I Am Madame X (23 page)

Julie laughed. “You can’t imagine how shy John Sargent is,” she said. “Women embarrass him
to death.
”

Two weeks later, Julie told me she had received a
petit bleu
from Sargent inviting her to an informal party. She asked if I’d like to go along. I was curious about both the artist and his work, and so I accepted.

Sargent’s Montparnasse studio sat on the ground floor at 73
bis,
rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a narrow, dusty street crammed with artists’ ateliers and cheap cafés. We arrived at nine to find the party packed with fashionably dressed men and women. As we pushed through the elegant crowd, I noticed that the studio was sparsely furnished with a few chairs and Sargent’s pictures, including his portraits of anonymous models and his copies of Velázquez and other Old Masters.

On an easel near the French doors stood Sargent’s painting of Dr. Pozzi. It looked like a portrait of the devil. Virtually the entire canvas was red—the sumptuous curtains in the background, the carpeted floor. The doctor himself was dressed in the red slippers and the red wool dressing gown that I had seen him wear dozens of times. His pose was hypertheatrical; his face was caught in intense observance of an object outside the canvas, and his elongated fingers tugged nervously at his collar and the drawstring of his robe. His fingers were as sharp as pincers and seemed spotted with blood. Had Pozzi just performed a gynecological operation? Deflowered a virgin?

A small crowd had gathered around the portrait, and Pozzi himself was standing at the back of the room, surrounded by a group of friends. Seeing him now, I felt nothing but cold contempt. He was a hollow person. Sargent had captured him brilliantly—his beauty and his cruelty. Our eyes met for a moment, but Pozzi looked through me, as if I were invisible. Now that he was finished with me, I didn’t exist.

“I had no idea this party was to celebrate Pozzi’s portrait,” Julie whispered to me, her brow knitted with concern. “Sargent just wrote that he was having a few people in. Let’s go.

“She put her hand on my sleeve, but I pulled away. “We can’t leave now. He’s seen me. He’ll think I’ve left because I’m upset that he’s ignoring me.”

“Did he snub you?”

“He looked right through me.”

“He’s a monster.” Julie turned to the portrait. “My God, Sargent has a flair for the bizarre. This is the kind of painting designed to turn the subject into a celebrity.”

“Pozzi’s already famous,” I said bitterly.

“Only in Paris. You watch. Sargent plans to send the picture to the Royal Academy in London. As soon as it’s exhibited there, every Englishwoman who can afford it will scoot across the Channel to be treated by this vision in red.”

And bedded by him,
I thought.

The bright tones of a Spanish folk song filtered through the crowd’s chatter. Sargent was sitting at a large upright piano near the windows.

“He plays as beautifully as he paints,” I said.

Julie nodded. “As long as he plays, he doesn’t have to talk to his guests. He loves society. But I don’t know why he bothers entertaining. The poor man gets so tongue-tied in large groups.”

Sargent’s shy, awkward manner was totally at odds with the bold assurance of his art. His painting was mature; the artist himself seemed hopelessly boyish, cut off from the adult passions swirling around him. Julie told me he lived by himself in a small hotel near his studio, but dined with his parents nearly every night.

Julie and I stayed at the party an hour, chatting with Carolus-Duran and some of his friends. When we left, Pozzi was still holding court in front of his portrait while Sargent remained at the piano, lost in a Beethoven sonata.

Later, through Julie, I came to learn more of Sargent’s background. He was born in Florence in 1856, descended from prominent Philadelphia families on both sides. His father, Fitzwilliam Sargent, was a doctor; his mother, Mary Singer, was a talented amateur musician and watercolorist who had a modest income from her family. After the death of their first child, the couple moved to Europe. Fitzwilliam gave up his medical practice, and the family lived a restless life, traveling back and forth between Europe’s resorts and cultural capitals. They never had a permanent home. Sargent grew up extremely close to his sisters, Emily and Violet. Two other siblings, a boy and a girl, died young.

The artist once told me that his sister Emily was as talented as he was but that she wasn’t disciplined enough to develop her gifts. Sargent, on the other hand, worked obsessively, starting at an early age. He said he could not remember a time when he hadn’t thought of himself as a painter. His first memory was of a purple-red cobblestone in the gutter of a street near his house in Florence. Its color was so lovely that he dreamed of it constantly and begged his nurse to take him to see it on their daily walks.

