“It will be about the girl. It will be about the chair. Or rather—”
She broke off, finding it impossible to express what she saw only in her mind, what she didn’t yet have words for, what describing in detail might destroy. The idea had to simmer inside her, find its own truth, even as she was seeing Degas’s dancers, endless numbers of them, his pictures portraits more of moments than of the dancers themselves. Repetition and variation, forming a story larger than each figure’s individual life, inducing a tremor of recognition in the viewer, who would understand the larger meaning without even recognizing that the parts expanded the whole. The inchoate vibrated in Mary’s mind, as she dreamed the picture her imagination was painting. But she felt, too, a wash of sadness, for that sensation happened rarely for an artist, and was in turn fleeting. How quickly it would devolve into the punishing discipline of hard work. The vision she was entertaining would require technical prowess she was not yet certain she possessed or ever would possess. And the clarity of this moment, the glorious moment of the idea, would fade into doubt of the value of the idea itself, and she would be left working and reworking a canvas upon which her dream seemed as banal as her fear of failure, and which in turn seemed far more certain than success. This gift of Eloise, she knew, had been meant to spark just this moment of joy, but it was also a betrayal, because soon she would suffer a surfeit of agony.
But in this first moment Mary dismissed, as all artists do, the pain to come. She kissed Degas’s cheek, an unconscious effusion of gratitude she wouldn’t remember after he and Eloise had gone, though for the rest of the day Degas would touch his hand to the place where her soft lips had grazed his skin.
“I’ll bring Eloise and her mother tomorrow,” he said.
“How can I repay you?”
“Someday, I’ll need you.” He gazed at her a long while. “Come, Eloise, we’re off to return you to your mother. How would you like to come to see Mademoiselle Cassatt again tomorrow? She will paint you and you will be remembered forever.”
The girl skipped to the door and he tied the ribbons of her hat and hoisted her once more into his arms, where she contemplated Mary with a gaze that was serious and patient, still clutching the scarf in her hands. Degas took it from her and wrapped it around Mary’s neck once, twice, and said, “A gift.”
When they had gone, Mary brought the scarf to her face and breathed in the scent of turpentine and oil and the chalky essence of a newly opened box of pastels.
Degas.
• • •
It was soon apparent that the little girl could sit still for only a few moments at a time. It was like capturing the light at sunset. She wiggled and squirmed and twisted in the chair until her mother declared her spent and scooped her up with an apology and a promise of better behavior the next day. But the promised better behavior never materialized. After concentrating on the girl’s face, getting the features just right, Mary then had to work fast, faster than she ever had, and this limitation forced from her hand a light, breezy portrait that somehow radiated both charm and the boredom Eloise had suffered in the sittings. It was the limitation that helped Mary. She wondered how Degas might have fared, with his deliberate technique of drawing and redrawing and beginning again. He might love children, but whether or not he could suffer their peripatetic dances was another thing entirely. But within a week Mary believed she had breathed life into the girl. All else in the picture she could paint without her.
But it was the rest of the picture that gave Mary trouble. She had sworn off plain backgrounds of no distinguishing feature. A good portrait was a picture in context, the background as important as the person, defining who they were. Just as she had painted Lydia at the Opéra, she was determined to make something more of this picture than any of her previous ones. The composition she had already imagined. She would repeat the blue chair as Degas repeated dancers, but she would vary its position, its appearance. Doing so would require forced perspective, a technique she had not yet mastered to her satisfaction. The prospect terrified and thrilled her. She could move the chair, rearrange it and paint it from either side, but there was the even trickier background of the room, the windows, baseboards, and walls—all derived from her imagination, for she had no similar room to model it after.
For two successive mornings, she stood before the canvas, eyeing the chair, eyeing the canvas. She thought, I will crop the chairs except the one that holds the little girl. But how large to make the room? How to draw the eye to Eloise? She had placed her to the side of the canvas, but that would not be enough if she didn’t paint the chairs just so. Balance and emphasis. All of art was balance and emphasis.
She painted a second chair, then a third, not as a chair but as a couch. Variation. And then a final chair, painted almost as a doll’s chair, forcing the perspective even more. And she had to place the chairs in a real room, with a floor and windows. What color for the walls? How much detail? In a picture already rife with flourishes and bright pigment, how would she make the whole work?
One day as she stood at the canvas, her little Brussels griffon fell asleep on the chair. She took the gift. His brown coat would echo the scarf and the little girl’s socks, which she had painted to echo the tartan. The dark colors grounded the two figures in the frothy sea of blues and oranges, anchoring them with an arabesque of contrast.
She studied the tone of the background, which she had primed gray and which now seemed too gray. The darker brown needed echoing too, but the hue had to be lighter. She wanted Eloise’s white dress to surprise. So yes, brown, but light brown, with an undercurrent of red to echo the orange in the chair. No wallpaper on the walls. And the windows a wall of light. She saw it all, but her paintbrush would not move.
A day passed. She went to the studio intending to work, but after an hour gave up and instead took the dog for a long walk. She did not want to admit that she was paralyzed, but she was. This painting was much more ambitious, much more complex than anything she had ever attempted.
