Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

The new couple sat hand in hand on the floor of the piazza all evening, looking out over the river. But only the next day, Edith’s birthday, she refused to come out of her room for breakfast. Had she changed her mind? Did she regret assenting to Newton’s proposal?

  When she materialized at dinner she was “still in a rather fierce and forbidding frame of mind,” as Newton remembered many years later. Newton was stricken. Edith was miserable. The family urged her to write to her closest friends at once, as though that would solidify the decision. As strange as her behavior would seem to someone not in her immediate circle, the family knew that Edith had an unparalleled stubborn streak. She had reached the age of twenty-eight without marrying. Now she had given in.

  SINCE THE DAWN of the Republic, a rigid triumvirate characterized marriage in America, three sacred, essential, interlocking elements: mutual cohabitation, a husband’s financial support, a wife’s service. By the Gilded Age, American women were freer than ever. By 1890, twice as many girls as boys graduated from high school. But practically every girl in the country found herself destined for life as a housewife. Men controlled the property in a marriage, could declare themselves head of the household and held virtually unmitigated power over their wives.

  The glacier of state melted only slowly. New laws went on the books, piecemeal, allowing women to have the legal right to the property they brought to the union. But at the end of the century first-wave feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stumped for women’s right to keep their earnings.

  Nineteenth-century suffragist Lucy Stone once described marriage as “a state of slavery,” but even she had gone ahead and gotten married (though she kept her maiden surname). Fewer women were accepting men’s authority wholesale. People were beginning to agree that the most important factor in a marriage, having nothing to do with the division of property, was love, true love, romantic love. Love and perhaps a glass or two of champagne were the only things that allowed a woman to overcome her misgivings and proceed willingly into a wedded union.

  Edith was the model of the New Woman. Given her modern, progressive political proclivities, she would have had to make sure she could love this man before moving forward with any betrothal. Could it have been these issues Edith was mulling, sequestered in her room?

  Finally, the morning after her birthday, Edith deigned to acknowledge Newton. She even bid her fiancé good morning. She seemed to have made peace with the notion that she was going to be wed, and wed to this particular man. Yet until they married—only two months later, a marked acceleration of the usual engagement timetable—Newton was never totally certain the wedding would take place. Their engagement was just as much a courtship, and courtship, he concluded, was a trying business for those who look seriously upon life.

  For Newton, the whole experience felt bewildering, about as far as it could be from the traditional engagement of the day. The normal thing, the typical practice, the Stokes idea, would have the suitor announcing his feelings and gaining an assent, the man then duly approaching the father of the bride for his approval. Each of the affianced would send out a formal announcement of the impending marriage. The bride would enter near seclusion until the wedding took place. At that point, etiquette experts ruled, no young lady should consider driving alone with her fiancé or attending the theater alone with him. A chaperone must be present at all times.

  In this case, the father of the bride was deceased. Edie was in no way secluded. The formality of the announcement got sidetracked. Here Newton was, living with the family of the woman he would wed, seeing her constantly and unchaperoned. Their prenuptial behavior, perhaps born of temperament, nonetheless gestured toward modernity.

  Both bride and groom would introduce other elements of modernity into their marriage. It would be a romantic union and a partnership of equals, one in which she had her say and kept control of her own money. These ideas existed in the social current, but Newton and Edith were at the front of the trend.

  But her recalcitrance, equally unorthodox, did not make him happy. He had been warned, of course, that Fiercely was nothing if not strong-willed. Contemporary cartoonists had begun to ridicule the scowling, pants-wearing, modern women’s rights advocate. Was Edith one of those?

  Newton recognized that his future wife was long accustomed to being independent. It might be too soon to use the word “love.” It might take time for her to appreciate the iconoclasm beneath his courtly, hapless exterior. He was willing to wait it out.

