone? Is not the truth of this person everywhere, in every turn of anatomical attitude, every crease of cloth or flesh, every mote of light and wisp of shadow?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Spooner, that those of us who paint the common people need to scale our labors to their economies, out of the necessity of getting our own livings?”

  “Yes yes, my dear lady.” He waved his hand, as if to say I had missed his point in my articulation of the obvious. “But you must see, I mean to point out the dangers of the naive formulae, no less than the academic, eh?” He paused to see if I followed. “And as to the ‘academic formulae,’ we need not, even in this age, add luster to the truth, to the very world that drenches us with every breath, with every flicker of light upon the eye. There is luster enough here and now, and it is divine enough here and now. Why should we follow the practice of so many painters today? Who model their figures in wax, dress them up in what colors and fashion they like, and put them into a little box, which does for a room? All mere affectations will soon be out of fashion! And then where shall we be if we settled for nothing more?” He looked at me and suddenly smiled. “Told that someone had affected a remarkable feat in painting with his fingers, Michaelangelo replied: ‘Why don’t the blockhead use his brush?’” He laughed.

  “I daresay, Mr. Spooner …” I began, but he cut me off.

  “No, no, Mrs. Fullerton, do not misunderstand. Please do not allow what is shoddy to hinder your best work. Let me ask of you only this in the interval before next Thursday. I have a book careful study might reward.” He walked over to the ample row of book-shelves he kept in his studio. He returned to me with a large tome, tall as his great hand and forearm and wide as his boots were long.

  “Smith,” he said. “John Rubens Smith. Just the thing for you, I think. Let’s begin to look with much greater attention at the figure in your paintings.”

  I took the book from him, admired the feel of it, and began turning through its pages, fraught with exquisite illustrations by way of instruction. A Key to the Art of Drawing the Human Figure.

  “He taught here, in Boston,” Mr. Spooner said, “some twenty years ago, before moving on to New York and Philadelphia. Regarded highly, Smith is. And he was master to Sully and Cummings, among others.” He had me flip to the “Recommendatory Certificate” at the back where Inman, Sully, King, Neagle, and Franklin Peale, among others, attested to the singular merit of Smith’s instructional technique.

  I asked him whether I should take the book with me and he urged me to do so indeed, and to benefit from its daily use. Pay special attention to Smith on male and female trunks and figures. In attitudes and recumbent.” He took the book from my hands and showed me the appropriate sections. “But do not forget his essential principle for students: parts must be studied before attempting to combine a whole.”

  He looked directly at me. “And one thing more. There is a freshness in your work, Mrs. Fullerton,” he added, “and a vigor you’ve heard me praise. That is your luck: not to have had such qualities crushed out of you by academy training. But there is a harsh innocence as well. And this innocence is that over which you must learn to prevail.”

  Mr. Spooner was always honest with me on every count. I respected him for that. He had about him a lack of humbug and of inflated bon homi such as I had never seen in a public man before. And as Julian had said of a similar quality in his work: “Mr. Spooner is that rarity—an artist whose powers and beauties come from deep beneath the surface of a painting, and cannot be faked, as if they were mere techniques or afterthoughts.”

  Julian had been speaking out of despair over his own inability to acquire that deeper beauty, but I recognized the merit in his point immediately, and I saw that it was these deeper qualities that I myself hoped to discover by my relation to Mr. Spooner. Yet I had come to worry myself about Julian’s progress as well. Here was a young man of talent whose ambitions, barring some revolution in his mode of life and thought, would likely come to naught. For despite his promise and ability, there was some flaw in his constitution that worked continually, as Fitz Lane had warned him, against his own best interests. It was not that he produced insufficient work. His work was adequate to maintain his way of living and to stave off the opprobrium of Mr. Spooner. And thereby h
e realized some snail’s progress, I believe, in the essentials.

  Yet he filled many of his vital hours with every conceivable manner of distraction from his work—or with every mere appurtenance to the central work. “My dear Julian,” Mr. Spooner once said to him, “you dress as if you had no talent!” And what prodigious goings and comings among his brilliant circle of friends—too many of whom were mere attitudinizers and promenaders, flirtatious posturers in love with the idea of being artists (but not with the patience and labor) and whose work proved withal predictable and lifeless. What vivacious teas and evening parties; what lengthy conversations and gossipings; what debates on chiaroscuro, depth of tone, and sauciness of color; what concert-goings and gallery musings and attendances at theatrical performances; what eternal walkings about the multitudinous city; what wine-samplings and convivial gatherings of every sort: all these, I say, comprised his gaggle of fondest distractions.

