Sargent's Women Read online

  For Henry the Next,

  with all my love

  His quarry was a suitable subject, his trophy the creation of a thing of beauty.

  —Sir Evan Charteris on his friend John Singer Sargent

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Four Women. Four Lives. Four Paintings.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Pilgrim

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Madonna

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Collector

  Epilogue

  The Curtain Closes

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Four Women. Four Lives. Four Paintings.

  BEAUTIFUL BUT HAUNTING, these women stop you cold, make you stand and wonder: Who were these women? Something in these canvasses guides the eye to detect rustling, restless souls. Elizabeth Chanler’s mournful eyes and anxious hands; Sally Fairchild’s enigmatically veiled features; Belle Gardner’s broad shoulders and curving arms that seem to cradle something that’s missing; and Elsie Palmer’s utter strangeness, with her blunt bangs and blank stare. You cannot help but gaze, for these canvasses contain secrets. They are images from a remote age of extraordinary, vanished splendor and they have stories to tell. At this level of art, the artifice falls away and we make a human connection—direct, startling, unsettling. The master who created these images, John Singer Sargent, confided to an acolyte, “Portrait painting, don’t you know, is very close quarters—a dangerous thing.”

  The late nineteenth century was the best and worst of times—times much like our own, floating on a financial boom, reveling in unprecedented excess, heading for panic. Mark Twain dubbed it, sarcastically, the Gilded Age, but in a way its greatest chronicler might have been Sargent. He defined the era in his portraits of the major players.

  Massive, wall-filling works made the Sargent myth—that he merely slathered on the glamour for ample fees. Indeed, he became the Tiffany of portraiture, a flatterer of Gilded Age vanities; but ever more famous and ever more a creature of the market, Sargent grew to detest portraiture. Still, he was an artist and some sitters truly engaged him. Their portraits leap from the walls, and when we learn their backstories we can see why—we don’t get an art history lesson but a secret guide to their emotions. From their eyes, postures, gestures, and clothing Sargent divined their internal landscapes. He could be uncannily clairvoyant in portraits of young women.

  During his lifetime Sargent created over nine hundred paintings and countless sketches. So why choose these particular four women? Their portraits captivated me with their aura of intrigue, their hints of deep layers of complexity that suggested fascinating stories behind the canvasses. All of these women inhabited the gilded world. But how did they navigate through it? What choices did they make? What storms did they endure? What passions? I tell the stories of these women in the order of age—beginning with an unformed teenager and ending with a commanding middle-aged woman who is painted again in old age. Their lives played out in different places, some of them expected: the drawing rooms in New York, Boston, London, and the behemoth “cottages” of Newport; some of them farther afield: a castle in the Rocky Mountains, a patrician beach on the Massachusetts coast, a haunted mansion in the Hudson Valley, a Bohemian art colony in New Hampshire, a medieval, moated manor house in the English countryside, a forbidding school on the cliffs of the Isle of Wight, an ancient hotel in the Cotswolds.

  I visited all these places to see where the women lived and where Sargent worked. I clambered up the steep cliffs on the Isle of Wight in search of an old girls’ school and explored the island’s Undercliff. I rummaged through attics. I tracked down local experts who brought me to out-of-the-way places and unlocked doors to show me treasures not open to the public. I encountered a man haunted by living in the house once owned by one of the courageous, but tragic figures explored in the book. Each story became its own rabbit hole, with unexpected twists and turns. Things got very curious indeed.