  Only a small number of friends of the bride and groom reached Murray Bay for the nuptials. Members of the Stokes family took up residence in two cottages on the main street in tiny Point-au-Pic, with Newton and his two closest friends and two brothers in one of them. When Newton and Edith traveled to Lenox after announcing their engagement, Anson jumped up on the step of the carriage to kiss the bride-to-be before she even got out—he was that excited about the union. She was, after all, the daughter of his longtime closest friend.

  The wedding took place on August 21, 1895, in the Protestant church of Point-au-Pic. Bunting festooned the village from the Minturn home to the church. The bride wore white, and the six bridesmaids—May, Gertrude, Mildred and Helen Stokes, and friends Lottie Lowell and Susie Codman—wore pink. Newton’s brother Graham served as best man. It rained. Instead of walking from the speedily finished Minturn house to the church next door as planned, the rain-soaked bridal party took the family’s one carriage in stages.

  The Stokes and Minturn families performed their own style of wedding, not a fancy, blowout affair but something more earnest, a quiet, gentle ceremony presided over by one Reverend William Rainsford, imported from Manhattan. “I have known one or two women as beautiful,” he said of the bride, “one or two women as interesting, one or two women as spiritual, but for the combination of the three I have never known her equal.”

  Afterward, a wedding breakfast convened in the house of the bride’s mother. Such was the convention for marriages of the era, but this one was less formal, more intimate, than was typical. The gathering had an added novelty because it took place in the airy new McKim cottage.

  An unpretentious gathering in the rain, perhaps more the Minturn style than the Stokes. Anson would have blown it up bigger. As it was, the coming together of Edith and Newton could not be more different from the weddings of others in their set, which in the 1890s boasted very public and very lavish demonstrations of the status of the bride and groom. There was far less pomp than, say, a wedding in Manhattan, where the atmosphere became so mannered at times that it was considered a breach of custom for the groom to kiss the bride. But in common with other weddings of their class, the Stokes-Minturn union gained generous coverage in the Times.

  The three-week honeymoon had its exquisite moments. The pair traveled by boat to Montreal from Rivière du Loup, first stopping at Cacouna, a resort town on whose cliffs perched villa after picturesque villa. The town’s first-class hotel did not, in Newton’s estimation, offer accommodations quite spacious enough for the couple, so the groom had taken care in advance to book a new suite—that is to say, to have the hostelry actually cut a door between two rooms to create a suite. His sense of entitlement matched his nervous desire that his bride be comfortable.

  Edith allowed that particular profligacy to pass. But she gently rebuked Stokes for handing a whole quarter to the porter for carrying their bags to their rooms in Montreal. He must, she insisted, promise to be more parsimonious in the future. They were learning each other’s ways.

  From Montreal forward they roughed it in a Stokes-style vacation. At Upper St. Regis Lake, Helen kindly sent one of her “emergency cooks” to take care of them. Pearl Island, one of the least traveled sites in the Adirondacks, allowed them a lake of their own for two weeks. By the time the couple returned to Murray Bay to celebrate the engagement of May to Harry Sedgwick (with Edie “Factory Girl” Sedgwick their most famous descendant), the two were firmly, formally, fundamentally captivated with each other.
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  In this way, Newton Stokes finally carried off his Edith in a blaze of glory.

  PART TWO

  9. A Pleasure to Paint Her Portrait

  On a muggy June morning in 1897, Edith and Newton Stokes made their way on foot through the heart of London. Their wedding day was twenty-two months behind them but they were still relatively newly minted as a couple. They had been living in Paris and were here in London only briefly. From their lodgings near Westminster Abbey, they hurried toward the Chelsea studio of the greatest portraitist of the day, John Singer Sargent.

  They were in a rush, loath to make the artist wait. The London neighborhoods through which they passed had been rendered unrecognizable by the frenzied preparations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, which honored the sixtieth anniversary of the queen’s ascension to the throne. The front of every soot-gray building was festooned with crimson cloth or wreathy swags of foliage. Workmen were banging together wooden spectator galleries that beetled over the streets. Carriage traffic had become nearly untenable. In an almost risible illustration of Britain’s imperial reach, visitors from every corner of the empire had descended on London. One contemporary (American) observer cataloged the scene: “The streets were crowded with a motley throng of strangers, dark-skinned visitors from India and South Africa, from the West Indies and Australia, with detachments of troops from the remotest colonies of the empire, burly negroes from the west coast of Africa, Maoris, Chinese, Siamese, and stalwart Canadians.”