  Yet Julian had a deep desire to paint, that sting of the Muse’s serpent, so to speak, and a true visual gift. Moreover, his ambition for fame and accomplishment seemed unlimited.

  How sad then to witness that absence of personal discipline which opened the poor, dear man to every one of these temptations which I have enumerated, and to more which I have not. He seemed to exist in an ether of hopefulness that the skies would some day open and a bolt of divine, righteous lightning would strike close enough to catapult him into the first rank of artistic reputations in the eyes of the world.

  IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME, however, during the late summer of 1838, that I began once more to have feelings, or certain aperçus, that I was being watched. I could not account for them this time either, and Tom thought I had grown unnecessarily apprehensive, so I brushed such feelings aside. Surely neither my uncle nor Joseph Dudley, nor their agents, could have followed us into the teeming city to single me out.

  Moreover, I was busy with commissions, meeting other artists through Julian—like Fitz Lane, his friend from Gloucester and a wonderful lithographer—and engaged in my studies with Mr. Spooner, through whom I also had begun to meet artists of accomplishment and reputation, men who filled the city’s ranks of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Not only was I beginning to move in circles that I could not have entered on my own, Mr. Spooner and his magnificent talent were having a rather consuming effect upon me. There was something magnetic in his person, in the ardent, exemplary manner, sans peur et sans reproche, in which he had organized his life. His first principle was to exclude from his every day anything that might hinder his work, that might possibly close off those influences that quicken one’s current project.

  There came a moment of infatuation that now seems to signify my state of mind at this time, an infatuation that perhaps contributed to my lack of vigilance despite these presentiments of being observed. The moment came at day’s end after a Thursday in Mr. Spooner’s studio. We had been working—Julian, Gibbon, and I—with Mr. Spooner on a landscape of heroic proportions. The canvas, I recall, was five by eight feet at least. What Spooner hoped to capture was a revelatory moment from a walking tour with Thomas Cole in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Mr. Spooner had put off the attempt for some years. But I saw now the view he was after, or rather the sublime vision. From the top of a mountain—I believe he said it was Chocurura—beyond a westward expanse of mountaintops receding into the distant haze, lay a lake of divine light, levitating just at the horizon like a great pool, a calm afternoon sea, of gold or liquid fire.

  We were finally seated, that afternoon, tired yet excitable from our labors, and discussing the painting when Mr. Spooner brought in his customary bottles of wine, usually a smooth red Bordeaux. The late light of that September afternoon had cast its blush upon the works and tools and furnishings of the huge room. As we sat in convivial conversation, still in our bespattered smocks, Mr. Spooner began to steer us toward a new project he had been contemplating.

  It was to be a portrait of an unnamed woman standing by an open window at midday. Outside the window would be a profusion of sunlit blossoms. She would be just rising from her escritoire, a letter in her hand, perhaps dangling, a freshly opened envelope on the floor. Her face would capture the movement of moods, the very transition, he said, of serenity and poise passing over to discomfort and agitation.

  “What news?” Mr. Spooner asked. “What news in such a letter?”

  “Death of a loved one?” Julian speculated immediately.

  “Or death of Love,” Gibbon offered after a moment.

  Mr. Spooner smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps not. Part of the difficulty will be discovering what news.” He sipped his wine, then smiled.

  “Not to mention the changing moods,” Julian added, with a wave of his arm, “in the very moment of sweeping across her face.”

  “Ah, to be sure, Julian,” Mr. Spooner said. “Perhaps the heart of the difficulty, after all. But once in England, at Panshanger, I found a self-portrait by Andrea del Sarto which accomplishes just such a moment of transition in a face. He depicted himself standing over a table where he had been writing—and in the very act of looking up from the letter before him, his face full of nobility and melancholy. A moment of marvelous ambiguity and unpretentious self-knowledge. You see, he had been writing to his wife, the enduring object of his foolish desire, the infatuation whose blandishments he was helpless to resist, and against whose betrayals he continually turned a blind and innocent eye.” He paused to frown. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time, you see, and I’ve been putting off the difficulties.”