  All these women left voluminous collections of papers—some in archives and libraries, others in private hands—which allow me to tell their stories from the inside out. I felt the joy of holding original letters and leather-bound journals and deciphering handwritten pages. Beautiful crisp stationery and travel journals illustrated by the diarist herself and datelined from exotic locales: the spa at Baden-Baden; the cities of Paris, London, Vienna, Moscow; tiny villages in Burma, India, and Japan; frontier outposts in the American West—it’s a bit like Gilded Age porn to someone like myself. There’s a tactile pleasure in opening envelopes with traces of sealing wax, and touching the engraved letterheads bearing the address of a grand hotel or a family crest from an ancestral mansion. The ink is sometimes smeared across a page; the handwriting is slanted, or florid, or, in some cases, practically unreadable. The letters and diaries kept by these particular women are an art form—written in longhand, with literary and artistic references that make modern correspondence pale. Their letters might go on for twenty pages or more, and they would write every day. It was their means of communication, their entertainment in an era before radio, television, and the nonstop cacophony of modern life. Absorbing all of their writing was not a task for the faint of heart, as it took me nearly eight years to read all of my subjects’ papers and then to try and make sense of it all. Poring over someone’s private writings is an extremely intimate act. Page after page of personal detail and the minutiae of daily life ushered me into the core of that person’s world. And yet, there was always the sense that I was gazing into an inner theater where people were constructing their own characters, pursuing their own elusiveness.

  Since any given scrap of paper could prove vital, my job became that of a detective, piecing together tiny bits of information from a variety of sources, not just from letters and diaries but from memoirs, from personal photographs, and ephemera of all sorts: receipts from dressmakers, invitations to balls, menus from fancy dinners, a family’s guestbook; and other, more bizarre remnants from a life: a photograph of a dead body, a vial of sand, an envelope marked “my curls” and inside it a huge clump of auburn hair. Everything offers evidence, clues, to each woman’s character. Stories emerge; love affairs—some secret, some not—are revealed; intrigues and jealousies play out; rigid family dynamics come into view. These women were all very rich—or in one case, had been rich—so the drama was performed on an operatic scale, abetted by large fortunes and mansions, which doubled as showplaces and as stage sets for titanic family conflicts and tragedies.

  Without exception, these women had a tremendous appetite for high culture. The music they experienced was performed live in their private drawing rooms, sometimes in Sargent’s art studio—it elevated them to another realm. Wagner was all the rage among their peers, and they made pilgrimages to Bayreuth for performances of the Ring cycle. They considered theater, art, and literature essential to their very being. Isabella Stewart Gardner amassed a spectacular art collection and created her own museum. The portrait of the veiled Sally Fairchild inspired her sister to take up brush and follow the path of an artist. These women scribbled favorite verses into their diaries and letters, and carefully dissected the latest novels they were reading. Elizabeth Chanler wrote poetry. As a child, Elsie Palmer penned two stories that were published by her proud father in a leather-bound volume. One was a fairy tale about a brother and sister who received a magic wand and got their wish to explore under the sea. The other story concerned a real-life incident that occurred when Elsie was ten and en route across the Atlantic. One morning the ship turned abruptly and Elsie thought the boat was sinking; in fact, the crew was rescuing a man w
ho had thrown himself overboard. Once safely back on the ship, the man tried to hurl himself into the water again.

  Travel was a staple of restless, upper-class life—private rail cars; first-class trans-Atlantic steamer cabins; grand hotel suites in London, Paris, Venice, and other Old World cities; privately owned steam yachts the size of small battleships. But John Sargent grew up with a different notion of restless travel. His mother, Mary Newbold Singer Sargent, had talked her husband into giving up his sedate medical practice in Philadelphia to live in Europe amid the glittering world of the wandering rich. Distraught after losing a child, she sought forgetfulness and relief in life abroad. She also harbored artistic dreams of her own. Dr. Sargent and his wife didn’t have the financial means of the gilded expatriates, but the couple socialized at the edges of that class, with Sargent’s mother cutting a slightly ridiculous figure as she tried to keep up.

  John was born in Italy in 1856 and raised amid the glories of the classical and Renaissance worlds. His first memory was seeing a piece of porphyry, a purple-red stone prized by the ancients, in the gutter as he walked with his nurse in Florence. Its color remained with him always. He’d later say that the stone was one of the two most beautiful things he’d ever seen. The other was its polar opposite. In Egypt Sargent witnessed brilliantly colored mummies being exhumed and opened to the desert air; within minutes, their vibrant tones faded into dullness.

