Sargent's Women Page 4

  By mid-December, the skies were so dark in London that Elsie suggested that Sargent come to their country cottage in Frant. He did so the next day, and he was rewarded with a bright sunny day. While Elsie posed, Queen read aloud the speeches of Charles Parnell, the Parliament member who fiercely supported Home Rule in Ireland. The political chatter seemed to propel him. “Portrait got on fast and well,” Elsie wrote, “and is so beautiful; it will be finished tomorrow.” The next day he came down early from London; but though there was lots of continuing discussion of Parnell, the light wasn’t good. A friend in attendance expressed her sympathy. Oh, the trials of posing!

  Within weeks, Sargent left London for the Near East and wouldn’t be back for the best part of a year. (Elsie’s painting would be unveiled in his absence, though he still wasn’t entirely satisfied with it.) The artist was going abroad on a research trip for his Boston Library murals that were to be based on the Bible and the ancient world. By contrast, Elsie’s life was circumscribed. She spent New Year’s Eve with her mother and, in her diary, reflected on how quickly the year had gone by. She added, “I can’t express my feelings.”

  At eighteen, Elsie was understandably confused. In a sense she was trapped between her mother—whose health she worried about constantly—and her father, who worried about Elsie’s health and well-being. As the family reluctantly left the Mote at the end of March 1890, Queen wrote to her eldest daughter on stationery from the manor house. She directed that the letter be opened only in the event of her death. It was a sequel to her previous letter containing her death instructions. Queen looked over the old letter and wrote:

  There is not much to add. If I should write farewell words to you now they would be the same. . . . Perhaps you will never see the words I have written, for I am stronger, not so tired any more, and even though we are on the eve of leaving our beloved Mote, I am happy. . . . It is a comfort always, to know that even if I should go to sleep tonight, not to wake again in this world, I have been able to go so far on your journey with you and the little ones. What a joy it is—you will not forget sweetheart? even when you miss your own Motherling who is near you—whether you see her or not—forever.

  Good by—my Heart—my little ones—our Mote—Your Mother

  Elsie suffered from worry and from headaches. Doctors in England prescribed coffee, but her father sent contradictory instructions from Colorado. He opposed the use of caffeine and advocated a daily regimen of fresh air and exercise. As if he were commanding troops or running a railroad, the General drew up a schedule for her. If she lived up to it, she’d earn a larger allowance, but if she failed to fulfill her duties, he would reduce it. Though he began the letter with “My darling chick,” he quickly adopted an authoritarian tone as he dictated a plan “of great advantage to [your] health, nerves, temper, spirits, & morale.”

  As I merely want compliance, & not promises . . . I have thought to adopt a plan which may present a continuing inducement—No compliance—No instalment [sic]. You can cease when you like—only I might not be inclined to renew when once broken . . .

  The present requirements are

  no tea or coffee or stimulants

  To be out & take a 10 minutes walk at 10 minutes before 8

  To take a walk or ride in the forenoon—before lunch & after breakfast

  Ditto—between lunch & dinner—the two together to be not less than 3 miles of walk every day unless weather should absolutely prohibit (which means an American not the usual English storm)

  Off to bed at 10—or earlier without fail except when theatres, concerts or parties are at hand.

  This will do for the present. If you wish to start on that, the check will be sent you weekly or monthly.

  You [are] to notify me of any default.

  Your Papa

  Elsie knew her father was a stickler for detail and would demand strict adherence to his regimen, so she responded with some questions of her own. Could she try the regimen for perhaps a month before committing to it? She also inquired about specific situations that might require bending the rules. For instance, if evening events kept her up beyond 10 p.m., could she push back her morning schedule the following day? She promised to tell him if she did not stick to the plan.

  When it came to Elsie, the General and Queen had differing priorities. For her father, physical exercise trumped all; for her mother, an immersion in the arts was paramount. Queen saw to it that Elsie had a steady diet of theater and concerts and ongoing piano lessons from a professional musician. Queen was well-known to the artists in London, and welcome to visit them. One winter day in 1891, Elsie and her mother visited Alfred Parsons’s studio where, courtesy of his paintings, they enjoyed the spectacle of English gardens in bloom.

  Elsie and her mother went alone to Paris in March 1891. It was art at the Louvre in the morning and the music of Richard Wagner, the German composer, in the afternoon. “The end of the Gotterdammerung, carried one off one’s feet—it was as though I were hearing the soul of music.” Wagner was an absolute obsession at the time, and the theater he built in Bayreuth, Germany, to stage mammoth productions of his work was a mecca for music lovers. En route to Bayreuth later that summer—the “most sacred spot,” in Elsie’s words—she and her mother passed through forests of “great solemn silent pines! they almost speak to one; and mean strength and everlastingness.” The first performance they saw at the Bayreuth Festival was almost more than Elsie could bear and beyond her ability to convey in language.

  Surrounded by some of the most talented and creative souls in England, Elsie felt an emptiness at her core. Who was she exactly? On January 21, 1891, she confided in her diary:

  there is . . . a something strangely lacking in me. . . . I feel that the lack of it (whatever it is) must be at the root of my clumsiness, forgetfulness, shyness, vagueness, and it makes me feel—well, not very happy. How nice if some kind powerful person would present me with it, and I could safely install it into that lacking void of my brain. Good-night, feelings, happy, sad and complicated! I have had quite enough of you.