  “You have a particular woman in mind, father?” Gibbon asked.

  Mr. Spooner did not answer immediately. He got up out of his chair, placed his empty glass on a nearby table, and poured off among each of us the residue of a third bottle. When he came to me, he asked again, “What news, then? What do you say, Mrs. Fullerton?”

  “Betrayal?” I asked. “Perhaps betrayal in love? Some mysterious betrayal nonetheless, I should think. Wouldn’t death be too direct for the face you have in mind? The more commonplace the news, the greater the difficulty in capturing that facial nuance, the mutability, you speak of. Wouldn’t the danger be that one might overstate the mood, the motion, the … ambivalence you want, if I understand you correctly, sir?”

  “There is something in what you say, of course,” he answered. He bent down and set the empty wine bottle on the floor, then stooped over me and took my face in his big hands. I believe I trembled slightly. A thick lock of hair fell over his brow. His fingers were firm yet gentle as he turned my head a little side to side. “Your face is quite perfect, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said. “At once strong and well proportioned. You have got me thinking about the painting again. But I’ve hesitated to ask whether you’d sit for me. I know of course I’d have to make recompense for the time away from your own work.”

  As his hands dropped to his sides, and he regained his full height above me, I let out a little laugh.

  “A model for the ambiguous face, then?” I asked. I was a little startled by his closeness and familiarity, yet I felt a kind of tenderness in my response to his presence and his request. He alone among us worked in his linen painting shirts, open at the neck, spattered, often sweat-stained by the end of day. I had caught the strong scent of his flesh, not unpleasant, and saw his thick throat and the top of his deep chest while he bent to me and gently held my face. My feelings were an admixture of admiration, longing, and uncertainty. He was, to be sure, of my father’s generation, yet so unlike a father. And he was a man of such energy, of such passion for his calling, of such accomplishment, that I did not know quite what to make of my own odd feelings.

  I knew I wanted to pose for him, however, in his new undertaking. So after some moments of silence (how long I could not begin to say), I simply looked up at him and said yes. Yes, indeed, I would be delighted to play a role in such formidable work, even as a sitter.

  That fall, in short (I believe it was in early October) I b
egan to sit for Mr. Spooner one day each week. But after the second sitting the painting did not go well, or at least Mr. Spooner was dissatisfied with his work. He could be even harsher in judging himself than in judging his apprentices or pupils. But I felt there was something more here, some deeper fault or difficulty or confusion he could not address yet. Two or three times he began all over again through those winter months, until at the end of February he threw the project aside and we dared not even speak of it. Or whenever he did mention it, his references were oblique and arose from an excess of wine.

  In May, however, he suddenly asked me if I would be willing to sit for him again, and it was just after I began to sit that my life abruptly changed once more. My lingering presentiments, as I have called them, proved at length to be all too substantial. The sudden, baleful change in my circumstances occurred as follows.

  After posing for Mr. Spooner one day, I returned at dusk to my rooms. Tom was out on some errand or adventure of his own. Fatigued, I undressed so that I might wash and change into a comfortable dressing gown, as was my habit after long days. But midway in my ablutions, a knock on my door announced a young lady in a well-cut dress and cloak of rather vulgar, strong colors. She presented herself as a friend of Julian Forrester who wished to make my acquaintance. She had heard much of me, she explained, from Julian. This interview proceeded amicably enough, and at first I took her to be a young woman not unlike myself who wished to make her way as a likeness painter. As we sat in the outer room, which served as my studio, bedroom, and parlor, she said during our conversation that she would be honored to see my work, and she asked how I had learned my craft. I assumed that she had come to me for advice and to see what kind of competition I might make as a portraitist and a student of George Spooner.

  As we spoke further, however, I began to see that her knowledge of painting was inexplicably shallow. No sooner had I probed a little further into the nature of her own work than the arm of a man grabbed me around the throat and placed an ill-smelling cloth over my mouth and nose. The rest is very confused in my memory, rather like a dream as one tumbles into sleep. I recall only that the young lady seemed to wrap her arms tightly around my legs, even as the strong arm of another about my neck threatened to choke off my air if I resisted. I could not cry out. Each gasp for breath brought deep into my lungs a foul odor from the cloth pressed against my face.