Strapless (16 page)

 

 

Even the story of how Gautier got the house was filled with fancy. Her publisher, Albert Lacroix, apparently had committed the unforgivable sin of losing one of her manuscripts. By way of apology, he invited her to stay at his house in St.-Énogat. Gautier had such a good time there that she impulsively signed her name to a list of people interested in buying property in the area. She never gave the matter another thought until, sometime later, she was informed that the foundation of a house had been laid on the property and that she was expected to foot the bill. Le Pré des Oiseaux became her home for a good part of her life, and she never regretted the expenditure.

In 1883, Gautier was thirty-eight to Sargent’s twenty-seven, and he found the age difference alluring. She had an exotic presence, with a round, full figure and darkly expressive eyes. She wore her hair in a loose bun and dressed in Oriental robes made of sensuous fabrics. She was a worldly and experienced “woman of a certain age,” described by one critic as a “nun of art,” a woman who lived for art and artists. As she had done many times previously when in the company of an artistic man, Gautier focused her attention on Sargent and made him believe that he was every bit as interesting as those who had come before him.

An ardent Wagnerite, Sargent was elated to be in the company of a woman who had been so close to his idol. An inescapable suggestion of transference was at work here: for Sargent, Gautier was an almost physical connection to Wagner, as the woman who was one of Wagner’s major obsessions became
his
woman when they were alone together.

To judge from the number of times Sargent sketched and painted Gautier during her stay in St.-Énogat, they were alone together frequently. Charles Mount, a lively if not entirely dependable Sargent biographer, has suggested a convincing, but unprovable, reason for Sargent’s visits: namely, that Sargent and Gautier had a love affair that summer. Mount describes Sargent’s trips to Le Pré des Oiseaux like scenes from a farce, the artist running out the back door of the château at Les Chênes whenever he had a free moment and racing over the hill to Gautier’s house for a few moments alone with her.

This could hardly have been the case. St.-Énogat is several miles from the walled city of St.-Malo (which is itself a distance from Paramé and Les Chênes), and would have been a time-consuming trip by horse or by boat in 1883. Whenever Sargent arrived at Le Pré des Oiseaux, he expected to stay for a visit. Now that he was working more decisively on Amélie’s portrait, he had the time to do so. He was known to paint rapidly when inspiration struck, and he made efficient use of the moments Amélie stole from her busy August calendar.

Sargent had, according to Mount, approached Gautier about posing for him, using the same line that had worked so well with Amélie: he was an “ardent admirer of her beauty.” Like Amélie, Gautier had refused other painters and also hated to sit still. Yet she made an exception for Sargent: his unusual talent, his combination of classicism and originality, would make her look distinctive.

Sargent’s most romanticized rendering of Gautier is
A Gust of Wind,
likely his first painting of her. In signature kimono, she stands at the top of the stairs leading from her house to the beach. She looks young, slender, and beautiful, a fresh flower on the bright landscape. But Gautier was not young, she was far from slender, and her beauty was definitely in the eye of the be-holder. As in
Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast,
Sargent, a man infatuated, captured the essence of Gautier’s appeal in his painting: her power to seduce. Whatever fascinated Pozzi, Wagner, Victor Hugo, and other admirers was depicted on Sargent’s canvas. It was Judith Gautier idealized.

Gautier was for Sargent a fascinating alternative to Amélie. While Amélie was slim, Gautier was overweight. Amélie was a young woman with more attitude than experience, while Gautier had years of both. Gautier’s mature exoticism contrasted with Amélie’s petulant sexuality. Amélie, the “professional beauty,” was her own self-packaged work of art, while Gautier’s beauty was rooted in her character.

Sargent enjoyed the time he spent with Gautier, playing chess, discussing music and art, and painting and drawing her. Legend has it that one day, when he did not have a canvas large enough to accommodate the full-length portrait of her that he insisted on starting that very minute, Sargent tore up a kitchen table. He is not usually perceived as the kind of man who would chop up the furniture rather than delay the creative process. But this was his “summer of love,” perhaps the first and last time in his life when he allowed passion and impulse to rule his actions.

As had happened with Amélie, Sargent’s ardor for Gautier cooled. He replaced his idealistic visions of her with more realistic representations. A later painting shows a full-figured Gautier at her piano, no longer girlish and alluring, but bearing the weight of maturity. He began to think of his visits to St.-Énogat as tiresome obligations: in a letter to Madame Allouard-Jouan, Sargent complained of having to stay there when he would rather be on his way to Florence, but acknowledged that he would be thought a “brute” if he left.

As autumn approached, Sargent sought to free himself from romantic entanglements, real and imagined, and return to a more focused and structured life. “The summer is definitely over and with it, I admit it, is my pleasure at being at Les Chênes,” he confessed to Madame Allouard-Jouan. He had spent too many weeks there, drifting from one romantic obsession to another. It was as if he were on a quest, casting himself quite consciously in the role of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, the mythic seaman who sailed from port to port on an eternal search for the one true love who might release him from his curse of loneliness.

Like the Dutchman, Sargent was nomadic, rootless, and alone. But he was beginning to think he might be better off that way. The past months had shown him that his infatuations came and went quickly, often ending in frustration. A more successful artist than lover, he could capture his subjects on canvas much more readily than in life.

Sargent turned his attention to more practical concerns. He had completed enough of Amélie’s portrait to be able to work without a model. Sargent didn’t need her anymore. It was time for him to roll up his canvas—his usual method for transporting unfinished paintings—pack up his paints, and return to his studio in Paris.