  When her portrait—her very character—was scrutinized at the New Gallery in April, neither her father, nor the artist himself, was there. The General visited London later that year, and, being a practical man, he wanted to look at his daughter’s portrait close-up, to examine what he had paid for. He and Elsie went to the artist’s Tite Street studio in December 1891, but Sargent wasn’t there and they couldn’t find the painting themselves. The artist had decamped for larger quarters in the village of Fairford, where he was working on his enormous library decorations. Upon learning that Elsie had been to his studio, Sargent wrote a letter of apology for any inconvenience he’d caused, saying that he’d moved her portrait from its accustomed spot in order to reuse the easel it had been resting on. He also asked a favor. Please don’t have the painting photographed just yet, he requested. “I want to do something more to your portrait.” What revision Sargent had in mind is unknown, but clearly Elsie continued to mystify and intrigue the artist.

  Sargent, too, remained something of a sphinx. In trying to describe him, Elsie wrote: “It is too difficult a task, too complicated and queer . . . to attempt; all I will say is that one feels great trust in him, and sure of sympathy in trouble.” Elsie wrote her assessment in the spring of 1892, when Sargent was staying with the Palmers at Loseley Manor, the mansion they were then leasing, one of the great Tudor houses of England. Queen Elizabeth I had visited the manor house three times.

  The current woman in residence, Queen Palmer, was entertaining a number of guests, among them, Sargent and Madame Haas, Elsie’s talented piano teacher who played Chopin, Beethoven, and Schumann with a level of artistry that amazed her pupil. The assembled guests, both adults and children, played bowls outside, went to a nearby garden that was “like an ideal fairy-garden,” and visited an old gallery that had a magnificent tapestry. After dinner there were the requisite parlor games and more music. When Sargent left the grand premises he to
ok with him an old wooden box that he’d found in the house. It would be perfect, he said, for one of his subjects to stand on while posing. (Elsie noted in her diary that Sargent’s studio certainly lacked practical necessities.)

  Elsie would know. That spring she was spending a good deal of time in his Tite Street studio, watching as he painted Helen Dunham, her dear friend from New York and sister of her closest friend, Katie. The artist chose a graceful, red chair with a curving back and a plush cushion for Helen to sit on, though she leans slightly forward, away from the chair rather than sinking back into the upholstery. Sargent has her wear a gown of fine white silk, her arms and neck exposed, her head in profile, her features soft—the exact opposite of how he portrayed Elsie. The artist began the painting with a distinct disadvantage—he’d scorched his fingers several days earlier in a freak accident. Elsie described the event in her diary on May 5, 1892:

  After having wandered through the New Gallery and Academy . . . [Sargent] went into some café to refresh himself with beer and cheese and bread and butter. He was quietly enjoying himself when suddenly he felt a sting and then flames shot out from his pocket, and he discovered that his match-box had caught fire; people looked at him suspiciously as they would at an anarchist, until at last the waiter had pity and put the fire out. His hands were burned, and I’m afraid he found it difficult to paint.

  Sargent’s studio was full of paintings at the time—so many, in fact, that he asked if Queen would take the charming painting he’d made of the group playing bowls at Ightham Mote. “Put it away in some nursery [or] on a stairway.” He had no space for it, he insisted. And so the painting eventually went to Elsie.

  Helen Dunham remained in London during the sittings, but Katie stayed with Elsie at Loseley Manor and the two of them would travel to town to spend mornings at Sargent’s studio, watching the portrait unfold. One day Katie sang a song by the Hungarian-born composer Francis Korbay to inspire the artist as he worked. In less than a month and a half, Sargent finished Helen’s portrait. He then moved on to Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, a close friend of the Dunham family, and completed her portrait after a mere six sittings. Sargent’s speed in executing these two portraits was in stark contrast to the way he approached—and avoided—finishing Elsie’s painting. As for the two portraits he created so quickly, there were similarities yet profound differences in the personalities he evoked. Sargent chose nearly identical white silk dresses for Helen Dunham and Lady Agnew to wear—though Lady Agnew’s has an elaborate, long, purple sash around her waist—and each one is posed in an elegant curved chair. But Lady Agnew, with her dark, bedroom eyes, slouches sensually onto one side of the chair, places an arm seductively around the outside of it, and is a magnificent seductress. In contrast, Helen, though beautiful, appears stiff and guarded. She looks away from the viewer and clasps her hands as if to protect herself. (Upon seeing the painting, the pianist Ignacy Paderewski described her fingers as “saignant,” or bleeding.)

  While Katie Dunham was visiting, the two friends went to see Ellen Terry. After going to the actress’s home, Elsie reported how delightful and down-to-earth Terry was, despite her celebrity. That evening Elsie and Katie went to see her playing Queen Katherine in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, and the actress had a special treat in store for them. Before the end of the play, “a white finger appeared through a little hole” in the curtain. It was clearly directed at them. “Beckoning!” Elsie wrote. Katie Dunham leapt up immediately, but Elsie waited for the end of the performance before seeing Lady Nell in her dressing room.