Her walk took her home, where she made the excuse that she was ill, and felt ashamed when Katherine doted on her all afternoon. The next morning, she returned to the studio in the April drizzle and found Degas waiting for her at the door.
“How are you getting on?” he said.
She opened the door with her key and let the dog run in before her, holding the door open to let Degas see the painting aloft on its easel. Inside, he removed his hat and overcoat and studied the canvas. She stood behind him. The stove and spirit lamp could wait. She was cold, but warmth was not what she needed.
“The background is giving you trouble, yes? The perspective?”
She nodded.
He pointed with his finger. “There, the walls will intersect. There, the baseboard will run. Windows?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then start here, behind the chair, and then next to the couch.”
“I can’t begin. I can’t find it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I literally can’t.”
He regarded her for a long moment, then took up her palette. “Tell me which,” he said.
“I thought terre de Sienne, some white, vermillion, too.”
“Yes.” He squeezed dollops of paint onto the palette and mixed. He held it out for her approval.
“Yes, just that, but more poppy oil,” she said. She wanted a thinner wash for the back. At least she knew that.
“I will paint the lines. Remember, it is always line. Whenever you are stuck, go back to lines.” He took up a thin hogs hair brush as she hurried to pour him some turpentine.
He painted eight lines. In less than a minute his judicious brush had created an entire room.
“Do you see the windows now? Where the floor ends?”
“Yes.”
“I can go now, yes?”
“How did you know?”
“Because we all suffer, ma chérie,” he said.
“Thank you, Monsieur Degas.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, and Eugène Manet all watched Degas pace from one end of Caillebotte’s well-appointed parlor at 77 Rue de Miromesnil to the other. Mary thought the chosen meeting place odd; the Caillebotte family had suffered a spate of recent deaths and it seemed unkind to invade, but Degas had assured her on the way over that Gustave’s mother had offered her parlor in hopes of enlivening their spirits. But when they arrived, there was no sign of her. A downcast maid greeted them at the door, and a dark pall hung over even the home’s exquisite furnishings and brocade draperies.
A formal letter outlining Degas’s concerns had arrived at the Cassatt home a week ago, causing Mary’s father to roll his eyes and say, “This is what happens when you withdraw from official exhibitions and entrust your welfare to renegades.”
The assembled group, huddled on armchairs and divans, was depleted. Though he was still committed to the group, the relentlessly impoverished Cézanne had removed to Aix, his family home, to reduce expenses. However, he was not missed, because he rarely socialized with anyone other than Zola, his childhood friend. Mary had met Cézanne on several occasions, and even in his best moments he looked like a beleaguered skeleton, his red-rimmed eyes ever roving. Renoir, also absent, had recently clashed with Degas over his dictum that anyone who submitted to the Salon must forgo exhibiting with the group. It was a matter of principle, Degas had said, to which Renoir had replied that it was not a matter of principle, it was a matter of money. He needed to make some, and no one with money had ever hired an impressionist to make his portrait. Not that Renoir’s defection had done him any good. The Salon jury had rejected both his paintings.
Degas would not engage with Mary in the carriage, though she had pressed her argument, crafted over the past week, as forcefully as she had dared. Now he paced, preparing to recount his fears to the group, which he had already summarized in his letter. Though Degas rarely had trouble expressing his opinion on anything, he seemed unusually nervous.
“It is foolishness even to try,” he began.
They were scheduled to open their exhibit in two weeks, on the first of June, in a different apartment on the Rue le Peletier. A deposit had been paid. Frames had been purchased. Posters had been printed. But Degas was concerned about the World’s Fair, the Exposition Universelle. The fair was not a surprise; the city had been preparing for it for months, but the extent to which it had engulfed the city had shocked everyone. Day and night, workers destroyed sleep and rendered life miserable. Construction of a brick palace atop the Trocadéro and fair buildings on the Champ de Mars had rendered the seventh and sixteenth arrondissements din-filled arenas. Thuds and shouts infiltrated every home, mean and stately, in the two districts. Electric arc lights burned all night long. An overabundance of spring mud made the champ a quagmire: Carts and camions overloaded with materials plunged into bubbling sinkholes. Even mourners at the Passy Cemetery had had to contend with the hubbub drowning out priests’ remarks. And now that the exposition had opened, traffic strangled the city; every fiacre and omnibus overflowed with visitors.
“It’s difficult enough to compete with the Salon, let alone a world exposition. That irresistible circus is smothering everything in the city. I propose that we cancel our exhibition. Even the Salon is opening late this year,” Degas said, shamelessly using the Salon he despised as a supporting argument.
“Forgive me, Degas,” Caillebotte said, “but all you’ve talked of all winter has been your search for a venue, of printing the necessary posters, of Mademoiselle Cassatt’s debut. And now you want to abandon all of it? Paris is teeming with visitors from all over the world. We could surpass all our previous attendance by the thousands.”
Mary nodded in agreement. She barely knew Caillebotte, but she liked him very much. His lean build and sharp, carefully groomed beard conveyed a disciplined personality that appealed in the midst of the slapdash garb of the other men.