In October 1883, with Les Chênes closed for the year, Amélie embarked on the new social season in Paris, and Sargent came home to utter chaos. After sharing lofts with other artists, he was unaccustomed to overseeing a studio the size of his establishment on the Boulevard Berthier. It was an expensive proposition for an artist with an uncertain income: in addition to rent and bills for art supplies, Sargent had to pay his servants, a cook and an Italian “majordomo,” whom he had hired in the spring, when he felt optimistic about his future. His staff proved troublesome—the manservant drank and made the cook cry. Their antics were distracting, and the new expenses amounted to more money than his income, which was not coming in as rapidly as he had hoped.

Sargent’s first task, after firing the manservant and straightening out other affairs, was to complete the portrait of Madame Gautreau for its March deadline. He had painted and scraped the canvas so many times that the painting’s surface was now cracked and uneven. Amélie’s right arm, the one leaning awkwardly on the table, had required a great deal of work before it satisfied him. Worried that the mistakes would make the canvas look too rough, he decided to paint a copy. With a clean canvas beside the original, Sargent tried to produce a perfect replica.

Even as he copied the portrait, Sargent did not lose sight of the future he hoped to create for himself. He had taken a commission to paint Mrs. Henry White, the wife of an American diplomat. Margaret White, “Daisy” to her friends, was a handsome woman, and would appear regal and imposing on Sargent’s canvas. She frequented diplomatic circles and was well connected in Paris and in London. The commission had arrived in the standard way, the husband coming to Sargent and arranging a proper fee—none of this campaigning to paint people, as with Pozzi and Amélie, or painting people for the Salon, as with Carolus-Duran and Louise Burckhardt.

Sargent’s portraits of Amélie and Mrs. White both featured socially prominent women, but there the similarity ended. Amélie’s revealing dress and fallen shoulder strap, the costume of a femme fatale, seduced and provoked. Mrs. White’s luminous white silk gown, by contrast, was almost bridal in its innocence. She radiated respectability and affluence. Presenting her as an emblem of the Gilded Age, Sargent aimed to demonstrate his skill and versatility to potential clients, to prove that he could paint the wealthy matron as artfully as he could the siren. If both paintings attracted as much attention as he hoped, he would have more commissions than he could handle.

Sargent completed his painting of Mrs. White and sent it to her in London. In the early months of 1884, he raced through the final stages of the copy of Amélie’s portrait. Before he could finish the bottom of her gown, paint in the table, and add the fallen strap, he suffered an attack of insecurity. Was it eye-catching? Was it as bewitching as its subject? Would it succeed as his “big idea” Salon entry?

Sargent wondered whether he should further refine the copy or return to the original. He invited Carolus-Duran to give a candid assessment of his work-in-progress. His former teacher, Sargent believed, would be an informative, impartial, and trustworthy judge. He knew Sargent’s capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses better than anyone, and he was an expert in portraiture. As well, Carolus-Duran had strong relationships with the artists who controlled the Salon. He knew the intricacies of its politics and was keenly aware of the judges’ likes and dislikes.

Upon viewing the painting, Carolus-Duran quickly dispelled Sargent’s fears. He advised him to send his finished portrait of Madame Gautreau to the Salon with confidence, assuring him that it would be well received.

Sargent was happy about this encouragement, and he never questioned Carolus-Duran’s honesty or wondered whether he had his own motives for being so encouraging. As one of Paris’s most successful artists, teachers, and arbiters of public taste, Carolus-Duran must have sensed that Sargent’s unusual painting would be controversial. If he didn’t say as much, it may have been that he was conveniently struck dumb by his own ambition. He and Sargent had worked together for almost ten years, yet it would not have been in his best interests to foster his former pupil’s success. Sargent was shaping up to be the older artist’s competitor for publicity and commissions; with every stroke of his brush, pupil threatened to overtake teacher. Perhaps if Sargent experienced a professional setback, he would be a less formidable rival.

By February, Sargent had resolved to abandon the copy of the portrait; after Carolus-Duran’s praise, he felt confident about submitting the original. He left the copy unfinished: the shoulder that might have had a fallen strap was bare. While he was readying the original and contemplating his still-uncertain future, Sargent met Henry James. The forty-year-old American novelist and journalist, who lived in London and was in Paris on a visit, was well known for his travel pieces and coverage of the international art world.

James was also well known for being a terrible snob. His clique was especially small and select—he had high intellectual standards and ignored those who failed to meet them. Although he rarely responded enthusiastically to a stranger, he was very impressed by the twenty-eight-year-old Sargent. “The only Franco-American product of importance here strikes me as young John Sargent the painter, who has high talent, a charming nature, artistic and personal, and is civilized to his finger-tips,” James wrote to a friend. “I like him so much that (a rare thing for me) I don’t attempt too much to judge him.” Though James had lukewarm feelings about Amélie’s portrait when he saw it in Sargent’s studio—he only “half-liked it,” he confided to a friend—he was convinced that Sargent was enormously talented, and wanted to add him to his exclusive list of friends. James saw Sargent as one of his characters come to life, the quintessential American expatriate, a young man blessed with the spirit and energy of the New World and the polish and refinement of the Old.

Inspired by Sargent, James wrote a story entitled “The Pupil.” It suggested dark realities at play in the artist’s early life. The central character, a precocious boy with an artistic nature, was at the mercy of his selfish, shallow, and chronically irresponsible parents, whose inattention ultimately led to his death. James implied that young Sargent (and probably James himself, who had experienced a similarly nomadic childhood) suffered from the chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity that his family had imposed upon him for nearly twenty years.

Several critics have suggested that Sargent painted the way that James wrote, portraying the same gilded world with penetrating vision. Both men were intensely observant, but just as guarded. They used their art to express their emotions, while keeping the details of their personal lives, and especially their sexual orientation, extremely private. They left no clues regarding the true nature of their relationship with each other: was it physical, or merely a common infatuation between artists and intellectuals of the same sex?