  Approaching twenty years old, Elsie had no romantic prospects and spent much of her time in the company of people decades older. Social activity revolved around the electric cultural figures drawn to her mother. It’s strange that Queen took no active role in encouraging Elsie to marry. After all, in that era and in that rarefied social class, the ultimate goal for a mother was to arrange an appropriate marriage for her daughter. A pedigreed British aristocrat was especially coveted by Americans—and vice versa. An impoverished earl or duke would bestow a prestigious title upon a wealthy American wife, who, in turn, would provide the necessary cash to keep up his ancestral estate. Queen had orchestrated the perfect backdrops—Ightham Mote, Loseley Manor—to entice a suitor for Elsie. Yet it seemed that she wanted to keep her eldest daughter for herself—as a friend she could confide in, and as a second parent who would help take care of the younger sisters, who were always considered “the children,” and therefore separate. Queen even looked beyond her own death, when Elsie would have to take charge of raising her siblings. In effect, Elsie became Queen’s handmaiden.

  Elsie spent little time cultivating friends of her own. Even an occasion with someone her own age inevitably devolved into an event dominated by older, famous personages. A birthday party in Surrey for Marie Meredith, the daughter of George Meredith, attracted several of London’s greatest theater luminaries who were almost a generation older: Johnston Forbes-Robertson, considered the greatest Hamlet of the Victorian era, and Arthur Cecil, a famous comic actor and playwright. Cecil led the group in humorous songs. After supper some of the guests, Elsie included, rode donkeys up a hill only to come down it dancing and singing the traditional English song What Cheer. George Meredith doted on Elsie while she stayed at the family’s country home, Box Hill. He even permitted her to read in his “chalet,” the cottage in the garden where he wrote many of his famous books. One day she pulled a volume of classic Arabic poetry from his bookcase and pointed out a poem she particularly liked. Thereafter, the elder Meredith playfully teased her. He dubbed her the “Poetess, who turns her back to Venus and faces the moon.” She loved the attention. “That evening we watched the sun set and moon-rise, outside his chalet door, and one enjoyed it the more for his presence,” she wrote.

  Elsie left Box Hill and its intellectual pleasures and went directly to London to see her father on June 11, 1892. As was often the case, Elsie saw her father alone, and, as usual, the General wanted his daughter to get more physical exercise. He had been dismayed to learn that she’d already given up on the daily health regimen he’d prescribed. For their day together in London the General had arranged a lesson at a stud farm just outside of town. Elsie was learning how to drive horses in tandem. The lesson went well. The stud master who tutored her was a wonderfully patient teacher and devoted to his animals, but he was an endless talker. Relief came when the baroness who owned the estate invited Elsie and her father in to lunch.

  Elsie’s diaries reveal a life of almost unimaginable privilege in England: accompanying Sargent to a concert by the virtuoso pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and being tutored in piano by the composer Korbay while she played a piece by Bach for him. But on at least one occasion she had the opportunity to learn how the poor lived. A month after Elsie saw her father, a group of about one hundred residents from a settlement house in the East End of London came to visit Loseley Manor. In an act of social service, Queen opened the grounds of the estate to “Men and women of all kinds. . . . It was interesting beyond words,” Elsie wrote. “They were all full of enjoyment and grateful and appreciative, and kind.” It was a beautiful summer day and the city dwellers took particular delight in the gardens and the beehives. Each one of them got a rose to take home. Lunch was served under a tent and the woman next to Elsie, a widow, spoke of her dead husband. She was now superstitious about the month of July because “he had been born in July, become shipmate in July, . . . and been drowned in July.” She said she was always relieved when the month was over. After lunch there was tug of war and a game of cricket that pitted the ladies against the men. Most of the men pretended they were playing in earnest, preferring to let the women triumph. There was tea and singing and speechifying and “Madame Haas played Chopin’s Funeral March, which touched the people very much.” They all gradually left, issuing invitations to their hosts to visit them in their urban quarters—an invitation that was apparently never taken up.

  Queen’s health was, and rema
ined, the determining factor in the Palmer family’s peregrinations. It’s why she lived in England with her daughters, even at the expense of her marriage. For much of their married lives, Queen and the General lived thousands of miles apart, with only occasional visits. Their courtship had begun with such romance and adventure, but Queen’s health—and Palmer’s absolute devotion to his work—kept them apart. Moldy old manor houses seem scarcely a prescription for good health, but Queen clung to the belief that she could survive only in England. In an undated letter to the General she reminded him that the three doctors who best understood her heart condition believed that even living in New York was out of the question. Of course the city was at sea level, she told him, but the weather there could prove fatal. “The very thing in this English climate which is called relaxing to some people is the quality most favorable for my condition.” Queen offered Elsie as a kind of pawn to placate his loneliness: “I will not let you be so homeless any more—if you cannot come to us, Elsie must make a home for you there. You know how decidedly fond of you she is.” Queen also begged him to consider delegating some of his responsibilities, or giving them up altogether, even if it meant a smaller income. Come to England, and “be happy with your little family here.”