Sargent's Women Page 9
Lucia had an idea. Miniatures—watercolors on ivory ranging in size from about 1½" × 1" to 6" × 4"—were an old-fashioned art form not much in vogue at the time, but she saw a possibility in them. She could paint them quickly and, with luck, in great quantity. They were affordable, yet carried with them a particular charm; you could hold one in your hand. Lucia believed there would always be a demand for family heirlooms that could be passed down from generation to generation. In an article touting the tiny art form Lucia noted, “a miniature brings the vanished personality before us more vividly than any photograph can do.” She argued that the “extreme finish of detail which so small a scale demands” created works of unequaled intimacy.
Producing a miniature was a painstaking process that demanded patience and talent—to say nothing of excellent eyesight. Lucia couldn’t employ the broad brushstrokes she’d grown accustomed to with her murals. Miniatures demanded tiny, carefully controlled brushwork in a technique known as stippling—basically making a series of small dots to create a kind of pointillist painting on an extraordinarily small scale. Lucia had been schooled in art, but not in this technique. She needed a teacher.
While attending an exhibition of miniatures in New York in the fall of 1894, Lucia tracked down the addresses of two of the artists in the show. Unannounced, she knocked at the Fifth Avenue address of the first miniaturist, who brightened immediately at the sight of Lucia, assuming she was a potential customer. “There she is, and powder dropped off her as she talked,” Lucia narrated in a letter to Harry. The artist was literally swaying with excitement at the prospect of showing Lucia her work. She pulled aside a heavy curtain to reveal forty or fifty of her miniatures—“all very pink, very finished, and very well framed”—affixed to a large velvet-covered board. As soon as Lucia explained why she was there, the artist lost all interest in her. It wouldn’t be worth her while to teach her, she explained coldly—and in fact, one lesson would be worthless anyway. The doorbell rang, the artist perked up at the possibility of a paying client, and abruptly ushered Lucia out the door. “I found myself, very crushed, in the street,” Lucia wrote.
Pregnant and sick, Lucia, nevertheless, pressed on. Helped by a postman, she tracked down the second artist in the Bronx. She knocked and heard a faint “Come in.” There, at an easel, sat an elderly, white-haired woman with a kindly expression on her face, surrounded by her “dreadful” miniatures. She agreed to give Lucia a lesson, perhaps even two if necessary, but added “I hope you find it pays better than I do.” On that dismal note, Lucia embarked on her new career.
Here was Lucia, alone and terrified in New York City. She implored Harry to send money as soon as possible so she could pay her bills. Lucia explained—as if she needed to apologize to her husband—that she had spent all she had on medicine and ivory and the other art supplies she needed to make miniatures. She was miserable, she’d caught a cold, and she wanted to come home. Accustomed to life in grand Back Bay mansions and gilded seaside resorts, Lucia now occupied grim lodgings on Union Square—an interior room with a window opening onto an elevator shaft. The gaslight fixture was so high up on the wall she couldn’t reach it, even standing on a chair, so she spent much of her time in darkness. The room lacked a washstand or towels, and she had to share a bathroom with a stranger. The walls were paper-thin. Sitting by herself in her spartan lodgings, Lucia could hear a woman sobbing in the room next door. “Release me,” she begged Harry. He wrote back and made it clear that she should not count on any help from him. He suggested that she borrow money from the William Dean Howells family—her childhood friends from that propitious hilltop in Belmont—who were now living in New York. She would have to fend for herself.
Lucia became skilled in the art of miniatures, turning out commissions for patrons in New York and Boston; she also became the primary breadwinner in their growing family. She gave birth to a daughter, Clara, in the spring of 1895, and nearly died when she gave birth in New York to a son, Charles, less than two years later. (The doctor warned her not to risk having another child.) Harry generally remained rooted in his studio in New Hampshire while she followed the money. Sometimes she had the children with her, but more often she pined for them from afar. “I think of that fat porpoise Clara til my arms ache to hold her,” she wrote of her year-old daughter. She fretted about her babies—“the dear birds” as she called them—ever fearful of accidents and illness. What would she do if something happened to them? She begged Harry to take good care of them. He dutifully reported that the children missed her, and that one morning two-year-old Clara announced, “mama all gone.”
