Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  On Saturday, October 5, John Arbuckle headed out to Fontainebleau and Château de By to visit Rosa Bonheur, accompanied by American portrait painter Anna Klumpke. Klumpke, who came to interpret for them, wrote: “Just as our driver was about to get down and ring the bell, the iron gates swung wide open. On the steps of the house, we saw a short little person dressed like a peasant in trousers and smock and holding a black and white dog. After directing the carriage to pull up at the porch, he stretched out his hands in the friendliest welcome. It was Rosa Bonheur. . . . Her bizarre getup only half surprised me. For a long time I had known that she was in the habit of wearing men’s clothes.” They sat down—not to eggs, but to a very light and delicate lunch.

  Rosa Bonheur apologized for having given away Arbuckle’s gift mustang, Apache, explaining, “The animal was so skittish that I could never get near him. As soon as we’d open the stable door in the morning, he’d gallop off into the meadow. Come evening, only hunger made him return to his trough and rack, which we kept full. . . . This wild horse stayed so thoroughly wild that, during the two years that this little game lasted, I was barely able to dash off a few sketches.”

  Arbuckle was pleased that his horse had been impossible to tame, and remarked, “She wanted a wild horse, and this time she really got one.”

  “It was, in fact, just what I wanted,” Bonheur agreed, “but I had to give up on him, and I thought I was doing the right thing by turning him over to Buffalo Bill, as I wrote you. His cowboys came for the horse just a few days ago. Those fellows really know how to handle ornery beasts without hurting them. It’s a real pleasure to watch them work. After one of them lassoed your little horse, he calmed him down so well that he was able to go up and stroke his head. That’s a task that I never could have given to a French groom.”

  When they’d finished lunch with a plate of local white Thomery grapes, Bonheur invited her guests to see the studio. She complimented Klumpke on one of her portraits shown in the last Salon, adding, “I admire American ideas about educating women. Over there you don’t have the silly notion that marriage is the one and only fate for girls. I am absolutely scandalized by the way women are hobbled in Europe. It’s only because of my God-given talent that I could break free.”

  At the studio door, Bonheur took out a small key and unlocked it. “Come in to my sanctuary.” Klumpke noticed a huge unfinished horse painting, which Bonheur explained: “I’m showing how they still thresh wheat in certain parts of southern France. Treading back and forth, these nine horses crush the husks with their hooves and squeeze out the kernels that are gathered up later on. I’ve been working on it for years now. I’d like this painting to be my masterpiece, but there’s still so much to do that I wonder if I’ll ever get it done. Since my dear friend died, I often lose heart.” Klumpke took in the rest of the studio, noticing tables and chairs covered by papers and books by Dumas and Zola, stuffed animal heads hung all about. What surprised her was the lack of art.

  Bonheur laughed, saying, “It’s your compatriots’ fault if there aren’t any paintings on the walls. They lay siege to my dealers, who carry off my paintings when they’re scarcely finished. That doesn’t stop me from sometimes making them wait for years. You Americans always go full blast, which has its drawbacks for art.” They talked a bit about photography versus painting, and Arbuckle offered to send her “a unique collection of cowboy photographs.”

  Bonheur accepted happily, but then added, “Only if you’ll take a study I drew of your horse. I feel a bit ashamed that I can’t show you the real thing.”

  On Sunday, October 6, across the Atlantic Ocean, La Champagne was steaming into New York Harbor, carrying Thomas Edison home. As the ocean liner approached quarantine, a steam yacht with a band playing drew near. On board, Thomas Insull, Charles Batchelor, and other Edison officers were all waving and cheering as they welcomed home their chief. Spotting Edison and Mina up on the crowded deck, they began yelling, “Count and Countess Edison!!” Once the towering liner docked, Edison and Mina boarded the yacht, leaving their baggage to be handled by aides. Young Insull pulled out a tape measure and proposed to determine if Edison’s head had swelled as a result of so much praise and attention. Edison remarked that any changes in his physical condition lay elsewhere. “Eight days on the ocean liner have failed to repair the damage to my digestion by a series of French dinners,” he said. “I have returned a perfect wreck.”

