The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (72 page)

He concentrated on each detail and took great care of the effect of each object and color. He was a man of great skill who felt secure and at ease while working. He was very fond of
music and had me play for him. He brought me several pieces from Louis Moreau Gottschalk … whom he admired very much, specially his interpretations of Spanish and South American dances.

Sargent’s love of music and the flamboyant were intrinsic to his work, and sometimes in small inventive ways. In a sparkling portrait of beautiful Madame Paul Escudier, in which she is dressed to go out, her coat and the background—virtually three-quarters of the canvas—are black, but the face radiates life and the white ribbon of her hat, in combination with her red hair, is a showpiece unto itself.

Little is known of Sargent’s interest in any of the women who sat for him, beyond the work at hand, with two exceptions and even then there was only hearsay. Fanny Watts, the subject of the first picture he sent to the Salon, was, like Vernon Lee, a friend from childhood in Italy. Their families moved in the same social circles and he was clearly fond of her. There was talk of a romance, even an engagement, but supposedly his mother put an end to it, saying marriage at such an early age would interfere with his career.

Later came even more talk of a romance with Louise Burkhardt, the subject of a full-length portrait by Sargent,
Lady with the Rose
, much admired by critics. He and Louise were together frequently in Paris and, with Carroll Beckwith and others, went off on summer excursions to Fontainebleau and Rouen. Her mother strongly encouraged the supposed romance, and again there was talk of an engagement that never happened.

How strongly attracted Sargent was to the opposite sex, or to his own, was and would remain difficult to determine. It would be said that no man indifferent to the physical appeal of stunning women could possibly have painted them as he did. But it would also be said that some of his drawings and paintings of his male friends argued the opposite, and that his rendering of women was his way of concealing his homosexuality. But no one ever knew or said so if they did. He kept that side of his life entirely private.

Vernon Lee, who knew him as well as anybody, later wrote, “More and more it has seemed to me that Sargent’s life was absorbed in his painting,
and that the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think, be:
he painted
.”

That the same could have been said of Mary Cassatt remained as evident as ever. Except for occasional spells of poor health and the interruptions required to attend to her family’s needs, her devotion to her work was no less ardent than ever. Her life, too, was her art.

Her father complained of dyspepsia and lumbago. Her mother suffered from a hacking cough and insomnia. Sister Lydia, her health steadily declining, remained a constant worry. Her sufferings from intermittent headaches and stomach pains had become more severe, at times alarming, though she seldom complained—“she has wonderful spirits considering all things,” her mother reported to her son Alexander—and with Lydia still willing to sit for Mary when the pains subsided, Mary kept painting her.

In 1880, primarily for Lydia’s benefit, the family began spending summers in the country at Marly-le-Roi. Alexander, his wife, Lois, and their four children made a long-promised visit to France to join them at Marly, and the atmosphere seemed to agree with everyone. Mary painted several of her finest pictures—
Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, Lydia Seated in the Garden with a Dog in Her Lap, Katherine Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren
.

Again it was the safely sequestered, quiet, unstrained, unthreatened feminine world of family and privilege that she portrayed and that, by all evidence, she had no desire to venture away from. Nor do any of her subjects ever look directly at the viewer. They are all quietly seated, preoccupied with some private, genteel interest of the moment. Even Alexander, who at home in the United States played an active part in the often rough-and-tumble world of giant railroads, is seen in an oil sketch with a book in hand, quietly gazing off as if lost in some philosophical thought.

Unlike Sargent’s subjects, Cassatt’s were never in the least flamboyant or theatrical. There is no drama to her settings, no suggestion of noise or merriment or mystery, only peace and quiet, and nearly always with an edge of sadness. Not only is there no dancing, no one is even seen standing.
Apparently she, too, like her subjects, sat at her easel to work at eye level.

The nearest she came to portraying the Paris world of music and drama were paintings of women at the opera and theater, but there as well her ladylike subjects sit safely sequestered in a loge or box seat.

She received abundant praise—she was a “veritable phenomenon”— and her paintings were selling. “Mame’s success is certainly more marked this year than at any time previous,” her father was glad to report to Alexander in the spring of 1881.

The thing that pleases her most in this success is not the newspaper publicity, for that she despises as a rule—but the fact that artists of talent and reputation and other persons prominent in art matters asked to be introduced to her and complimented her on her work. She has sold all her pictures or can sell them if she chooses—

Alexander, who had spent his whole career with the Pennsylvania Railroad and had recently been made a vice president of the company, had now, under Mary’s guidance, begun his own collection of Impressionist works. But early in 1882, when the Impressionists began quarreling among themselves, Mary withdrew from the group. Worse still, that summer at Marly, Lydia became “very ill” and Mary became extremely sad and unproductive. “Mary being the worst kind of alarmist does not help when things look gloomy … and is not doing much in the way of art,” her father wrote. After a private meeting with Lydia’s doctor, who said there was no hope for a cure, Mary went home so depressed she had to take to her bed.

“Poor dear!” her father wrote of Lydia in mid-September. “This is the first time she has spoken plainly and directly of her death. …” Mary, Lydia had told him, had developed into a “most excellent nurse.”

Lydia Cassatt died in Paris of Bright’s disease at age forty-five on a dismal, rain-soaked November 7, 1882.

Mary had never known the death of someone close to her. When Alexander, Lois, and the children arrived in Paris three weeks later, Mary told
Lois how desperately lonely she felt. Perhaps she would have been better off to have married, she said, than face being “left alone in the world.”