Lucia meanwhile attracted a stellar roster of clients—Whitneys and Morgans and even the famous actress Ellen Terry when she was touring in New York; Cabots and Curtises in Boston. Her subjects could be infuriating and demanding, but the bills for Lucia’s young family were mounting, so she had no choice—she had to be accommodating. Price was always a delicate issue to negotiate and proved to be especially so when painting Dr. Carroll Dunham at his country home at Irvington-on-Hudson in the summer of 1896. Sargent had painted Dunham a few years earlier—a “very florid and very strong” image that was apparently destroyed by the family because the colors were considered too brash. That painting had been commissioned by a friend, and it’s doubtful that Dunham haggled with Sargent over a fee—the artist was much too famous and in too much demand to put up with such nonsense. But twenty-six-year-old Lucia, a young mother in need of money, did not have that kind of clout.
Lucia was at the doctor’s home, ready to embark on portraits of him and his wife, when news broke that populist William Jennings Bryan had won the Democratic presidential nomination. That’s it, Dunham told her, now I’m going to have to “economize”—a euphemism for Your fee will be cut. Meanwhile, he insisted that all the servants and guests in the household, including Lucia, attend a family religious service he presided over. They all had to sing hymns and canticles, get down on their knees to pray, and listen as the doctor preached on the topic of how material comforts were a reward for having pleased the Lord. Lucia seethed over his holier-than-thou hypocrisy. Here he was equating his own prosperity with goodness, while chiseling Lucia at the same time. It was positively “materialistic” and “impious,” she wrote to Harry. Afterward, Dunham’s wife refused to pose for her portrait as it was a Sunday, and then the doctor announced it would be another ten days before he could sit. Harry, meanwhile, dashed back a note to his wife saying that he was thrilled by the selection of William Jennings Bryan and urged her to stand up to Dunham and demand a hefty fee. Easy to say from afar.
Lucia produced miniature after miniature. Her Boston Brahmin clientele were no better than Dunham—they turned out to be just as cheap and difficult. In June 1898, when Lucia presented Mrs. Cabot with her finished portrait she rejected it. “I don’t like the way my hair looks,” she told the artist, and “I want to be presented as if seated on a cushion.” Lucia dutifully redid the ivory portrait. Mr. Cabot was impressed with the result, saying it was the best image he’d ever seen of his wife and a hundred times better than what he’d expected—a rather backhanded compliment. But worse, they still haven’t paid me, Lucia noted. A common refrain. While juggling portraits for several wealthy Bostonians that summer, she wrote forlornly that for all the work she had produced, and for all the time she had spent on the miniatures, she had yet to receive a single penny from her clients. In the next sentence she was asking Harry how much money they had left in the bank. There wasn’t much.
In 1897 they’d purchased an old farmhouse in the village of Plainfield, New Hampshire, and they were in the midst of renovations. For Lucia and Harry, Plainfield was Nirvana, the fulfillment of an aesthetic dream: they became full-fledged members of the so-called Cornish Arts Colony, a gathering of artists, writers, musicians, and theatrical sorts who had gravitated around a picturesque section of the Connecticut River Valley. The area boasted covered bridges, sparkling tributaries with colorful names like Blow-Me-
Down Brook, and rolling hillsides that culminated in the three-thousand-plus-foot Mount Ascutney that ruled like a kind of Mount Olympus over the gifted creatures assembled below. Art was the official religion, and the chief priest was sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
The son of a shoemaker, Saint-Gaudens had risen to become one of the titans of the Gilded Age. Today it’s hard to imagine just how famous Saint-Gaudens was, as even the art forms he perfected—bas-relief sculptures of exquisite detail, monumental bronzes for public spaces, cameos, medals, and probably the most beautiful American coin ever created—have long since faded from popularity. Massive postwar urban monuments to Union heroes were being commissioned at that time and Saint-Gaudens created the greatest of them. They were brooding, powerful works of art. Saint-Gaudens redefined the sculptural depiction of American heroism in that era.
