Sargent's Women Read online

  The finished portrait, however, dispenses with charm. Elsie seems to be in a state of hyperfocus. One contemporary critic wrote that the portrait was a “merciless analysis of character.” Except for the single dainty slipper that appears from underneath her dress, and the soft shawl (perhaps cashmere) partially draped across her lap, Elsie is all hard edges. Humorless. She is otherworldly.

  On October 31, 1889, the day after Elsie’s seventeenth birthday, Sargent came to paint her. Elsie’s mother had just visited the artist at his country retreat; while there, she probably finalized the arrangements for the portrait. Elsie, her two younger sisters, ages eight and nine, and her mother were then living in the English countryside in Kent. They were American expatriates. (Elsie’s father, General William Palmer, a railroad baron from Colorado, footed the bill but made only infrequent visits.) For the past three years the Palmers had been living in a medieval fantasy of a house called Ightham (pronounced “Item”) Mote, a sprawling half-timbered manor house surrounded by water, with a central cobblestoned courtyard, a bell tower with a one-handed clock that rang on the hour, and a ghost that supposedly paced the staircase hall at night. The ghost, Dame Dorothy, had died a gruesome death in 1641 after pricking her finger while sewing on a Sunday. As if her nightly footsteps were not reminder enough of the ill-fated dame, her portrait in Elizabethan dress hung above the fireplace in the dining hall.

  Elsie’s mother was called “Queen,” an apt nickname given that she presided over an ancient estate with a cast of courtiers who came regularly by train from London, some thirty-five miles away. Queen, a rich, charming American with a gorgeous mezzo-soprano voice and a taste for entertaining, had the perfect property to gather like-minded lovers of art and music and literature. Who could resist visiting one of the great historic treasures of England? London tastemakers flocked there for the atmospherics and for the august company: the famous novelists Henry James and George Meredith; John Singer Sargent and his friend, the musically inclined Alma Strettell (she and Sargent played such incessant duets in the Cotswolds one summer they were dubbed “co-maniacs”); Alma’s sister, Alice, an inspired costume designer; and Alice’s husband, Joseph Carr, a well-known art critic, theater director/impresario, and the founder of the New Gallery, where Elsie’s portrait would hang.

  The biggest personality to frequent Ightham Mote was Ellen Terry, the greatest stage actress and celebrity of the day—“Aunt Nell” to Elsie and her sisters. Born into a theatrical family, Terry made her stage debut at the age of nine. She married three times, had a series of lovers—including a rumored relationship with Elsie’s German governess—and gave birth to two children out of wedlock. This sort of behavior by a woman did not generally go over well in Victorian England, but in her case, it added to her fame. (She was eventually appointed a dame of the British Empire.) Sargent had painted the forty-two-year-old actress the previous winter. She was then starring as Lady Macbeth in a controversial London production. Sargent, an avid theater fan, took in the opening performance on December 27, 1888, and audibly gasped upon the actress’s first entrance. That dress! It shimmered like “the scales of a serpent,” and hugged Terry’s figure like “soft chain armour.” That had been the intent of the costume designer, Alice Strettell Carr, a friend of both Sargent and Terry, and among the inner circle at Ightham Mote. But the dress hadn’t come easily. Carr couldn’t find any fabric in England to create the sensuous yet metallic look she had in mind. She imported fine yarn from Bohemia—strands of green silk twisted with blue tinsel—and then crocheted the yarn into a dress based on a thirteenth-century design. It was floor length with large sweeping sleeves, but still lacked the theatrical brilliance to project to the final row of the theater. Inspiration came in the form of luminous insects. Carr had countless iridescent beetle wings sewn all over the dress. In a finishing touch, she arranged rubies and diamonds along the edges of the costume to create Celtic-style patterns.

  Upon seeing Terry in that fabulous dress with her hair hanging to her knees—“magenta hair!” Sargent exulted in a letter to the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston—Sargent knew that he had to paint her in full costume. It took some arm-twisting, but Terry finally relented and arrived by carriage to Sargent’s Tite Street studio one soggy morning. (Across the road, Oscar Wilde was riveted as he looked out his library window to witness “the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler.” Such “wonderful possibilities” the street now possessed, Wilde mused.)

