Sargent's Women Read online

  But Fairchild also had a hankering to mingle with the literati. A drinking pal of Mark Twain’s and other “knights of the quill,” Charles helped finance the Atlantic Monthly in the 1870s. He bought up land atop Belmont hill west of Boston, and developed it with the dream of creating a kind of high-brow commune centered around the Fairchild family. Fairchild built a house for William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a writer, and one of the titans of the literary world. Famous authors gathered there. Henry James described Howells’s house as a “fairy abode of light and beauty” and its airy, hilltop location as nothing less than inspiring: “When I looked from within outwards and over that incomparable landscape . . . I said to myself, ‘Well, good fortune can no further go. Let silence muse the amount of it!’ ”

  In 1880, Charles became a partner in the patrician investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Company and was ushered into the inner sanctum of the Brahmin financial world—in fact, right into its drawing room. The Fairchilds lived in one half of an enormous six-story double house in Back Bay with Henry Lee Higginson, head of the firm—and one of the bluest blue bloods in town. Music, art, and brilliant conversation were staples of the grand household. In 1881, Higginson created the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a gift to the city, bearing virtually the entire cost himself for decades.

  The gods had lavished every advantage on the Fairchilds, and life never seemed sweeter, better, or more ennobling than when Sargent came to visit that summer of 1890. The artist’s evocation of Sally captures a self-assured, beautiful, and privileged young woman with an independent streak. She became the first woman permitted to attend a lecture at Harvard—a psychology lecture by family friend William James (though Harvard insisted she stand behind a screen for propriety’s sake). Over the years, she casually batted away endless proposals of marriage, finding none of her suitors right for her. Apparently content, she stayed at home, caring for her mother. Perhaps sensing that time was passing her by, she grew increasingly resentful as her younger sister—plain, plump Lucia, whom she’d bossed around since childhood—stepped out of the shadow and took center stage. She, too, had been touched by Sargent’s magic.

  If you look closely, you can see Lucia in one of the snapshots on the beach at Nahant. She’s lurking in the background like a spy. Sargent is front and center sitting on the grass, a look of sheer pleasure on his face, a rambling, shingle-style beach house on the bluff behind him. But in the middistance is the shadowy figure of Lucia, a rather pudgy young woman, sitting upright, looking vigilantly in Sargent’s direction. Reading through hundreds of Fairchild family letters one is drawn inexorably to Lucia, the ugly duckling sister, because her story, her character is so riveting. Sally, the chosen one, pales in comparison. Perhaps Sargent painted the wrong sister. As it turns out, his painting transformed Lucia, not Sally. The veiled portrait points to the story of a hidden sister who formed her own connection to Sargent, and opens up a tale of sibling rivalry, passionate but misbegotten love, and the power of art.

  Lucia was nearly eighteen when Sargent painted Sally. She watched him intently that summer, following him around, noting his every mannerism and brushstroke. Lucia wasn’t surprised that Sargent wanted to paint her sister. He’d shown his preference for Sally before, and had already painted her several times. She was clearly resigned to her second-class status. Sally was so graceful and magnetic, “the goddess of my childhood,” Lucia would later write. But, it still must have hurt to be passed over. Lucia wrote in her diary: “Things I must learn not to care about: That I am so ugly.” And on the facing page: “Things I must learn—Courage . . .” Lucia was touched, inspired—who knows?—perhaps even ruined by Sargent. He was her idol. “He is so great,” she wrote and later tried to erase in her diary. He helped inflame her passion for art.

  When Lucia first announced to her parents that she wanted to go to art school they were not thrilled—this despite the fact that they collected art, commissioned it, and surrounded themselves with artists and writers. Several years earlier Charles Fairchild had hired Sargent to paint Robert Louis Stevenson, already world famous, as a gift for his wife Lily, who was a devoted fan. Why buy just a book when a painting by John Singer Sargent would bring the author to life? In fact, even bring him to their doorstep.