  By midday, the Edisons were home at their Glenmont estate in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, where Mina was gratefully reunited with their young daughter. Dot had stayed on in Europe, but her pretty French tutor had inveigled Mina into letting her come with them to America. (Apparently, mademoiselle hoped to land a rich husband while helping Mina learn French.) Thomas Edison, ever the master of PR, held court for the big-city press that first evening home. Happily ensconced in his library and smoking one of his beloved cigars, he held forth, telling The World’s reporter, “I went over to see the Exposition. It was a big show. Couldn’t begin to see all of it. Acre after acre of things to look at.” As for the official U.S. presence: “Very poor. Even the little South American republics beat us hollow.”

  Edison recounted proudly his many honors, including his elevation to a commander of the Legion of Honor, “the highest rank in the order they confer on foreigners.” Still, he reassured The New York Times, “I am just as much of an American as ever; I wear the same sized hat now that I did when I left home. They tried their best to spoil me, but my head is not a jot larger than it was, and this week you will see me back in harness as before.”

  Once again, Edison sang the praises of the tower: “The Eiffel Tower is a wonderful thing. I was given a dinner by the French Society of Civil Engineers on the first landing. M. Eiffel was there, too.” Edison could not refrain from mentioning that it took American know-how to design and manufacture the elevators that rose up the tower’s curved legs, and he spoke bullishly of the prospects for America’s own centennial World’s Fair of 1892, and New York City as the natural spot for it. Of course, the Americans would build a tower 1,500 or 2,000 feet tall to outshine Eiffel’s creation. “Edison,” reported The Times, “says the building of one twice as large for the World’s Fair [here] is not an engineering problem. He heard in Paris that M. Eiffel was coming to New York to consult with capitalists.”

  Meanwhile, James McNeill Whistler and Trixie had finally bestirred themselves and departed London. They had journeyed, however, not to Paris and the World’s Fair but to Amsterdam, where the Master had a few pieces showing in the Dutch Salon. Like many other artists that late September, he traveled out to sketch the picturesque fishing villages of the Zuyder-Zee district on the North Sea. The Herald’s correspondent dropped in to see the couple one rainy afternoon at the Hotel Suisse, where they chatted over wine and walnuts. The journalist was delighted to discover the ever-pugnacious Whistler reviving his feud with Gen. Rush Hawkins, purportedly to explain why he and his art had defected to the British. “I did not mind the fact that my sketches were criticized,” Whistler insisted, “but it was the discourteous manner in which it was done. If the request had been made to me in proper language . . . I would have given them the privilege of placing [my art] in the American exhibits. I have not yet seen the Exhibition, but I shall go from here to Paris in a short time.”

  General Hawkins, who had spent the summer being abused by one aggrieved artist after another, had had enough, and the next day in The Herald struck back: “I have never in my life written a line to Mr. Whistler. What he did receive was a circular with my name printed at the bottom. . . . It is a little singular that among about one hundred and fifty artists who received this circular, Mr. Whistler should have been the only one to discover its latent discourtesy. . . . Had Mr. Whistler been the possessor of a more even temper and a little more commonsense, he would have had five or six of his works on the line in the American department, and nearly twice as many on exhibition than is actually the case. Really, I fail to see what h
e gained.”

  Various artists seized the occasion to hurl a few more of their own brickbats at Hawkins, a Republican appointee. Wrote “Refusé” to The Herald : “We can endure the G.A.R. in politics, but spare us, good Lord, their interference in art.” One of the lady art scribes who had tangled with Hawkins early on coauthored a long epistle with a male colleague that revisited all of the general’s sins. The next morning on The Herald’s front page, Hawkins gave as good as he got, even as he insisted, “I never allow myself to be drawn into mud-slinging contests.” He dismissed the two “prying scribblers . . . [as] fair samples of multitudes of others who have for weeks past found pleasure in attacking me. And why? Simply because I refused in every case to reverse the decisions of the American Art Jury. . . . There are two sides to this story, and so far, only one has been told—the story of the sour grapes contingent.”