  The year had been an emotional roller coaster for Sargent. Winter sittings with the sublime Ellen Terry (among others) and the spring unveiling of his finished portrait, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. The painting caused an enormous sensation; it was adored and reviled in equal measure and made Terry and Sargent the talk of the town. The artist created a tableau that did not appear in the production, but one that evokes the heart of the tragedy: the moment—simultaneously horrific and triumphant—when Lady Macbeth becomes queen of Scotland after having goaded her husband into committing murder. Dressed in her costume of beetle wings, she lifts a golden crown onto her head; her face, ghostly white, is stricken with overwhelming emotion, half steely ambition and half hysteria at the realization of the evil she has wrought. Henry Irving, who played Macbeth opposite Terry, purchased the painting and hung it in an alcove of the Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum Theater, a cozy gathering spot for the posttheater Bohemian set. A celebratory dinner was held there in March when the painting had its first private viewing among friends.

  Just a month after Sargent’s triumph, his father, FitzWilliam, died in the village of Bournemouth on the southern coast of England. FitzWilliam Sargent had grown to hate the expatriate life with its incessant travels through Europe, but he bowed to the demands of his wife. Decades earlier he wrote: “I am tired of this nomadic sort of life:—the Spring comes, and we strike our tents and migrate for the summer: the Autumn returns, and we must again pack up. . . . I wish there were some prospect of our going home and settling down among our own people and taking permanent root.”

  Permanent root—there had been no such thing in John Sargent’s early life, as his family roamed around Europe always in search of something that seemed just out of reach. As an adult, Sargent had become not quite a man without a country but one who straddled two lands. He laid claim to being an American artist, yet lived full time in England.

  With the death of his father, Sargent became head of the family. The artist was accustomed to painting aristocrats who fell heir to vast estates and fortunes. Sargent’s father didn’t leave much in the way of a financial legacy. The family had long-since depended upon Mary Sargent’s fortune—the bequest she had received years earlier—and they had expended much of that capital with their nonstop travels. The painter now inherited the care of his demanding mother and his two siblings: Emily who could still, at age thirty-two, burst into tears at any moment, in humiliation over her spinal deformity; and headstrong twenty-year-old Violet.

  When Sargent arrived at Ightham Mote on the last day of October in 1889 he must have experienced a twinge of recognition. Here was another nomadic American family with a mother hungry to mix with the leading cultural lights of the day. Unlike Sargent’s mother, who had been driven abroad by a combination of grief and artistic ambition, Elsie’s mother was fleeing illness. Nine years earlier, Queen—then only thirty years old—had suffered a heart attack near her home in the Colorado Rockies. Doctors warned that the thin air could be fatal for her.

  Queen had not grown up in the pioneer West. She’d been raised in pampered style on Long Island. Her father, William Proctor Mellen, was a prosperous, well-connected lawyer and a former partner of Salmon P. Chase, the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Seeking investment possibilities in the post-Civil War boom, Mellen met William Jackson Palmer, an ambitious and bright young man who understood the western railroad business. A former Civil War general, Palmer had political clout and financial savvy. A number of Union generals p
arlayed their high military rank into postwar railroad riches. Palmer also had a thorough knowledge of railroad technology and a grandiose scheme: he’d build a railroad line from Denver south to El Paso, Texas, and connect it with a railroad that he would simultaneously build north from Mexico City. In the steep Rocky Mountain regions rich in coal, gold, and silver, he would cleverly make use of narrow-gauge rail lines. The system of railroad lines he created—and the ancillary real estate and mining investments that rippled out from them—eventually turned into a bonanza.