  The eccentric author of Treasure Island spent part of one summer on the Fairchilds’s couch in Newport, lying ill after a rough ocean crossing on a ship with a cargo full of apes. His skeletal frame wrapped in a scarlet dressing gown, he smoked nonstop and unspooled a stream of stories. The children were enthralled. Stevenson and Lily hit it off right away—he found her handsome and “very intense.” They became long-term correspondents and he later invited her to visit him in Samoa where he’d taken final refuge. You’d love it here, he assured her—the simplicity and purity and happiness of the natives. “You are quite right,” he wrote to her, “our civilisation is a hollow fraud, all the fun of life is lost by it.” Ah, but Samoa was different. “It will be the salvation of your souls, and make you willing to die.”

  Art made life worth living, in Lily’s estimation. She published poetry under the pseudonym C. A. Price, or “Caprice” (in deference to her husband’s starchy sense of propriety that a married woman should not publish under her real name), and she surrounded herself with a cast of literary heavyweights. In addition to Mark Twain and Henry James, other celebrated figures drifted through the household, among them Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe, who’d written The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Conventional people did not appeal to Lily. So why the reluctance to permit her daughter Lucia to study painting? Art was one thing, but economic reality was another. The Fairchild brand of bohemianism required money—lots of it. So her father made a deal with Lucia: if she’d agree to endure the yearlong pageantry of being a debutante in Boston society—and, with luck, snag a suitably deep-pocketed spouse—she would be allowed to pursue her art.

  Lucia began her studies at Cowles Art School in Back Bay, a private academy that employed Parisian modes of instruction. Under the Impressionist painter Dennis Miller Bunker, a friend of Sargent’s, she learned how to draw figures, studying anatomy and composition. Her next step was New York and the fabled Art Students League, to work under the tutelage of William Merritt Chase, another friend of Sargent’s. But Lucia’s education was enhanced by her intimate connection with the master portraitist himself. She was the student who had dinners with John Singer Sargent. When Sargent took refuge with the Fairchilds in Boston and abroad, the famous artist chatted with young Lucia—the acolyte. She took notes of his unguarded observations on celebrity, art, his clients, literature, and music. He thrilled to the “grand cubic chords” in Wagner, but had little use for Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (“dreadfully morbid, and the whole thing seems so unnecessary”). He grumbled about his high-paying clients, among them the exasperating Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose face he described to Lucia as “a lemon with a slit for a mouth.”

  But more importantly, Lucia’s diary records conversations when the master imparted the arcane alchemy of painting. In the summer of 1891, Lucia visited him in the English countryside at Fairford. There, she began a landscape. One afternoon Sargent found her at her easel. “Very green, those trees,” he said. “You’re under the impression that trees in England are green—whereas they aren’t.” Not green? No, to him they had to be “much blacker and duller . . . grey—or purple, or whatever along the edge.” And while others might see the inky silhouettes of fishermen on the horizon as black, Sargent saw them as brilliant yellow, the sunset reflecting in their eyes.

  Lucia listened intently as he discussed the role of the artist in society—in his view, art and politics should never mix—and commented on his own work. He feared sentimentality in his paintings, admitted that an “interesting” face outweighed a beautiful one, but also spoke of the hazards of his profession. “Portrait painting, don’t you know, is very close quarters—a dangerous thing”—an intense, claustrophobic experience, dangerous for bot
h artist and subject—the danger of coming too close to the person, or to the truth; or straying too far away, or unveiling oneself. Lucia, the sorcerer’s apprentice, avidly took notes.

  In Paris, Sargent gave Lucia and her family a tour of the Louvre. Lucia thought he looked “wonderfully handsome & tanned & rather thin, with the Legion of Honor ribbon in his button hole,” as he led the way through galleries he knew by heart. Sargent had been appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur—the highest honor awarded in France—after having won a grand prix for six paintings he exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in the spring of 1889. Having once been denounced by the art establishment in France for his Madame X, Sargent must have felt triumphant as he strutted through the museum wearing his badge of knighthood. Perhaps puffed up by his exalted status, Sargent took exception with the placement of the art. The Louvre had erred, he said, in the way it positioned the Venus de Milo—it should be turned so that the light would strike her more dramatically; he approached a museum guard about doing just that, but was rebuffed. He lingered for the longest time over the headless Winged Victory, admiring it from every angle—something, he said, he had to do every time he saw it. He darted from painting to painting, pointing out his favorite ones, and highlighting details of color, line, and texture.