  Young Sargent and his family moved about Europe like vagabonds. When funds grew short, they’d pick up and go to a new place in France or Italy or Germany and start over. They belonged nowhere, and Sargent was keenly aware of, and embarrassed by, their outsider status. His sister Emily, a year younger than he, suffered from a strange spinal disorder and for some years was bedridden and unable to walk. In the vain hope of finding some new climate or spa to cure her affliction, the wanderings of the family quickened. An artistic prodigy, the young Sargent became the family’s shining star and his domineering mother’s favorite cause. They went to Paris so John could study painting in one of the best ateliers. His stock rose to great heights in the City of Lights and then abruptly fell when his painting Madame X was unveiled in 1884 and scandalized the art establishment. Sargent depicted his subject, a well-known society figure in Paris, as a kind of courtesan—with her décolletage amply displayed, her pale skin casting a sickly bluish tone, and the strap of her gown slipping seductively off her shoulder. An uproar ensued, hastening Sargent’s departure to London.

  Business in England was sluggish in 1887 when the thirty-one-year-old artist received a letter from a supremely rich New York financier and art collector. He asked the artist if he would come to Newport, Rhode Island, the summer playground for the robber baron set, and paint a portrait of his wife. Name your price. Three thousand dollars, Sargent shot back—triple his usual fee. The financier agreed and Sargent set off for America, where he soon fell into the social and professional arms of Stanford White, the fabled architect with the Social Register client list. White admired Sargent’s extraordinary talent and arranged a small private dinner at a downtown studio to introduce Sargent to New York’s top painters and architects. White also grasped how useful he and Sargent could be to each other. The architect was madly designing palaces for American potentates. Enormous walls required paintings—lush, beautiful paintings—and Sargent could provide them. At convivial dinner parties White dropped the name of the artist, whose work was so expensive, so exclusive, so sought-after. Sargent became the portraitist to New York’s gilded set.

  Sargent himself remains an enigma. The artist with the broad sensual brushstrokes, renowned for the rich texture and dreaminess of his canvasses, was a man of contradictions. He was an epicure who adored good food and fragrant handmade Turkish cigarettes; he made nightly appearances at the most fashionable parties and theatrical events; he loved earthy sports like wrestling and ice hockey, both of which enjoyed a vogue in London. He straddled the Bohemian and establishment art worlds, with a wide circle of friends among artists, actors, musicians, writers—perhaps the most famous being Henry James, another expatriate American.

  On the wall of his dining room on Tite Street in London Sargent hung a portrait of a long-necked, handsome young man with an angular jaw and a square-necklined shirt to match. His eyes in shadow, he could be mistaken for an exquisite dancer, a youthful Nureyev-like figure fully aware of his smoldering sensuality. He was Albert de Belleroche, a fellow art student in France. They shared studio space in Paris and London and traveled together. Sargent painted and sketched his friend repeatedly, with a romantic flair. He called Belleroche “Baby.” Lovers? One can’t jump to that conclusion. But past biographers have sometimes taken pains to depict Sargent as a robust masculine specimen who had no interest in sex, to preclude the possibility that he might be, in the coded language of the day, “not a marrying man.” Indeed, Sargent never married, never appeared to have a serious romantic entanglement, though there were rampant rumors: He was a “frenzied bugger” according to one contemporary, others claimed a young woman had broken his heart. He produced a remarkable number of nude portraits at the turn of the twentieth century—the majority of them male, highly erotic, and carefully kept out of view.

  One friend wrote that Sargent “seemed to protect himself in a network of repressions.” His clothing was conservative and well tailored; his life was as orderly and regimented as a banker’s: up at 7 a.m., breakfast by 8, followed by a bath, correspondence, and checking the list of social invitations he’d received. Then it was on to his sittings, to make use of the morning light. By turns he could be shy, voluble, overly opinionated, or charming. He was generous with other artists.

  Sargent maintained that his paintings were not psychological studies—he merely painted what he saw. Yet he managed to peer into the souls of the women in this book. When Elizabeth Chanler limped into his studio, wounded by a debilitating illness not unlike Emily Sargent’s, her melancholy eyes spoke to him. Elsie Palmer, and Sally and Lucia Fairchild, came to him not just as paying clients, but as the fascinating daughters of treasured friends. Isabella Stewart “Belle” Gardner was the toughest of the bunch. The first portrait he made of her was a battle and he muttered about her, and mimicked her, when she was out of earshot. She was narcissistic and impossible—“a lemon with a slit for a mouth,” he said—but she grew on him. Over time she became his greatest patron and friend. His final portrait of her, a watercolor, is regal and heartbreakingly beautiful.

