Sargent's Women Page 3

  For Elsie, an imaginative child who grew up reading romantic stories while curled up in the cleft of a rock, the house must have been mysterious and fascinating—but not without its terrors. There was no electricity, so family and guests wandered the corridors with candles, the flickering light casting long shadows. Rats scurried across the floors at night. Turning a corner, Elsie would come face to face with the frightening head of a Saracen carved into the newel post of the Jacobean staircase. Up the stairs were the bedrooms, one created out of the “Old Chapel” where services had been held from the Middle Ages until at least 1585, when authorities raided the Mote to search for relics and to accuse the owner, whose wife was Catholic, of keeping “a vile and papistical house.” There was still a “squint,” or opening on one wall, so that family members not inclined to attend the chapel service could listen without entering the room. Elsie’s own bedroom had a small window looking out onto the stone courtyard; she wrote in her diary of moonlit evenings when she could see the shadow of the tower on the illuminated cobblestones and the dark fir trees beyond.

  Down the hall there was another chapel—the “New Chapel,” probably consecrated in 1633—with a barrel-vaulted ceiling celebrating Henry VIII with images of the Tudor rose, the castle of Castile commemorating Henry’s first wife, and other royal images laboriously painted on the curving ceiling boards. The room was somber. The wooden pews, and pulpit; the linenfold paneling, so named because the carved wooden walls look like folded linen; the angelic figures carved onto the end of the church stalls. The only light filtered in through sixteenth-century stained glass windows from Germany. A claviorganum, a hybrid of harpsichord and organ—Henry VIII owned such an instrument—stood at one end of the chapel. This seems a gloomy spot for a portrait, but Sargent got to know Elsie well, and this is where he eventually decided she belonged.

  A photograph taken during Sargent’s stay at Ightham Mote shows Elsie and her mother as he might have first encountered them after crossing the moat to enter the house. They are in the stone courtyard. Queen wears a fancy dress, an elaborate broad-rimmed hat, and a full-length cape draped over her shoulders. Her arm is raised and her finger is pointed toward her daughter, as if giving instructions. Elsie is looking the other way, directly at the camera. She wears a billowing dress, a tall soft dark hat, and has a blank, impenetrable look. She appears to inhabit a world of stone ruled by her powerful, domineering mother. Elsie holds on to her new dog, a sad-eyed St. Bernard named Leo.

  Elsie had recently returned from a nearly two-month trip with her father. They had traveled through France, Germany, and Switzerland. In Paris they ascended the Eiffel Tower that had just been built as the entrance to the world’s fair being held there. They hiked in the Swiss Alps and spent a night at the Hospice, or monastery, of St. Bernard, where monks had first bred the mountain rescue dogs. Elsie’s father bought two St. Bernards and gave the bigger one, “who is a perfect beauty,” to his daughter. Elsie went back to the Mote with her dog; not long after, her father returned to New York with his dog on the City of Paris, the fastest steamer then plying the Atlantic.

  Elsie’s mother spent most of her married life apart from her husband and she confided in her eldest daughter as if she were a peer. The threat of death always hung over “Motherling,” as her children affectionately called her. Queen made it clear to Elsie that she was to take over in her place if something should happen to her. In July 1886, Queen had just moved her children to England. She feared she was about to die; her children’s father was nowhere in sight. She entrusted a letter to thirteen-year-old Elsie.

  Mother wants to be very sure that you have some words from her—for “God-speed”—in case she should be called away suddenly on a long journey—without time to speak . . . to you before she goes. . . . My big darling—my white little maid—my gentle snow drop—Elsie—you know how much we have talked of your being the little mother of the other two. Think of that, now—my first born—my precious daughter—I need say no more to your loving soul than that—never forget—that Motherling is near you blessing you—always—forever—helping you, comforting you—and waiting for you and your baby sisters. . . . Make them brave and good—Kind and true . . . and let them know how “Mutterlein” is loving them—and near them. You will read these words to them—so that they will remember what Mother said to them—and you will show them by your own sweet love how Mother loved them . . . better than all the world besides—You will not be sad—but bright and happy with them—Mother is resting (you know how tired she often was—my darling) and happy—and glad in your joys—and goodness—and waiting till your work is done too—