  En route home, the conversation turned to love and marriage—another burning subject for Lucia, who had fallen in love with a fellow art student, a young man named Henry Brown Fuller, of whom her parents disapproved. Henry had the proper breeding, descended as he was from a distinguished old New England family, but he had no prospect of making any real money from his art, and Lucia’s father took financial independence seriously. (Apparently, the debutante festivities hadn’t produced the desired result.) Lucia announced that one should marry only for love and Sargent laughed. He warned her that one had a better chance for happiness without all that intense passion; he told her that “Terrific love” might lead to bitter disappointment and “Terrific hate.”

  Henry Fuller was boyishly handsome with his seductive eyes, thick eyebrows and mustache, and fringe of brown hair falling on his forehead. Five years older than Lucia, Henry—or “Harry” as she called him—was tall, well-read, and charming. To her, he was irresistible, radiant with talent. Everyone agreed he was going to be a star in the art world. His father, George Fuller, had also been a painter. One Boston newspaper, with hometown hyperbole, announced the elder Fuller’s death in 1884 with the front page headline: “THE LEADING ARTIST OF AMERICA PASSES AWAY.” The Fairchilds moved in the same social circles as George Fuller and his wife, Agnes, who was a Higginson. Charles and Lily had even commissioned a painting by George Fuller. Nonetheless, they did not view his son as proper marriage material.

  Despite her father’s best efforts to squelch the romance, Lucia carried on a furtive love affair with Harry for several years. They met secretly and wrote passionate letters to each other. Harry’s talent was yoked to bleak depressions. He craved the praise and encouragement Lucia provided. Enamored with Symbolism, a new movement that had taken hold among some Parisian artists, Harry conjured bold, universal ideas. He eventually created large allegorical paintings using figures out of mythology and fiction, whose titles—Illusions and The Triumph of Truth over Error—give an inkling of the philosophical issues he tried to convey on canvas. Portraiture bored him, and he blanched at the very idea that he would kowtow to the rich to secure commissions. According to family lore, he had the dubious distinction of never actually finishing a commission.

  Lucia found his ambitions pure, godlike even. “Don’t you think I know the difference, King, between you and me?” she wrote. “You are a God—Jupiter or maybe sometimes Apollo and Kali and Botticelli and Marcus Aurelius and I am your humble servant.” Lucia may have felt unworthy, but it was her career that was in ascendance, not his. Perhaps inspired by the sheer size of Sargent’s canvasses, Lucia painted on a grand scale. Murals became her specialty. At the age of just twenty, she leaped to the upper tier of artists when she was commissioned to create a mural for the Woman’s Building in the fabled “White City” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She was one of six women artists—the famous Impressionist Mary Cassatt among them—to provide murals for the building’s Hall of Honor.

  While Cassatt painted Modern Woman, Lucia evoked the New England past with a mural titled Women of Plymouth. It is an all-female colonial world that Lucia created: More than a dozen women, on an eleven-by-twelve-foot canvas, are spinning, washing, teaching the young, and caring for infants amid a wintry landscape. The women appear saintly, devoted, and dutiful, though the central figure also seems slightly shell-shocked as she washes out a pot. (A thought bubble over her head might read “Is this my future?”)

  Lucia’s mural in the White City promised a bright professional career. The leading American artists of the day exhibited at the exposition, among them the monumental sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens who mused, “Do you realize that this is the greatest gathering of artists since the fifteenth century?” And here was Lucia taking her place among the luminaries. All seemed possible.