  While promoting his business plans to Mellen on a train heading west, thirty-two-year-old Palmer had a chance meeting with Mellen’s traveling partner, his diminutive, curly-haired, eighteen-year-old daughter, Queen. Instantly smitten, Palmer began to court her. One of his first invitations was an impressive one: he asked Queen if she would accompany him to President Ulysses S. Grant’s inaugural ball in Washington. Shortly thereafter, they were engaged. Palmer, constantly on the move on business matters, wrote her long affectionate letters. He painted a romantic vision of their life in the West: he’d build a “Castle” for her in a spectacularly beautiful setting he’d come upon in Colorado “where life would be poetry—an idyll of blue sky, clear, intense atmosphere, fantastic rock, dancing water, green meadow, graceful hillside, high mountain, rugged cañon, and distant view—of the kind that gives wing to the imagination.” Queen loved this adventurous dream, though wished that Palmer would stop working long enough to come see her every now and then. “I may as well get used to these sudden moves of yours and accept my fate with mild resignation,” she wrote him on May 30, 1869. She also had to get used to the idea of being intimate with a man so much older and more experienced than she. The awestruck bride-to-be continued to address her fiancé as “General,” until Palmer insisted she call him by his first name.

  They married in November 1870 and honeymooned in England, where the workaholic groom drummed up investors for his railroad and for a resort town he envisioned along the route. The town, Colorado Springs, would feature pure mountain air and no alcohol—though residents would soon find creative ways to circumvent that particular proscription. Known variously as the “Newport of the Rockies” and “Little London” for the number of Britons it attracted, Colorado Springs eventually became a refuge for well-heeled invalids—patients suffering from consumption (now known as tuberculosis), who were referred to as “lungers.”

  With Queen offering architectural advice from afar, Palmer oversaw the creation of a rambling country home about seven miles from the town, in a canyon of spectacular red rocks beneath Pikes Peak. Called Glen Eyrie, their home was on the edge of the “Garden of the Gods,” a geological wonderland that featured sculpturelike rock formations of every conceivable shape scattered haphazardly about—pinnacles and spires, mushroomlike effusions and boulders that appeared to be teetering en pointe. The novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, among those drawn to Colorado Springs for her health, described this surreal red landscape as “all motionless and silent,” as if at “the very climax of some supernatural catastrophe.”

  As a new bride in Colorado, Queen embraced the frontier, giving the rock formations around Glen Eyrie fanciful names: “Major Domo,” “King Arthur’s Seat,” “Abraham Lincoln,” and “Montezuma,” among others. As Colorado Springs emerged from the wilderness, she also christened the town’s new streets, naming them Cache de Poudre, Tejon, Cascade, and Pikes Peak, after rivers and mountains. She eagerly embarked on town projects: hosting a Christmas party for the local children that became an annual event; arranging and singing at a concert to raise money to build a library. She endured blizzards in their remote canyon perch, and witnessed snow rising from avalanches sliding down the surrounding mountaintops. She accompanied her husband on a strenuous overland trip to Mexico City to survey railroad possibilities. En route, the group was attacked by bandits but managed to escape. Queen soon realized that she was pregnant and grew increasingly sick from the incessant jostling of the carriage. She left the traveling party for New York, where she gave birth to Elsie on October 30, 1872. Then, Queen brought their infant back to the wilderness kingdom of Glen Eyrie.

  Native Americans considered the landscape sacred and Elsie, who grew up there as a child, found it magical. As a young girl, she wrote a fan letter to the children’s fantasy author George MacDonald, asking him for his autograph. “Our home is in Colorado in the midst of the mountains, and a long way off from houses, and I love it more than any place in the world,” Elsie wrote. “Some of the descriptions [in your books] . . . remind me very much of it; and when I am there I go far away almost inside of the beautiful red rocks, and read them, and they help me to understand them.” She signed her note, “Your little friend Elsa Palmer.” She felt a kinship to MacDonald’s characters, particularly the eight-year-old heroine of The Princess and the Goblin who lives in a remote mountain landscape, her mother dead and her father away much of the time. Left to her own devices, the princess finds an evil world of goblins in the nearby mines, and a beautiful ghostly forebear who protects her.