  This was a heavy burden for Elsie. She had a special bond with her mother, but it was always clouded with impending doom. Queen traveled to the Continent without her children on at least one occasion while they were living at the Mote, and Elsie hated the separation. She wrote plaintively to her mother:

  After supper at 8 o’clock here I am, writing to you, my Mother, in your morning room which shows a tiny bit of your spirit to me . . . loving you dearly, dearly, and wondering what you may be doing just now at this very minute . . . I love The Mote better than any other place in the world . . . [and] when I am away from it I always long to get back to it, just the way with Glen Eyrie. I am sure this will be a real second home some day; I love it too much, and you love it too much . . . that it shouldn’t be, even if only in our thoughts . . .”

  Ightham Mote became a touchstone for Elsie. On returning from Switzerland in 1889, she wrote in her diary that she was “bewildering[ly] happy” to see “Motherling” and “Our Mote.” The General made only occasional visits to the manor house, where he faded into the medieval furnishings. Queen, who charmed her guests with delightful, animated conversation, was the star of the household; her introverted, business-obsessed husband became the butt of some joking among the artistic crowd—even though he was the one paying the bills. At Christmas 1887, Henry James wrote sarcastically of the patriarch’s arrival, “The good General Palmer arrived from Mexico, with the mud of his railway-making still on his boots.”

  James and assorted other guests were spending the holiday season with the Palmers, an episode the novelist described as the “drollest amalgam of American and Western characteristics . . . in the rarest old English setting.” The rich Americans, with “characteristically Coloradoish, generosity,” laid out a Christmas feast for the estate’s seventy “lean tenants,” whose English landlords had been so poor and closefisted for so many generations that the “rustics” were unaccustomed to such largesse. The tenants devoured the dozens of turkeys and roast beefs and plum pies set out for them in the Great Hall. The room was warmed by a Yule log and a band provided music. A Christmas tree added to the festivities, and the young people—Elsie and her sisters and the other children who were houseguests—performed a dance in costume.

  The local innkeeper, who helped organize the event, was most competent in James’s estimation. Why would Queen, who “now lives in a country boasting the perfection of domestic service,” look elsewhere for help? After a trip to Italy, she had returned with an Italian butler who was merely “a picturesque boatman who doesn’t even wash his hands,” and she employed as her “major-domo a helpless German-American governess from the Rocky Mountains.”

  That being said, the household was still exceedingly English, with its ancient furnishings, in James’s words, in “a state of almost perilous decrepitude.” The place was also freezing. Frances Wolcott, an American guest, once wrote that the dining hall was so drafty that screens had to be placed around every chair. “Our spines were chilled,” she wrote. “I felt that a woman’s best friend was a hot water bottle and that to jump into bed and pull up the coverlets . . . was but the part of wisdom.” A member of the House of Commons had warned her about how frigid English country houses could be. He told her that on visiting such places he wore “perforated chamois skin next [to] my body.” Not quite able to picture herself with chamois peeking
out of her low-cut dress, Wolcott had to endure the cold, “sitting at [the] table looking black and blue from lack of circulation, with my toes turned under the arch of my foot.”

  James didn’t focus on the cold during his Christmas visit, but he did report that he shared his tower bedroom with both a ghost and a secret dungeon, though “fortunately the former remained in the latter.” The author added to the decidedly spooky atmosphere by sitting next to a huge fireplace and spinning out gruesome ghost stories—leaving the assembled adults, and doubtless the cringing children, hanging on every word. But the guests, both young and old, also sang Christmas carols and danced merrily to music provided by a fellow reveler.

  The Mote was a paradise for children, and Queen saw to it that her grown-up friends brought along their young ones. “The children were always the frame to the picture in that lovable household,” one guest reminisced. There were formal gardens and dark woods to explore, there was bowling on the large greensward known as the “Pleasaunce.” The children dangled fishing lines off the stone bridges over the moat or stood on window seats in the library—each child claiming his or her own cubicle—and then cast their lines out the window to the water below.