  And two very much in love Americans. Nearing their destination, Edith and Newton hustled past the manicured grounds of the Royal Hospital, past Chelsea’s celebrated gardens, ignoring the lofty new red-brick townhouses and pristine mansion flats they usually took the time to admire. To the south, the molten gleam of the Thames.

  They turned off the Embankment into the by now familiar urban lane, the street where Oscar Wilde had lived. After seeing the actress Ellen Terry enter the Sargent studio in “full regalia” to model for Lady Macbeth, Wilde swooned that Tite Street “can never be as other streets, it must always be full of wonderful possibilities.”

  Out of the hurly-burly, into the cool vaulted environs of the Sargent atelier. The week before, a disgusted Sargent had scraped his canvas clean. The astonished couple gamely tried to write off the tantrum as a quirk of the artistic temperament. Now he promised to begin anew.

  What had happened? Edith and Newton were unsure. This expedition was a high point of their extended honeymoon in Europe (after their brief Canada interlude), a special detour in order to get the picture accomplished. The couple spent all of June 1897 in London as guests of Newton’s sister Sarah, in her luxurious flat near the houses of Parliament. Sarah was a baroness, having wed Baron Hugh Colin Gustave George Halkett of Hanover in a New York City ceremony attended by the likes of Vanderbilts, Astors, Beekmans and Roosevelts.

  The portrait had been arranged as a wedding present from Minturn family friend James Scrymser—the same Scrymser who had served as chaperone for Edith’s escapades over her years as a footloose single girl. Scrymser paid Sargent 500 guineas (60,000 U.S. dollars today) for the privilege of presenting the girl he had watched grow up with the finest portrait money could buy. The artist had by this point in his career grown so fantastically popular that he could barely fit the job in.

  Sargent, the portraitist. Edith, the portrayed. In one sense it was extraordinary that a young bride would cross an ocean just to get her likeness done. In another sense, though, nothing could be more quotidian, more expected, in the lives of America’s elite. Scrymser was wealthy, as were the Stokes and Minturn families, and a Sargent portrait would be a signifier of that wealth.

  When they met, Sargent had just begun his manic struggle to deliver a set of murals for the Boston Public Library. He painted seven days a week, sometimes around the clock. The theme of the murals was unabashedly ambitious: the evolution of religious thought from paganism to modern Christianity. The library job represented the type of public commission Sargent believed was commensurate to his talent. Amid such monumentalism, the Scrymser commission might have tumbled through the cracks—portraits for patrons, sumptuous likenesses of aristocrats and their velvet-frocked children, were merely bread and butter jobs.

  Sargent complained to a friend that he often had three sitters a day at his studio. He had wearied of the compromises that accompanied painting to please a patron, the demands that he alter a feature to suit a subject’s vanity. The plea to have the mouth adjusted came so frequently, the painter related, that he would define a portrait as “a likeness in which there was something wrong about the mouth.” The squeamish husband of one subject hired another artist to have his wife’s décolletage masked with a scrap of watercolor tulle before her Sargent portrait debuted. Yet Sargent still created portraits with gusto.

  Scrymser first approached the artist the year after Edith’s marriage. “I am sure Mrs. Stokes must be one of the two Misses Minturns whom I met in America,” Sargent replied in a letter. “It would be a great pleasure to paint her portrait.” Unfortunately, he continued, “I won’t be over in Paris except for a flying visit. I am afraid I must get back to my decorative work [the murals] later in the summer. I wonder if Mrs. Stokes would feel inclined to wait a year?”