In part, it was a commission to create a monumental sculpture of Lincoln that first drew the artist to Cornish. A wealthy New York lawyer named Charles Beaman had a country place in the area, and he convinced his friend Saint-Gaudens to move up to Cornish for the summer of 1885: There are lots of Lincolnesque types in that New England backwater, he assured the artist. (In fact, Saint-Gaudens did find a lean six-foot-four-inch local farmer by the name of Langdon Morse.) The lawyer had been gobbling up huge tracts of land for a pittance from dirt-poor farmers and he sensed a real estate bonanza if only he could attract the right kind of people—artists like Saint-Gaudens. Among the properties Beaman owned was a brick inn that dated back to around 1800. The place was so out of the way it had been a complete bust—what travelers would ever be wandering by? Locals referred to it as “Huggins’ Folly,” after the brothers who’d built it. Saint-Gaudens preferred to remember that it had also been a whorehouse. He bought the place and eventually moved in full time.
Saint-Gaudens renamed the estate Aspet, after the French town where his father had been born. Now a historic site overseen by the National Park Service, it’s set on a hill with a magnificent view of Mount Ascutney, and the grounds and studios are littered with plaster casts and full-scale bronzes of Saint-Gaudens’s works. There, his colossal sculptures are displayed away from the cacophony of their usual urban settings—the commanding figure of Civil War admiral David Farragut; a brooding seated Abraham Lincoln; and a rather arrogant Puritan in midstride, his cape billowing around him in royal fashion. Looking up at these works one feels awed by the power of their presence—even diminished by them. Yet, wandering amid the cozy hedges and birch trees on the estate, a different set of emotions are stirred by two of Saint-Gaudens’s greatest works: the heart-rending Shaw Memorial dedicated to the ill-fated Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his regiment of black soldiers who were killed during the Civil War (the film Glory was based on their story), and the funerary sculpture of Clover Adams, the brilliant but unstable intellect, wife of the writer Henry Adams, and photographer who took her own life in 1885 by drinking her photographic chemicals. Both of those sculptures are set apart, in meditative isolation, each one in a leafy cul-de-sac.
Saint-Gaudens employed a small army of assistants to help with his commissions, and a steady stream of artistic spirits followed in his wake—Lucia and Harry among them. At some point, Lucia’s mural Women of Plymouth was installed above a stage at the quaint Blow-Me-Down Grange in the center of Plainfield, where they lived. The Cornish Colony was more a “state of mind” than a municipality; its borders were fluid and the burg of Plainfield was a northern outpost of that enclave of “high thinking and perfection.” (Just so there’d be no mistake about it, one Plainfield resident had calling cards that read “Geographically in Plainfield, Socially in Cornish.”) The colony spilled across the Connecticut River to the town of Windsor, Vermont, which was linked by a covered bridge (as it happens, the longest such bridge in the country). Windsor was where Cornish residents picked up their mail, and where they boarded trains for the approximately six-hour trip to Boston, nine to New York.
Maxfield Parrish, famous for the supersaturated, Technicolor quality of his paintings and illustrations (intense cobalt blue is sometimes referred to as “Parrish blue”), was part of that hallowed congregation of artists. Like Lucia and Harry, he lived in Plainfield and, like Lucia, he left behind a treasure for the town. Practically a stone’s throw from the Grange, Plainfield Town Hall features another stage used for official ceremonies and plays. In 1916, Parrish designed a backdrop that includes six wings and three overhead drapes. It depicts a woodland scene with a brilliant display of painted leaves in autumnal shades, and sculptural, white birch trees surrounding a large body of water. Mount Ascutney is at the far end of the scene, overseeing all. When lit properly, the landscape backdrop can be transformed into any moment of the day, from daybreak to twilight.