In 1874, when John was eighteen, the Sargents moved to Paris to nurture the young man’s ambitions. He joined the atelier of Carolus-Duran, one of the few artists who welcomed American students, and he quickly passed the rigorous exams to study drawing at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Sargent’s rise was swift and dazzling. In 1877, the Salon accepted the first picture he submitted, a portrait of a family friend, Fanny Watts. Two years later, he won an honorable mention for his portrait of Carolus-Duran. In 1881, the year I met him, he won a second-class medal for his painting of Madame Subercaseaux, the dark-haired wife of a Chilean diplomat. Now his success enabled him to show
hors concours,
without approval of the Salon jury.

From the start, the critics applauded Sargent’s work. He was endlessly and enviously talked about in artists’ ateliers and drawing rooms across Paris, and reproductions of his work regularly appeared in the fashionable magazines.

Among the general public, however, the publicity had not translated into commissions. His Salon successes attracted a few clients, almost all Americans, but he could not earn a decent living, and he was shunned by the French
gratin
—the uppercrust—whom he most wanted to paint. Like me, Sargent was a victim of rising prejudice against Americans and a growing fear among the French that American dollars, talent, and boldness were overtaking native traditions. In June 1881, long before my famous collaboration with Sargent, Perdican, the society columnist for
L’Illustration,
condemned the artist and me as dangerous threats to French hegemony. “It is a stealthy war; but they come to hoist their victory flag over our land,” Perdican wrote. “They have painters who seize our medals, such as Monsieur Sargent, and pretty women who eclipse ours, like Madame Gautreau.”

On a frigid, snowy afternoon more than a year after Perdican’s item appeared, I was reading in the parlor when the maid announced a visitor named Ralph Curtis. A moment later, a slender young man appeared in the doorway, brushing snowflakes from his lapels. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored waistcoat, coat, a blue cravat, and a white collar.

I had met Curtis a few times at parties. He had studied with Carolus-Duran and fancied himself a painter, though he had little talent. Curtis’s real profession was as a bon vivant. He was part of a group of worldly American expatriates who dressed exquisitely and pursued social life as avidly as others practiced law and medicine. By day, they haunted the cafés and picture dealers. At night, they could be found strolling the boulevards and lingering over dinner at the better restaurants.

Curtis was devoted to John Sargent. Their fathers were cousins, and John and Ralph had spent time together as children.

“Hello, Madame Gautreau. I’ve something important to talk to you about,” Curtis said. He settled himself across from me on a chair next to the fire. “John Sargent is wild to paint you. He’s desperate to have something magnificent for the next Salon, a painting that will take Paris by storm. He feels you’re the only woman in town who can give him a masterpiece.”

“Can’t he ask me himself?”

Curtis smiled. “You know how shy he is.”

The maid wheeled in a cart with a tea service and left it in front of me. I poured two cups of tea and handed one to Curtis.

“My husband wants to commission Léon Bonnat to paint me,” I said. Though Bonnat’s work was rather dark and glum, he was very fashionable.

“Not
that
overrated mediocrity,” Curtis exclaimed. “Bonnat can only paint men! And his talent is nil compared to Sargent’s. Anyway, this wouldn’t be a commissioned work. If you like the painting, you can buy it. If not, you’re under no obligation.”

“Tell Monsieur Sargent I’ll think about it.”

“Very well.” Curtis drank his tea quickly and left.

If I could have been sure that Sargent’s portrait would be as beautiful as the one he had painted of Madame Subercaseaux, I’d have agreed in a second to pose for him. But a portrait is, at best, an uncertain undertaking. My beauty was my claim to consequence, and though I loved the idea of being immortalized on canvas, I was leery of entrusting my image to an artist.

As it turned out, Curtis’s visit was the first strike in an ardent campaign by Sargent to win my approval. Over the next year, his friends bombarded me with letters begging me to sit for him and help him “unleash” the full power of his brilliance, as Curtis once put it. Yet Sargent never approached me himself.

Oddly, when I’d occasionally see him at a party or a restaurant, he never tried to start a conversation. Sometimes, though, I’d catch him staring at me. Finally I confronted him.