  Of course, Whistler would have the last word and from Amsterdam wrote, “It is a sad shock to me to find that the Good General speaks of me without affection. . . . Here I would point out again, hoping to be clearly understood, that had the methods employed in the American camp, been more civil, if less military, all further difficulties might have been avoided.” Nor could “Refusé” resist a final retort: “The truth is, and always has been, that whatever military proclivities our Commissioner may have, he knows no more about art than the fly that crawls wearily over some of the panoramas in our department.”

  Out at the Wild West camp in Neuilly, in contrast, all was good cheer, for on Saturday, September 28, Chief Red Shirt’s wife had been delivered of a healthy boy, “the first papoose which had kicked up its little heels under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.” Moreover, as The Herald reported, when the Wild West folk had learned of the impending birth, “bets were at once started among the cowboys and the rest of the crowd as to the sex of the newcomer. For some occult reason the prevailing opinion was that it would be a demoiselle, but Red Shirt . . . swore that it would be a garçon. Better still, he backed up his opinion with abundant gold. . . . Consequently, when the die was cast yesterday and it turned up a boy, Red Shirt first danced a complicated mazurka and then collected his bets.” The French papers marveled that two hours after the baby was born, Madame Red Shirt was up and tending to her wigwam household.

  Soon thereafter, to the mystification of the Americans, French newlyweds began showing up at Wild West shows straight from their nuptials, brides and grooms arrayed in full wedding finery, the young women’s gowns bursts of white in the grandstands filled with the dark autumn fashions. After the show, the couples strolled about the Wild West grounds looking for Baby Red Shirt. The camp learned that the French were hewing to a purported American custom that promised many offspring to anyone who held an Indian baby on the day of his or her wedding.

  Washingtonian Pattie Miller Stocking, a latecomer to the fair, admitted: “We had never cared to see Buffalo Bill at home, but since he is the fashion abroad, why not go and rejoice over him? To be sure, the Indians seemed a little tame to us . . . but it seemed to give foreigners an immense opinion of us as a people in our uncivilized condition. However, the riding and shooting is something to be proud of. . . . We were a little ashamed of the 2-year-old peanuts they handed around during the performance. They were almost as bad as the French of the peanut boy who sold them.”

  Rosa Bonheur attended the show numerous times, and by late September had become a fixture at the camp, arriving most mornings and then settling in on her canvas stool with her tripod easel and art supplies to sketch and paint. Among other projects, she completed a small equestrian portrait of Buffalo Bill cantering along on his beloved white horse, Tucker, the steed’s full, long tail swishing behind. Bonheur’s Cody was an idealized, younger man, western virility incarnate, his goatee and long tresses free of gray, his figure notably trimmer in tawny fringed deerskin jacket, thigh-high black leather boots, his scout’s eye taking in some distant point. As soon as the painting was done and dry, Cody shipped it home to his Scout’s Rest Ranch in North Platte, where it took pride of place. In gratitude, Cody presented Bonheur with “a splendid trotter, very free and very gentle. I take great care of him.”

  But Bonheur’s greatest fascination was with the Indians. Her frequent sojourns at the camp “gave me time to study their tents; I watched everything they did, and talked as best I could with the warriors, squaws and children. I drew studies of their buffaloes, horses and weapons, all tremendously interesting.” To help her master the intricacies of the Sioux costumes, Mr. Knoedler gave Bonheur a chief’s suit of beaded buckskin and leggings, a silver conch belt, moccasins, and a bow and arrow that she displayed in her studio. Bonheur had, she said, “a real passion for this unfortunate race, and it’s utterly deplorable that they’re doomed to extinction by the white usurpers.”