  Perhaps buoyed by her triumph, Lucia defied her parents’ objections and Sargent’s advice to opt for terrific love. In the fall of 1893, Lucia announced her engagement. She wanted a simple wedding—the sooner the better—with only the immediate families present. Her oldest brother protested that she should at least have the decency to wait until after the Yale–Harvard game. The bride- and-groom-to-be were presented tickets to the game in the hope they would postpone their nuptials. They didn’t. Lucia and Harry were married in Boston on October 25, 1893.

  The newlyweds hatched a romantic plan: They’d be itinerant artists, painting portraits as they moved from one New England town to another in a “caravan”—a horse-drawn house on wheels custom-built by the groom, with a special compartment beneath it for their cat. They didn’t get very far, as Harry’s carriage was an ill-conceived mess: It was at once too low-slung for the rutted roads to the Green Mountains of New Hampshire where they were headed, and too tall to pass through covered bridges. They meandered on back roads.

  Lucia got pregnant, and then in the cramped confines of their fantastical caravan, she began suffering from an ailment that had first appeared in her adolescence, a strange, recurring weakness that would leave her bedridden for weeks. Over the years, she had gotten varying diagnoses, followed by just as varied treatments—nothing helped. Leaving Harry in the caravan, Lucia sought refuge at her family’s summer place in Newport, “Bel’ Napoli,” in late August 1894. She was told to lie down and rest—she was not even to think about bathing in the ocean or fresh water ponds. Meanwhile, she watched enviously as her healthy brothers played tennis and swam all afternoon. Her grandmother had no sympathy, storming into Lucia’s room one morning to command, “Luddy, you lazy girl . . . get right up.” But Lucia’s weakness persisted. Her doctor advised “fleshing up”—gaining weight being considered a healthy antidote for women suffering from “hysteria” and just about any other mysterious illness.

  August turned to September and then to October. Confined to Newport, Lucia missed Harry dreadfully and spent her days writing love letter after love letter to him, filled with news of life in the resort: the bicycling craze that had taken hold among the socialites (a millionaire’s sister offered to teach Lucia, but she wasn’t able to take her up on it) and the closely followed exploits of the deep-sea divers searching for a lost torpedo in the harbor. “They look like hob-goblins, with huge helmets on their heads, and little glass windows set in, a complete rubber suit, and long rubber tubes through which the air is pumped to them.”

  She had such yearning for Harry. “Dearest dearest Harry I am longing to get your letter . . . I think of you all the time. My dear little Harry, don’t take any risks will you, and write me right away if you want me.” Her own health seemed insignificant; it was Harry she worried about. She fretted over his not sleeping well in the caravan (“Rigolo�
� was her name for it), suggested he have curtains made to keep out the morning light, and sent him a specially ordered hammock, and wicks to light the stove so he’d be warm in the September chill.

  Harry’s extant letters seem to dwell on his own complaints and money worries. Always money. It would be the preoccupation of their lives, and he seemed incapable of making any. He disdained commercial work. It was beneath him.

  Lucia began to think of practical moneymaking schemes; someone had to. Yet she feared her husband would hate her for looking to the marketplace: “Harry you make me so afraid that I shall turn out . . . exactly [like] one of the artists that you despise. You know I haven’t the jeu sacre like you, and I don’t believe I shall ever want to do anything more than literally copy things that I literally love—Principally you.” She wrote him that fall, “It makes me respect you awfully to see how entirely you live up to your principles.” Meanwhile, still suffering from her undefined illness, she went to New York City to consult with yet another specialist (“Dearest little Harry . . . I write thee of nothing but Doctors, medicine and ailments. What would Emerson say!”) and to recast her own artistic career in order to generate some income.

  The giddy free-spending days of the Gilded Age had been at least momentarily derailed. Even Lucia’s father suffered devastating losses during the financial free fall of 1893. She couldn’t turn to him for help, nor did she want to, as it would be an admission that perhaps she’d made a mistake in marrying Harry after all.