The occasion was the opening of the 1882 Salon. I had wandered into the “S” room, the space dedicated to painters whose last name began with
S.
A large crowd had gathered in front of Sargent’s
El Jaleo.
The painting was a monumental depiction of a frenzied Spanish cabaret scene, with the lower panel of the frame inverted to suggest footlights. Sargent stood to the right of the painting, accepting compliments from his friends.

I pushed my way through the crowd. “I see you’ve painted another masterpiece,” I said, teasing.

Knowing his reputation for shyness, I expected a timid response, but he looked me in the face with shining eyes. “Ah, I’m still waiting for my masterpiece,” he said. “I’m waiting for you.”

His cool charm unnerved me, and for once it was I who stumbled for words. “And I’m still thinking about it,” I said, more flippantly than I had intended.

He looked so disappointed that I thought he might cry. Immediately I was sorry. In a flush of embarrassment, I said good-bye, then scurried off to another gallery.

The next day, still brooding about our encounter, I decided to dropin on Sargent. He answered the door dressed immaculately in a waistcoat and a white collar, and puffing on a foul-smelling Egyptian cigarette. “Madame Gautreau! This
is
a pleasant surprise,” he said. He looked ecstatic to see me.

In sharp contrast to Sargent’s neat appearance, his studio was untidy. A film of dirt covered every surface. Old rags and abandoned sketches littered the floor. Jars of turpentine, brushes, and scrapers cluttered the tables. A tattered carpet covered the model’s stand. I hadn’t noticed the mess during the party for the unveiling of Pozzi’s portrait the year before, but now I hesitated to touch anything.

Sargent removed a pile of newspapers from the divan and motioned me to sit. Then he settled himself beside me.

“Have you thought any more about sitting for me?” he asked.

“Tell me exactly what you have in mind.”

He pulled fussily on his collar. “Something striking, something that will celebrate your beautiful lines and exotic color. I haven’t worked out the setting or the pose. But I see you in a simple gown, something, er, décolleté. Your figure is perfect. Let’s show it off.”

“And jewelry?”

“No jewelry. The statues in the Louvre don’t wear jewelry. Why should you?” Sargent looked deeply into my face and smiled kindly. Then he straightened himself and said, “If you have time, I’d like to make a few sketches.”

“Now?” I asked.

“Why not?”

He retrieved some paper from a portfolio on the floor and positioned himself in a chair, where he’d have a good view of my profile, the only angle of my face that interested him. He told me that my lines fascinated him—my sloping forehead, my distinctive nose (reminiscent of portraits of Francis I, the sixteenth-century French king), my jutting chin. Working rapidly with thick pieces of black charcoal, he made three sketches in two hours. He had a fresh baguette on the floor by his side, and sometimes he’d break off a piece to use as an eraser. When he finished, he wiped the drawings with a rag dipped in turpentine and signed them in the bottom right corner, “John S. Sargent.”

“Please take whichever of them you want,” he offered.

I chose a simple sketch of my head and shoulders. Later I had it framed, and it hangs in my bedroom to this day. Before I left the studio, I told Sargent I still needed time to think about posing.

“I hope you’ll say yes,” he said as we shook hands at the door. “It will be an honor to paint you.”

Over the next few days, I thought about the pictures I had seen in Sargent’s studio, mostly copies of works by Velázquez and Frans Hals and a few portraits of female models. There was no doubt that Sargent was a master of technique and color. But one of his pictures, a head-and-shoulders view of a blond model, gave me pause. The young woman had a sad, plain face and a double chin. Did she really look like that? Or did the picture reflect Sargent’s negative view of her character?

I began to worry that the artist might have a negative view of
my
character. Also, I was concerned that my beauty wouldn’t translate well onto canvas. Certainly none of the photographs I had had taken over the years captured me accurately. At least that was my conclusion after flipping through our photograph albums. Perhaps, I thought as I studied the dull prints, I had never gone to a good photographer.

After mulling it over for a few days, I made an appointment to have my picture taken by Nadar, the most celebrated photographer in Paris. Nadar was said to be a brilliant interpreter of personality, and I was curious to see how his prints would compare to Sargent’s sketches.