In the fantastical paradise that Parrish and his cohorts created in flinty old New England, what better gift than a stage set? In the Cornish Colony, pageants, plays, masques, tableaux vivants, dramatic readings, and energetic evenings of charades were part of its very soul. Everything about the colony had a theatrical element. There was a kind of a Midsummer Night’s Dream aura to the entire enterprise. Photos of Lucia’s children and their friends show them in one costumed drama after the next. Ethel Barrymore—considered the greatest American actress of her era—coached the children in William Thackeray’s comedy The Rose and the Ring in the summer of 1906. In her memoir, Barrymore made special note of Clara Fuller’s marvelous performance as the queen. Lucia created the scenery for the production, which was covered by a New York theater magazine. Modern dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan visited Cornish and performed one evening, though her knees creaked while dancing as she was well past her prime.
The families that stayed year-round—among them the Parrishes, the Fullers, and, by 1900, the Saint-Gaudenses—proudly called themselves the “Chickadees,” for like those small birds, they remained behind during the long winter. Considering themselves a special breed, the artists snidely dismissed the rich hangers-on who wanted to be part of their rarified world—the patrons who actually purchased their work—as “Philistines.” They didn’t have the creative gift. Even worse were the “natives,” whom they looked down upon as rubes. (Though they did need the farmers to clean their houses and do their yard work.) In turn, the locals thought these free-spirited artists were slightly nuts—flouncing about in Grecian robes, spouting poetry, allowing their boys and girls to swim naked together in the summer, and generally encouraging them to act like forest nymphs. Lucia reveled in the freedom of their country life—and hated those bleak periods when commissions tore her away. She permitted her children Clara and Charley to pose nude for their father, which was not uncommon in that milieu. Lucia, too, posed for Harry and other artists in the colony. There was lots of model swapping, and lots of live-in-models-who-soon-became-mistresses, and eventually lots of fractured marriages. The farmers watched all the drinking and partying and theatrical goings-on and shook their heads. Protocol in their households was much more conventional.
Real life—at least the kind the natives were used to—rarely intruded, though some of the colonists liked to populate the countryside with livestock of various sorts. One member of the colony preferred bison, which he trained to pull his cart. Such quaint touches added to the Arcadian idyll. Though herds, of whatever sort, were charming to look at from a distance, the noise could be bothersome. Artist Kenyon Cox enjoyed his view of cows on the landscape, but implored his novelist neighbor to quiet their bells, on the excuse they woke the women in the house too early. Another colonist found that the lowing of cows in a nearby pasture interfered with his tennis game and he succeeded in having the offending herd removed.
The well-traveled colonists hated New England farmhouses, considering them much too severe and boring. They found the rolling hills reminiscent of Italy and wanted to re-create a style of life that evoked classical civilization. Terraces, pergolas, formal gardens, tiled roofs, stucco walls, and columns suddenly sprouted up all over the landsca
pe. Lucia and Harry remodeled their house in Roman fashion: a three-sided structure facing out onto a central courtyard. A colonnaded portico completed the scene. Renovations went on and on, with Harry filing reports to Lucia on the status of the studio as it was being built, and on the size of the courtyard (“too small,” he pronounced). As Harry lounged in the country, Lucia endured long stretches in New York and Boston to pay for it all.
In the meanwhile, Lucia’s father was faring badly. On March 31, 1894, a small item appeared in the New York Times:
NOTICE—
Mr. Charles Fairchild retires from our firm this day.
Lee, Higginson & Co.
Charles had guessed wrong in the stock market. In the collapse of 1893 his favored investments—western railroads and real estate—had gone bust, and he was unceremoniously cut loose from Higginson’s firm. Just like that, Fairchild’s gilded career in Boston was over.
The war veteran had grit and started over in new territory. Charles, now fifty-six, launched an investment firm at 29 Wall Street, and managed to purchase seats on the New York Stock Exchange and the Corn Exchange, but his business never really flourished. Family members later blamed the eldest son, Charles Jr., for squandering a million dollars of the family fortune. The family began a slow descent, while trying to maintain appearances: They socialized with the same old families (though the Henry Lee Higginsons surely must have kept a healthy distance), went to the same clubs and schools (Harvard, naturally, for Lucia’s younger brothers), still attended the Boston Symphony (until they couldn’t afford even the cheapest seats), maintained their servants and their cottage in Newport, and lived amidst their books and art collection. But the paintings began to slowly disappear from the walls, one by one—works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sargent—to pay the bills for residences in Boston, Newport, and now, New York.