Strapless (13 page)

During the early years of their marriage, Gautier ignored Mendès’s behavior and concentrated on their pursuit of the artistic elite. The couple befriended important writers, including Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, and cultivated a friendship with Richard Wagner, whom they both worshipped. But after eight years of tolerating her husband’s escapades, Gautier could no longer ignore his raging infidelity. Even her liberal-minded father was relieved when the marriage fell apart in 1874.

Flirtatious before her divorce, afterward Gautier developed close relationships with many of the men she and Mendès had admired together. Hugo doted on her, and to help her maintain the lifestyle she had had as a married woman, he tried to arrange a government pension for her. When a government official hesitated to do so—Gautier was not such a distinguished artist in her own right that she warranted such a gift—Hugo told him in no uncertain terms that “it is enough that this is so, and that I tell you, for the pension to be given.” He had that kind of power, and was happy to exercise it for his alluring friend.

Wagner and his wife, Cosima, also welcomed Gautier into their realm. Gautier had a way of making herself indispensable to artistic people. She flattered them. She convinced them that she alone understood their art and its importance. She did such a good job of being a fan that, sometimes, her heroes became her admirers. There was a serious flirtation between Gautier and Wagner, leading the eagle-eyed Cosima to ban her from the composer’s presence. Whether or not Wagner and Gautier had a sexual relationship, she was his intellectual and emotional intimate, and this was enough to make her the high priestess in Wagnerian circles.

In the 1880s, Richard Wagner was a god in Paris—and a particular favorite of Sargent’s—because he was the quintessential romantic artist. His life and his music were built around his epic vision of the world, a universe of legend, passion, myth, loss, redemption, and the eternal battle between good and evil. His
Ring of the Nibelung
was the most spectacular, the most imaginative, and certainly the most provocative entertainment anyone had seen. Wagner spent twenty-eight years creating the masterpiece, expanding his
Death of Siegfried
into a saga that incorporated the tragic hero’s entire life, and more. Wagner was so concerned about the staging of his monumental tale of gods, giants, and other mythological creatures that he persuaded patrons to spare no expense in building the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, a special theater where the
Ring
cycle could be performed according to his specifications.

A largely self-taught musician, Wagner spent years bringing his complex compositions to life. He had an enormous ego and insisted on being the dominating force in his household. His first wife was an actress, Christine Wilhelmine (Minna) Planer. Their tempestuous marriage lasted from 1836 to 1860, while Wagner traveled through Europe, composing his operas and creating controversy in the musical world.

In 1861, Wagner met the great love of his life, and his emotional and artistic match, Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of Franz Liszt and the wife of the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. They moved in together and started a family, and married after Minna died in 1866. Wagner and Cosima managed to stay afloat financially with the patronage of Ludwig II, the “Mad King” of Bavaria. Ludwig, who had succumbed to the spell of Wagner’s music as a teenager, was an eccentric who spent fabulous sums of money making his most decadent dreams come true. He built elaborate fairy-tale castles, such as Neuschwanstein, in his homeland, freely borrowing the swans from Wagner’s
Lohengrin
as his insignia. In one of his outrageously outfitted castles, Ludwig would act out bizarre
Arabian Nights
fantasies in a man-made lagoon. The very castles that sent Bavaria into a financial tailspin and sparked a successful plot to remove the king from his throne would become lucrative tourist attractions in the next century, and Neuschwanstein would inspire the design for Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland.

People either loved Wagner, as Ludwig did, or hated him. His supporters believed he was one of the greatest artistic forces of the century, and made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to see the
Ring
performed exactly as Wagner decreed. But after the Franco-Prussian War, many French people found his music an offensive reminder of their terrible defeat. When they heard the stirring chords and the overt celebrations of German history and folklore, they thought of nothing but the humiliating Prussian victory. Opera houses had to hire guards and print disclaimers in their programs when they produced works by Wagner, warning, “The public is requested neither to hiss nor to shout encore during the Wagnerian performances!”

As Sargent observed Pozzi and the fascinating figures around him, he saw that their behavior had a marked influence on how he painted. Pozzi presented him with a new challenge. While Sargent was a master at capturing forms and features through the juxtaposition of light and shadow, Pozzi’s most distinctive feature, his potent sexuality, could not be rendered with art school technique alone. Sargent would have to learn to paint emotionally as well as intellectually, using his brush to capture that potency as well as his own reaction to it.

Sargent conceived a daring image that both demonstrated his talents and expressed the feelings he had for his subject. He persuaded Pozzi to wear his scarlet dressing gown for the portrait, the male equivalent of a lady’s
robe d’intérieur.
A garment reserved for intimate moments at home would suggest that Pozzi was in his bedroom. Sargent then posed the doctor with one hand at his heart while the other played suggestively with the cord of his tasseled belt, as if preparing to undo it. His long fingers, tools in his profession, were graceful, immaculate, and sensual in the painting. He looked like a man poised to commit an indiscretion.

With every artistic choice—the robe, the pose, the use of the color red—Sargent eroticized the already erotic Pozzi, turning him into a symbol of male sexuality. And the portrait said as much about Sargent as it did about the libidinous doctor: clearly the painter of this portrait was captivated by his subject. Any artist could have painted Pozzi in a conventional way, but only an artist who was smitten could have captured the man’s power to seduce.