  Queen’s heart seizure in 1880 changed everything. The thin mountain air—which Colorado Springs touted as such a tonic for good health—was deadly for her. On October 29, 1880, Queen gave birth in Colorado to her second daughter, Dorothy; but when she got pregnant again the following year, the family retreated to a seaside resort in southwestern England, where a third daughter, Marjory, was born on November 12, 1881.

  Queen stayed on in England with her three daughters, ages nine and under, while the General returned to America to attend to his all-consuming railroad business. That didn’t prevent him, however, from giving long-distance child-rearing instructions. He was worried when, in 1882, Queen wrote that Elsie appeared “dull-eyed and wan.” Is her schedule too strenuous, he wondered? “Is the discipline too much and are the rules too exacting for a rather delicate constitution?” He knew what that felt like. As a boy, he had been pushed too hard until he fell ill and nearly died. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to his dear Elsie. “I suppose the nearer to little kittens children can actually be kept during infancy the better, so as to give the animal part of their natures full swing and development,” he wrote to his wife. He went on to complain about a “hot-house tendency” in child rearing at that time, “as if the competitions of the business and social world had entered the nursery and the schoolhouse.” He worried that perhaps they, as parents, were too ambitious for Elsie, and “that we may have driven her too much, in our anxious zeal, and made a little machine of her.” He did, however, want Elsie to work on her equestrian skills in England. “I am perfectly enchanted to learn of the way Elsie jumps,” her father wrote in a subsequent letter. “She has succeeded beyond even my sanguine hopes.”

  In the summer of 1882, the General went to London and brought them all back to Colorado. But within a year Queen’s heart grew weak, her spirit restless. She worried that eleven-year-old Elsie needed a proper education, and not just the one-room schoolhouse at their rock-strewn estate, miles of barren unpaved wasteland away from Colorado Springs. Queen brought her daughters to Newport and then, in 1884, to New York City, where Elsie enrolled at Brearley, a serious private school for young girls that had just been founded by a Harvard graduate of the same name. There, Elsie had the chance to make friends in a school setting with girls her own age. She became lifelong friends with the Dunhams, a brood of a half-dozen sisters—four of whom Sargent would eventually draw or paint—who were sought-after guests in the drawing rooms of New York’s cultural elite.

  While in New York the Palmers lived for two years at the Dakota, the city’s first luxury apartment building, a delightful confection of French Renaissance, German Gothic, and Victorian English design that had just been built on the then barely inhabited far reaches of the Upper West Side. (At Central Park West and 72nd Street, the Dakota has been home to the rich and famous for generations and was made ghoulishly famous as the setting for the film Rosemary’s Baby and the real-l
ife murder of John Lennon, who lived there.) Central Park lay just outside their door, so Elsie had ample opportunities to ride. And the Dakota had its own adjoining tennis and croquet courts, so there was no end of fresh air and activity. But the bitter winter weather took its toll on Queen’s health. In 1886, they pulled up stakes once more, moved back to London, and then on to Ightham Mote.

  The Mote is a giant puzzle, or more precisely, a geometric sequence of squares. It is a square within a square within a square—the central square cobblestone courtyard, surrounded by buildings, all protected by a moat fed by a lake. The house, in a wooded hideaway, is completely enclosed upon itself. Impregnable, solid, and self-sufficient, it feels as if it’s hermetically sealed. The walls of the house fall precipitously into the water surrounding it. At the main entrance, a two-arched stone bridge delivers visitors to an oak door studded with nails. One expects knights in armor to emerge.

  The exterior of the Mote is a marvel of irregular gables, chimneys, and staggered rooflines, the accretions of many centuries; there are mullioned windows and a stone tower topped by a brick parapet. The interior is just as quirky. The fourteenth-century Great Hall has an arched roof that rises nearly forty feet above the ground; in a humorous touch, crouching carved figures in the wall appear to hold up the arches. Coats of arms and mythical beasts are carved into the wooden paneling.