In 1882, the year of Lydia Cassatt’s death, John Sargent’s genius took hold as never before. In that one year, at age twenty-six, he painted not only his
Lady with the Rose
and the stunning small portrait of Madame Escudier, but a second portrait of her standing in her sumptuous parlor, as well as eight other portraits and two of the largest, most arresting works of his career,
El Jaleo
and
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
, in neither of which was there any holding back on his sense of theater and love of dramatic light and shadow.

The French critic Henry Houssaye called
El Jaleo
“the most striking picture of the year.” Eight feet high and nearly twelve feet long—so huge no one could fail to take notice—it was Sargent’s passionate, bravura tribute to Spanish dance and music. In a scene lit by footlights, a dark-haired flamenco dancer in a flowing silver-white skirt flings herself into her performance, as behind her, against a wall, a line of musicians and singers, all in black, play and sing, and other seated dancers clap hands.

Painted far from Madrid on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, with a French model posed as the dancer, it was the exuberant culmination of innumerable pencil, ink, and oil sketches from Sargent’s time in Spain three years earlier and in Paris as part of his preparation. The Spanish word
jaleo
denotes the burst of clapping and shouts of
olé
that are part of flamenco dancing. Once Sargent had the immense canvas under way, such was the vigor and clarity of the brushwork in the highlights of the dancer’s skirt that it was as if he, too, were shouting “
olé!
” to the loud stamp of her high heels. The darkly shadowed back wall, the dramatic lighting, the singer who throws back his head in a kind of ecstasy, are all pure, unabashed theater.

Nor was there much less theater in the second masterpiece, painted only months later, with the difference this time that the curtain had opened on an altogether silent tableau in which four very proper figures
stand perfectly still, all but one looking directly at the audience—a scene made especially arresting in that they are children.

Edward Darley Boit and Mary Louisa Cushing Boit were the rich American expatriates and friends of Sargent’s who commissioned him to paint their four daughters. Boit had given up being a Boston lawyer to paint, specializing in watercolor, at which he was highly proficient. His wife, whose inherited wealth exceeded even his, was described by Henry James as “brilliantly friendly.”

Apparently they had no specific requests or requirements of Sargent, leaving the setting, individual poses—everything about the picture—to him. And what resulted, the whole arrangement and mood of the painting, could hardly have been more unorthodox. That the canvas was a huge square, seven by seven feet, was in itself a departure, and the composition, the placement of the subjects, was a clear echo of
Las Meninas
, the Velázquez masterpiece of children in the Spanish court that Sargent had copied at the Prado.

The two oldest Boit daughters, Florence, who was fourteen, and Jane, twelve, stand together at the side of a high, wide doorway. Jane is positioned at the exact center of the canvas, Florence with her face in profile is so shadowed she is barely recognizable.

Further forward on the left, seven-year-old Mary Louisa stands alone, hands behind her back, her face fully lit, while “the baby,” three-year-old Julia, also fully lighted, sits on a Persian rug in the right foreground.

A pair of giant Japanese vases several heads taller than the two tallest girls also stand on either side of the doorway. With the Persian rug, they constitute the only props suggesting the luxurious Boit way of life. (Such was family pride in the vases that they were shipped back and forth between Boston and Paris every time the Boits crossed the Atlantic, year after year.)

The three older sisters wear the starched white pinafores considered proper play attire, and the three-year-old holds her doll. But the play attire notwithstanding, none is at play, and each seems oddly alone.

Other artists of the day painted children at play in the sunlight of public gardens in Paris, often accompanied by stylish, chattering mothers or white-capped nursemaids. Sargent placed these four young Americans
not only indoors, but in a sunless interior with a dark void of a background made to seem darker still by a gleam of light reflected in a mirror to the rear. To add further drama and mystery, part of a red screen makes a bright, dagger-shaped slash down the right side of the doorway.

The children surely have a story to tell, and one waits for them, like actors onstage, to begin speaking, perhaps in turns, to unfold the story.

Contrasting with the rigid geometric composition of the tableau and the motionless pose of its protagonists is Sargent’s characteristic vitality in the brushwork—in his rendering of the white pinafores, most conspicuously, and the decorative pattern of the Japanese vases. He is like a virtuoso pianist who, playing rapidly, strikes every key perfectly. Moreover, along with the air of mystery there is great warmth in the wall and the parquet floor, but especially in the pretty faces of the two younger girls in the foreground.

Vernon Lee would later write, “I am persuaded that the individual temperament of every artist expresses itself with unconscious imperative far more in
how
he paints than in what he chooses to be painting. …” It was, she felt, in such “perfectly pure and contrasted colors” and “the unerring speed of his hand and eye” in such paintings as
El Jaleo
and the portrait of the Boit daughters that the true temperament of John Sargent was to be found.

Finished in late 1882, the picture of the Boit daughters was intended for the Paris Salon the next spring. But Sargent could not wait, and so put it on exhibit under the title
Portraits d’Enfants
at Georges Petit’s gallery on the rue de Sèze in December.

Reaction to it then and later when shown at the Salon was uneven. Some viewers were troubled by its mood. One French critic described the children as “
en pénitence
,” being punished. Henry James, writing in
Harper’s Weekly
, would declare without hesitation that Sargent had never painted anything “more felicitous and interesting.” The picture was “astonishing,” James said, and praised “the complete effect, the light, the free security of execution, the sense it gives of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge. …”