Sargent sent the finished portrait to an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Art in 1882, where it drew the attention of Oscar Wilde, a writer familiar with “the love that dare not speak its name.” Wilde recognized Sargent’s deep feelings for his subject, and he later immortalized Sargent’s relationship with Pozzi in
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In the novel, the artist Basil Hallward makes a startling declaration to his subject, Dorian Gray, confessing, “I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. . . . Your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.” Wilde felt no compunction about using the details of a real artist’s life in his fiction: Hallward is said to paint energetically, with “the sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas,” just like Sargent. Hallward shows his paintings at the same Paris and London galleries where Sargent exhibited, and favors colors Sargent sometimes used, lilac and purple.

Though Sargent may have been enamored of Pozzi, the doctor would have been an unattainable object of desire. Pozzi flirted with men, but was without question a womanizer, so the relationship between the two—as that between Pozzi and Montesquiou—would have been confined to friendship. Sargent seems to have been comfortable with this platonic bond, and he further secured it by becoming close with several of Pozzi’s intimates, including Judith Gautier. He also started to form his own circle, pursuing friendships with artists he met in various Left Bank cafés and restaurants. At Sargent’s favorite place, L’Avenue, the cashier kept an album for artists to use for drawing if they didn’t bring their own. Sargent would monopolize it, sketching everything from arms and legs to small portraits, and it was commonly referred to as
“l’album Sargent.”

Albert de Belleroche, a student at Carolus-Duran’s atelier, happened into the restaurant one night in 1882 when Sargent was holding court. A beautiful young man with fine bones and an aristocratic bearing, Belleroche was at age eighteen new to the Parisian art world. He had met Sargent once before, at the annual studio dinner honoring Carolus-Duran, but they did not know each other well. When Belleroche looked through the album at the restaurant, he was surprised to see a drawing of himself. Sargent had sketched him without his knowing it. Belleroche, enchanted, tore the page out of the album and took it home.

Sargent was fascinated by the younger man, initially by his appearance, and later by his personality. They started spending time together and became fast friends. Sargent teasingly called Belleroche “Baby Milbank” (Belleroche used Milbank, his stepfather’s last name, until he was thirty), and the nickname stuck.

Belleroche came from one of France’s oldest and noblest families, Huguenots who moved to England in the seventeenth century in pursuit of religious freedom. Belleroche’s father, Edward Charles, the Marquis de Belleroche, died when his son was a baby. The marquis’s widow, Alice, was a great beauty. Still a young woman, she married the notorious Harry Vane Milbank, who was reputed to have shot twenty men in duels, and they maintained residences in Paris and London. Years into their marriage, the Milbanks became cocaine addicts. They lost everything to their addiction and ended up impoverished. But when Belleroche was an art student, they were a wealthy and fashionable Parisian couple.

Belleroche introduced his new friend to his mother and stepfather at an opportune time: Alice’s husband wanted to have her portrait painted. Belleroche suggested Sargent, who posed her in a daring black gown with an extremely revealing décolletage. Sargent was testing new ideas of perspective and palette when he started the painting, and he was never satisfied with the results. He abandoned the portrait before it was finished, and eventually gave it to Belleroche.

The two artists kept up a long friendship. They shared studio space in Paris, and later in London, and frequently painted and sketched each other. Belleroche drew Sargent, casually dressed and uncharacteristically relaxed, working in front of his easel. Sargent painted Belleroche in various poses and costumes—as a proper modern gentleman, for instance, or in medieval dress, holding a giant sword. A photograph taken at Sargent’s studio shows the artist pausing from his work while Belleroche poses in what appears to be a seventeenth-century courtier outfit. One day Belleroche placed a fur hat on his head and Sargent painted him as a Spanish aristocrat.

The brooding and romantic quality in Sargent’s portraits of Belleroche suggest a relationship that went beyond that of artist and model, or mentor and student. The early months of their friendship were an ongoing flirtation, much like that with Pozzi. The art historian Dorothy Moss writes that “Sargent’s portraits of Belleroche, in their sensuality and intensity of emotion, push the boundaries of what was considered appropriate interaction between men at this period.” In the throes of this second romantic crush, whenever Sargent painted Belleroche, he did so with the same heat that he used in painting Pozzi.

Sargent’s emotionally charged relations with these two men electrified his art, and nowhere is this more apparent than in
El Jaleo,
his 1882 Salon entry. The painting, enormous in size and dramatic in mood, showed a Spanish dancer, transported by the sensual movement of her body as she surrenders to the power of the music. Sargent demonstrated a new level of emotional involvement with his subject:
Le Figaro
proclaimed
El Jaleo
“one of the most original and strongest works of the present Salon.”

 

 

But he was still an American, and therefore an outsider to the influential Parisians whose commissions he needed. In their eyes, there was an abundance of home-grown French portraitists, like Carolus-Duran, who were more deserving of their money. Sargent’s good reviews at Salons and his highly visible portraits of figures such as Dr. Pozzi had helped establish his reputation. But his nationality would remain an issue unless he became truly famous.

S
ince his Salon debut in 1877, Sargent had demonstrated great range, versatility, and technique. He had been praised by clients and hailed by the press as a rising star. But at this stage of his career, in order to affirm himself as one of Paris’s leading portraitists, he had to show more than talent. He needed a big idea.

The end of one Salon always meant another on the way, with a new submission to prepare. In early 1883, as Sargent sought an image that would launch him once and for all, there was one that burned clearly in his mind. Sargent had been thinking about Amélie Gautreau ever since he’d met her while painting Pozzi.