  Chiefs Red Shirt and handsome young Rocky Bear posed for Bonheur, who painted a double portrait of the two men, solemn in fringed, beaded buckskins riding bareback through a scrubby countryside. “It’s unbelievable how I get the old fire back,” Bonheur enthused to Anna Klumpke, with whom she had become close, “when my pencil brings to life those thrilling [Indian] scenes from Fenimore Cooper.” Other Wild West Indians also posed, and over the next several years Bonheur’s many sketches served as inspiration for seventeen paintings. A half-dozen were portraits of Indian chiefs and braves riding or hunting, while another six captured buffalo stampeding across the prairie, some wild-eyed as they escaped prairie fires, while others were pursued by Indian hunters on bareback. The remaining paintings depicted the more domestic side of Indian life with families outside their teepees, or horses, often wild mustangs, or cowboys on horseback.

  Rosa Bonheur at her easel, painting Buffalo Bill

  It was while he was posing for Rosa Bonheur that Rocky Bear discovered Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo. This panoramic (six-by-ten-foot) painting, set on the Wyoming prairie, had captured for the Sioux chief as nothing else had the tragedy of the Plains Indian. On certain mornings in late September and early October, Rocky Bear could be found at the Boussod and Valadon Gallery studying Bierstadt’s dramatic scene of an Indian buffalo hunt unfolding on the golden prairie, the Wind River Mountains violet-hued on the horizon. A New York Times reporter happened by as Rocky Bear, accompanied this time by numerous other Sioux, lamented how the Indians had taken “the hand of the white man and his whisky and sold their plains, where the buffalo was wont to run wild as in this splendid picture.” The Indians spent a silent half hour contemplating the poignant work Bierstadt had painted specially for the Paris show.

  Bierstadt’s picture was an uncomfortable reminder that in the course of a century white men with guns had slaughtered almost sixty million of the great beasts, wiping out the vast herds that had once darkened the plains. Now a few hundred buffalo survived in pockets here or there—including the eighteen Cody had brought to Paris. The American jury, however, had rejected Bierstadt’s entry, the only submission of the venerable Hudson River School artist, leading Art Amateur’s critic to wonder how it had ruled that “Mr. Bierstadt, a veteran of established reputation, cannot paint well enough to earn a place even in such a miscellaneous collection of pictures as has been sent over to represent the United States”—especially when his was a uniquely American subject certain to be “highly interesting to the foreign visitors to this Exposition.”

  Of course, in his hunting years, Bill Cody himself had reportedly slaughtered as many as ten thousand of the beasts that gave him his famous nickname. Ironically, the success of his Wild West show would so glamorize all things western—including the buffalo—that millions of urban Americans would come to support laws saving the few bison remaining, enabling the herds to slowly climb back from near extinction.

  Down in St.-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh had grown much better and had begun corresponding again with Paul Gauguin after their violent parting the previous winter. In mid-October, Gauguin had written Vincent from Le Pouldu to report, “Among other things, a fa
irly big project that de Haan and I have jointly undertaken: decorating the inn where we take our meals. We’re beginning with one wall and we’ll finish by doing all four, including the stained glass window. We’re learning a great deal, so it’s a useful thing to do.” Gauguin was noticeably upbeat, for after a fallow period, he was working not only on the wall mural but also on a painting of the local Breton women gathering seaweed on the beach.

  Vincent himself had never been so productive, deeply inspired by the local landscape. As he wrote to Theo, “From time to time there are moments when nature is superb, autumn effects glorious in color, green skies contrasting with foliage in yellows, oranges, greens, earth in all the violets, heat-withered grass. . . . And skies—like our skies in the North, but the colors of the sunrises and sunsets more varied and clearer.” Theo, who was receiving a steady supply of new canvases from Vincent to show, congratulated his brother for his success in capturing the Provençal world: “I like the wheat field and the mountains enormously; they are very beautiful in design. In the wheat field there is that unshakable something which nature has, even in her fiercest aspects. The orchard too is extremely fine.”

  Perhaps because Vincent felt that he had by now mastered the local countryside, he was beginning to think about a change of scene—moving north to Auvers, where he had the prospect of boarding with a Dr. Gachet. “The main thing,” he wrote Theo, “is to know the doctor, so that in case of an attack I do not fall into the hands of the police and get carried off to an asylum by force.” Vincent, as always, sent kindest regards to his sister-in-law, Jo, whose pregnancy was now well advanced.