  By the time Edith and Newton entered the Tite Street studio, Sargent had become the most sought-after portraitist in the English-speaking world. Though he worked in London and, before that, Paris, Americans were devoted to the artist. When all was said and done, his countrymen considered Sargent to be an American himself, despite the fact that he grew up flitting about Europe with expatriate parents, had resided in France for years and had not set foot on U.S. soil until the age of twenty.

  He had gained an invaluable imprimatur when Henry James touted his work in an 1887 Harper’s review, accompanied by a depiction of the young artist in rugged profile. James professed himself bowled over by “the slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.”

  Sargent was just then touring the East Coast of the United States in conjunction with exhibits featuring his new work. He occupied himself by dashing off paintings as he went. In the 1887–88 season alone, he finished twenty portraits during a peripatetic stretch in Newport, Boston and New York. More importantly, the artist devoted himself to the kind of education essential to any successful artist, studying, cataloging and being introduced to the American royalty who could afford his increasingly costly portraits.

  In the spring of 1890, Sargent again visited New York, settling into a borrowed studio on 23rd Street. There he would not only render portraits of local financiers and their families but capture a more exotic subject. The Spanish performer Carmencita was then Manhattan’s latest low-culture sensation. The gossip had it that Sargent found Carmencita a difficult model. Her fidgeting during sittings drove the painter to paint his nose like a clown and even ingest his cigar in order to keep her amused.

  A few years later, in another triumph, Sargent sent nine paintings to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exhibit placed his work in front of hundreds of thousands of Americans. His interpretation of the formidable Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (the vision of whom in costume so impressed Wilde) shocked fairgoers. Terry’s stirring posture of self-coronation and her magenta hair unsettled the midwestern viewers. But they loved it. This was the same fair where Edith-as-Republic gazed down upon throngs of visitors. Introductions by the exposition architect, Stanford White, provided Sargent with additional commissions among White’s rich clients.

  For wealthy Americans, Sargent represented the perfect package. He had it all: the exquisite taste and ferocious talent expected of a French artist, a Boston Brahmin’s gentility—his father’s family hailed from Puritan Massachusetts—and the flawless social skills that made him welcome in any highbrow drawing room. To be “done” by the master had become an indelible marker of one’s social standing. By the mid-1890s, the Am
erican public had been stricken by what fellow painter Walter Sickert called “Sargentolatry.”

  So that’s what Edith was doing at Tite Street that sweltering English June. She finally found herself in a position to “sit to” the artist, as posing was described in her era. The experience was quite different from posing for Daniel Chester French. For one thing, she had on more clothes. Also, this time she would appear as herself, or anyway the painter’s version of her real self, not a symbolic representation.

  In sitting to Sargent, Edith Minturn Stokes would take her place in the armada of brilliant young women who sailed forth from the painter’s turpentine-scented loft in artistic Chelsea. A cartoon by the caricaturist Max Beerbohm lampooned the lineup of fashion plates waiting their turn at the Tite Street door, each attended by her individual footman.

  Sargent paid meticulous attention to dress, choosing clothes for his models in the belief that costume was a manifestation of the sitter’s character—as well as a splendid opportunity to lay on the paint. Lately he had taken to posing his more gamine-like subjects in delicate whites and pastel silks. There had been a whole procession of them: Helen Dunham, pensive in snowy ruffles; Vanderbilt heiress Mrs. Hamilton McKown Twombly, whose white satin sparkled with sequins; an unpretentious Katharine Pratt in tightly sashed muslin; Countess Clary Aldringen, sporting a cream bouffant sleeve and the loop of a diamond pendant chain across her bosom; the world-weary Princess Demidoff, in a frost-white sash and crimson cape.

  Ingénues became something of a Sargent trademark, with their shimmering dresses and expressions that were regal or penetrating or beguiling, the most typical example being the ravishing Lady Agnew of Lochnaw in 1892, languid in lilac silk and white chiffon. The painting launched her. She arrestingly displayed the “nervous energy” so emblematic of his female subjects, with the lovely wasting quality prized in elite Victorian ladies.