  The house yielded its secrets to curious children. A scouting party once turned up an unknown room that hadn’t been used for over two hundred years. Ellen Terry’s son found it when he nearly fell through rotted floorboards into the hidden chamber that had been used as a temporary jail for Roundhead troops who’d attacked the Royalist stronghold of Ightham Mote during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century.

  The guests who frequented the house were an unconventional sort who mixed easily with the next generation, treating them as equals. The theatrical impresario Joseph Carr insisted the children call him by his first name. George Meredith, a literary eminence in declining health, would park himself beneath the spreading cedar tree next to the bowling green and ponder the future careers of all the children by studying their heads as if they were crystal balls. Joe Carr’s daughter had such a remarkably shaped head that Meredith advised, “Always let her pursue whatever walk in life she chooses.” Elsie found Meredith full of lively talk, though his stories and reminiscences tended to ramble on. He once told her that she looked “like a nun in a rose garden.”

  Dress-up was a major component of entertaining at the Mote. Queen loved wearing outfits that were in keeping with the medieval surroundings. Guests followed suit. At Queen’s insistence, Ellen Terry would bring her theatrical or fancy dress costumes when she came for a weekend. (While at her own country house, Terry preferred doffing her clothes, and dancing outside in gossamer nightgowns.) Elsie watched this world of make-believe with her mother at the center of it.

  During her sittings with Sargent, Elsie kept a diary. The artist was very particular. He would decide upon the manner and the mood in which his subject would be presented. The socialites and dowagers he painted would bring out an array of their finest gowns and Sargent would look through them, rejecting this one, choosing that one. Or, he might just take some luxe fabric and drape it around the sitter in the way he wanted. The accoutrements were crucial—perhaps a hat, a rose in a hand, a pair of oversized Asian vases to tower over a group of children, a costume covered in beetle wings.

  With Elsie, in contrast, Sargent stripped everything down. The dress he chose is simplicity itself: smocked on top, a sash at the waist, the crisp vertical folds of the fabric echoing the background. It is an aesthetic-style dress, a fashion then in vogue, that harkened back to the Middle Ages. Elsie is almost entirely covered: Her inner sleeves stretch to her wrists, her dress reaches to her neck. She wears a modest, barely visible necklace. She looks chaste. The artist abstained from using bright colors. He made it largely a study in white, muting the rest of the colors. He matched Elsie’s brown hair and eyes with the linenfold paneling. He gave her pale pink lips and a subtle mauve shawl wrapped partially around her waist. That was all the contrast he cared to show. He used the severe wooden background of the chapel wall, coupled with Elsie’s blank but haunted stare, to make it seem as if she were in a liturgical trance, or had just emerged from the confessional.

  Sargent needed activity, conversation, and music during his painting sessions. He’d encourage his subjects to invite friends. He’d puff on a cigarette, sit at a piano and play when he hit a dull patch. Sargent was a brilliant pianist and could just as easily have pursued music as a career, but whether he would dare touch the claviorganum in the chapel is another matter.

  “Hardly doing any-thing but sitting still with my hands in my lap, having my portrait painted,” Elsie wrote in her diary on December 1, 1889. The sittings at the Mote had been going on for a month, and Sargent was still seeking something. The artist was a virtuoso of technique and was well-known for being able to turn out portraits quickly. Critics accused him of being facile; fellow artists gnashed their teeth with jealousy. A full-length portrait usually took Sargent no more than about a dozen sittings. But Elsie was giving him fits. He couldn’t quite get a handle on her—and the weather complicated the matter. Sargent needed light to illuminate Elsie’s features inside the chapel and a stretch of gray days delayed the process. On one gloomy, dank day Sargent abandoned the indoors altogether. He went outside and sketched a group playing a game of bowls next to the manor house—five women in long cloaks, Queen and Elsie among them, and one tall, thin, bearded man.