Before Degas could answer, Pissarro leaned forward and said, “If I may, Degas, didn’t you just tell me the other day that you have no canvases to show? Isn’t that really why you want to put off the exhibition? Because you are not ready?”
“Nonsense,” Degas said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is that true, Degas?” Caillebotte said.
“It is not true. What is true is that visitors don’t know Paris. They won’t know how to find us. We could paper all the kiosks in Paris with fliers and no one would come. For that matter, we are the only Parisians left in the city. Most everyone else has fled. They’ve sublet their apartments for twice, three times the rent and escaped to Dieppe or Nice for the summer. Paris has turned into nothing but a huge hotel. And I can assure you, foreigners who visit expositions are not art lovers. They go to fritter away their time on the fairgrounds in the interest of being seen. We would be wasting our time. No one will come to see us. At this late date, we can’t retrieve the deposit for the apartment, but we can at least save half the rent.”
“But Degas,” Pissarro said, “you told me you have nothing ready to show.”
“That is not relevant. I’m trying to be prudent.”
“So prudent you forced Renoir from our midst?” Caillebotte said. “With your silly rule, you made him desert us. And he is one of the best of us.”
The argument was veering off course. Of late, the group, which Mary had at first believed so singular in its objectives, seemed to be nothing more than a loose association of opinionated individuals who rarely agreed. She would never admit it to her father, but his suspicion of the group no longer seemed unfounded. She said, “What if we double our efforts at advertisement? We could distribute fliers at the fair—”
“And look as if we are amateurs or gypsies?” Monet said. He sat slumped in a straight-backed chair set apart from the rest of them. His face was ruddy from having spent the spring painting outdoors. He held his glass of wine precariously in his callused hands. “We might as well set up our canvases on the streets leading to the Trocadéro and let people peruse them there. Besides, the Champ de Mars is too far from the ninth arrondissement to induce attendance.”
“Berthe,” Mary said, “what do you think? You and Eugène could find us a space there, couldn’t you, since you live so near? Or at least you could suggest one? There is no rule, is there, that our exhibitions have to take place in the ninth arrondissement? Why not the sixteenth or the seventh? Why not look near the Trocadéro? Why not pitch a tent near the champ?”
The Manets had arrived at the same time as she and Degas, but they had spoken only for a moment. Tonight Berthe looked wan and pale, thinner than usual. “I—” she began, but before she could finish, Monet said, “That’s already been done.”
“Give my wife leave to speak, Claude,” Eugène said.
“Forgive me, Madame Morisot,” Monet said. “Have you anything to say to enlighten the American?”
“Enough, Claude,” Caillebotte said. He turned to Mary. “I’m afraid Claude is right, Mademoiselle Cassatt. The last time Paris hosted a World’s Fair, Édouard rented a tent just off the champ. He set his pictures on easels, laid a carpet on the wooden floor, furnished it with armchairs, and even had a maid serve refreshments. No one came, even though Zacharie Astruc wrote an article about him in the newspapers every day. The whole thing was a huge failure. Édouard lost so much money his mother nearly disowned him. Isn’t that right, Eugène?”
“It was her money, of course, that he’d used,” Eugène said.
“There are more of us this time,” Mary said. “Together, we could attract more visitors; we could share the costs.”
“You are forgetting, mademoiselle, that the relevant point is that we could not charge admission,” Degas said. “So it would be an outlay with no return. Unless Monsieur Caillebo
tte sees fit to throw his money away.”
They all turned to Caillebotte, who met their inquisitive gaze with an impassive one of his own. He had, over the years, lent them all money, never asking for its return. Unlike the others, family wealth sustained him, but he did not acquiesce now.
“You see? Far be it from us to follow in Édouard’s failed footsteps,” Degas said. “So, are we agreed? We abandon this year out of practicality? Or put it off till autumn?”
“Will you have canvases then, Degas?” Pissarro said.
“I did not say I did not have canvases.”
“But this capitulation is premature,” Mary said. “We haven’t yet exhausted every idea.”
“I believe we have,” Degas said. He looked around the room. Sidelong glances confirmed that everyone, or almost everyone, agreed. “Then it’s settled. Perhaps autumn. But not June.”
Mary colored. Everyone else rose from their chairs to find their way to the drink trolley to refill their glasses. No one came to talk to her, not even Berthe, who hovered near the doorway with her glass of sherry.
“Try not to see this little interruption as a failure,” Degas said, bringing Mary a glass of wine and sitting beside her. “Manet is beside himself. He has to move studios because his landlord is still furious about that little stunt he pulled with his private exhibition. This is nothing like that.”
“Only a little interruption?”
“Nothing public matters. What matters is what happens inside the studio. Your work. That is where genius lies, where it is born, where it is played out. It is not born on the walls of an exhibition. That I can guarantee. Besides, the press destroys us every time. Not because they are right, of course, but because they are stupid. Think of this as a reprieve from your inevitable public flogging. They will ridicule you just as much as they ridicule the rest of us.”
“Don’t patronize me, Edgar.”
“But weren’t you worried that you didn’t have enough canvases to show?”
I Always Loved You Page 15