  These portraits reveal the carefully crafted paradox that lies at the heart of Sargent’s work and gives it its tension. If you walk through museum galleries looking for Gilded Age spectacle you will find it, but you will miss Sargent’s truth: He painted illusion that shared space with its own undoing. Sargent’s well-wrought, deluxe surfaces create the dream of a perpetually placid world, but these canvasses hold clues that an elaborate illusion is being enacted. These women are about to do something we cannot see—to experience something they cannot predict. With his uncanny insight, Sargent has grasped that something is impending from within them. They present novellas in embryo: stories of forbidden sexual longings, byzantine family rivalries, tragic illness, the onset of shattering madness, and the transformative power of art. They illuminate a proud and troubled age, an era when financial panic and collapse threw some lives into turmoil and left others barely touched. And they illuminate their maker, whose reputation has waxed and waned, but whose works remain mysteriously seductive.

  SARGENT’S

  WOMEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Pilgrim

  Here is no home, here is but wilderness

  Forth, pilgrim, forth! . . .

  —Geoffrey Chaucer quoted by Elsie Palmer in her diary

  THE CROWD OF London aesthetes argued over the young woman’s look. Some found her “lifeless” and “hard”; others were mesmerized by the intensity of her expression, the “almost crazy” directness of her eyes. The discerning audience—writers, critics, and design
ers among them—were seeing a new work by John Singer Sargent. Titled generically A Portrait, the six-foot-tall painting was on display in the spring of 1891 at an invitation-only viewing at the New Gallery in London. What most of the crowd didn’t know was that Elsie Palmer, the subject, was there. The eighteen-year-old moved through the large crowd, hearing fragments of their sometimes-acid judgments while experiencing the strange sensation of being out of her body. “I sat sedately and unconsciously up in my frame; while people talked and fought about me down below,” she wrote in her diary. The painting’s surreal quality had a lingering effect. People were convinced, well into Elsie’s old age, that she was mad. Others that she was steely and cold. Virginia Woolf once referred to Elsie as “marmorial and mute.”

  It’s true. She is utterly still and severe in the portrait. She’s ice cold as she confronts the viewer with a forbidding stare. “I dare you,” she seems to be saying. She’s more like a character from Poe than the well-dressed elite we expect of Sargent as she sits alone on a low bench. She is in the chapel of a moated, medieval manor house and the mood is funereal. Her blunt dark bangs and long straight hair, her hooded eyes and thick eyebrows, the sharp creases in her white dress that mimic the linenfold paneling behind her—the entire composition is eerie. Sargent absorbs her into the very fabric of the house. Elsie appears utterly affectless. A pagan goddess perhaps, in a world of her own. And, really, she was in her own universe.

  Sargent had a great deal of trouble with the commission; it took him over a year to complete the painting to his satisfaction. When the process began, Elsie had just turned seventeen, on the cusp of womanhood. It seems that Elsie was in the process of changing right before his eyes, for the early sketches that Sargent made are entirely different from the final canvas. The sittings dragged on and on as Elsie’s character remained elusive. Initially he depicted her as childlike, gentle. In a pen-and-ink sketch, Elsie’s lips are parted, her hair softly frames her face, and she glances away from the viewer. She is anything but confrontational; she appears dreamy, sympathetic. Sargent also made several preliminary oil sketches—something he rarely did—to find just the right pose, just the right look for his subject. He painted her standing in the Great Hall of the manor house, with a fireplace and a Gothic arch in the background, a collie resting at her feet. She is distant and unformed, her features blurred. In an entirely different composition Elsie poses in the garden, bathed in yellow light, surrounded by roses, her head cocked slightly in a charming manner, a hint of a smile on her lips. She’s flirtatious but innocent.