  The more time Sargent spent at the Mote, the better he got to know Elsie—and the harder it became to paint this complicated creature. He and she conversed over dinners and on evening strolls. On November 5, while Queen was in London, Sargent and Elsie walked several miles with the dogs to the village of Shipbourne. It was Guy Fawkes Day and there was a bonfire on the green, a great conflagration with a tower of smoke, flames shooting up and sparks flying above and onto the crowd. The groups of boys carousing around the fire unnerved Elsie, who thought they looked “strange and weird.” Leo, the St. Bernard, was frightened by the chaotic scene so Elsie and Sargent ambled home.

  As November turned to December, Sargent had to put aside the painting. On December 4 the artist was leaving for America with his sister Violet. Commissions awaited Sargent on the other side of the Atlantic. Elsie went up to London to see him and his sister off, and then stayed in town for several days in a flat that Queen had been leasing. Elsie did her Christmas shopping, attended a concert, and then returned to the Mote in moonlight with the countryside covered in snow. The sight enchanted her.

  Life would soon be different. The Palmers’ lease for the Mote was coming to an end, and a new owner, Sir Thomas Colyer-Fergusson, had given them notice that he would be moving into the house himself. Queen and Elsie had already spent months seeking a new country home, and they settled on Blackdown, a stone Elizabethan manor house in West Sussex set against a steep hill and looking out onto wonderful vistas. Lord Tennyson lived nearby.

  Leaving the Mote was wrenching. Queen’s fortieth birthday fell just a few days before their departure. Elsie’s sister Dorothy (“Dos”) played some Schumann for her mother, and a magnificent array of spring flowers—daffodils, violets, primroses, and daisies—brightened the table. Nonetheless, the birthday celebration was melancholy. At the end of March 30, 1890, their last full day at the Mote, Elsie lingered at the window, savoring her final view of the courtyard and the lawn. “Tonight: this is the Mote; tomorrow: that was the Mote,” she wrote. The next day the family bid good-bye to the tenants on the estate, one of whom presented a hazelwood cane to Queen, and blue jay feathers to Elsie.

  Mother and daughters caught the morning train and began yet another new chapter. But they had barely settled into Blackdown when they got word that that estate had also been sold, and they’d have to find another place to live. They shuttled between London and a cottage in the ancient village of Frant, until they could find something grander.

  Sargent meanwhile was deluged with commissions in the United States in 1890; nonetheless, his sister Emily
wrote, “Elsie Palmer’s unfinished portrait in England is weighing very much on his mind.” The fact that Sargent was even thinking about her portrait at all is rather astonishing. Sargent was then frantically finishing a series of commissions on the East Coast, and about to embark on mammoth wall decorations for the new Boston Public Library designed by the prestigious architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Sargent’s architect friend Stanford White and his benefactor, Isabella Stewart Gardner, had played key roles in securing this coveted commission for Sargent.

  Sargent briefly returned to London in November. Busy as he was, the artist was intent on finishing Elsie’s portrait. On November 18, 1890, three days after his arrival, Elsie visited his Tite Street studio and was amazed to see the “wonderful change” he’d made to her painting since she’d last seen it. That being said, he still seemed to be having some trouble with her hair. “Hair is probably coming down,” she noted. There was, she said, a “state of quiet” in the studio.

  To those who didn’t know him well, Sargent appeared shy and awkward, his speech interrupted by long pauses and nervous half coughs, his feet jiggling. He despised public speaking, which he avoided at all costs. Repressed was a word that often came to acquaintances’ minds, but with friends he was gregarious and charming. He also held strong opinions and loved to debate matters of art and literature. He did so with Elsie, keeping up a steady stream of good-natured arguments as she sat for him in his studio over the course of a week. “Same spirit of rebellion against Scott,” she wrote, after he presumably expressed his old distaste for the historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. On other days they argued over Schubert’s symphony, actors and actresses, his picture of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. Elsie either ate lunch with the artist at his studio, or went off with his sister Violet to catch up on the latest news. In the evenings, Queen and Elsie often dined with Sargent. Yet the portrait still remained unfinished.