The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (15 page)

Adèle's message delivered, she moved on to other topics:

It's really a pity that you didn't come to the country today. The weather couldn't have been lovelier, and also we have arranged a beautiful country ball near our house. After having danced a great deal, we will set off fireworks at ten o'clock, and there will be a lot of
fashionable Ladies
[sic].

The teasing words, again in English and emphasized, were apt. Eliza relished connections in high society. Although she might have stayed in town to celebrate Pentecost under the guidance of the marquise de la Suze, she would have regretted the lost opportunity to expand her circle of acquaintances.

Adèle closed the letter with a final pinprick: “Adieu, bad Madame Jumel, I am sending you only a little kiss because I am truly annoyed.” As for Stephen, “He must take half of my severity for himself, since he has not come any more often than you.”
²

Although it is unmentioned in any letters from the period, Eliza had thrown herself into an all-absorbing project. Over a period of approximately eighteen months, she assembled a collection of more than 240 paintings.
³

She was in the ideal place to do so. Through late September 1815, she could have admired an unparalleled assemblage of masterworks in the high-ceilinged rooms of the Louvre. She had arrived in Paris just before the treasures of Europe, gathered by the Napoleonic armies, were packed up and returned to the countries from which
they had been looted. According to one visitor's count, a budding connoisseur could have found fifty-seven Rubenses, thirty-three Rembrandts, twenty-six Raphaels, twenty-four Titians, eighteen Veroneses, nine Correggios, and seven Leonardo da Vincis lining the walls of the museum.
⁴

The city was rich in artistic spoil even after Raphael's
Transfiguration
, Rubens's
Descent from the Cross
, and the Apollo Belvedere were homeward bound. At the Musée des Monuments français, medieval sculptures and tombs, rescued from cathedrals ransacked by the Jacobins, crowded a former church and convent.
⁵
Titian's
Danae
hung at the Luxembourg Palace and the portraits of the marshals of France decorated the gallery of the Tuileries.
⁶
Dealers offered collections nationalized during the French Revolution and others bought from Bonapartists fleeing the Bourbons.
⁷
Art sales were held in the homes of defunct collectors and in the auction rooms of the seventeenth-century Hôtel de Bullion. The marquis de Cubières, with his knowledge of art and artists, could have introduced Eliza to these fascinating realms.

Her acquisitions reveal that she absorbed expertise as rapidly as the proverbial sponge. In its completed state, the Jumel collection was an encyclopedic selection of works dating from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century. All the major categories of subject matter were represented: scenes from mythology, the Old Testament, and ancient history; landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes; devotional paintings, genre scenes, still life paintings, and portraits; even a few allegories and animal paintings. Mannerist, baroque, rococo, and contemporary paintings came from the French, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish schools.

The authenticity of certain works in Eliza's collection remains a vexing question. She was not a deep-pocketed collector. The bigger names in her collection were represented by copies of varying quality or originals in crying need of restoration. Thus her
Cleopatra
, said to be by the Italian Baroque artist Guido Reni, was almost certainly a poor imitation in the style of Reni that was on and off the Paris art market in 1816 and ultimately sold for barely twenty-four
francs.
⁸
A “Rubens”
Battle of the Amazons
was presumably a copy of a well-known painting of the subject in Munich that was traditionally attributed to Rubens. But the fact that a work was not an original did not necessarily make it a bad painting. Before the invention of photography, replicas of Old Master paintings were prized for their beauty and educational value.
⁹
Eliza's
Incredulity of Saint Thomas
, which she claimed as a work of the Italian master Guercino, may have been an excellent copy made by Joseph-Marie Vien, a past director of the French Royal Academy of Painting. The Vien canvas was sold in Paris in October 1816 for 109 francs, a handsome price for a work known to be a copy.
¹⁰

Two of Eliza's most highly praised paintings were by living artists, contemporary art being a niche where it was still possible to buy high-quality works for minimal sums. An attractive genre scene by Jean-François Garneray, painted around 1793, showed a young woman plucking a guitar as a boy played with his cat under the eye of an elderly woman.
¹¹
Eliza also owned one of Jean-Frédéric Schall's jewel-like little paintings, creations that summoned up the pleasures of the ancien régime with their graceful dancers and amorous couples. Her acquisition, full of delicate charm, was a picture of a girl with a dog.
¹²

Her budget stretched to Old Master paintings by artists who were out of fashion or whose works were not in high demand. For example, she owned a painting titled
Rejoicing of Africans
by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Frans Post, who visited South America and painted the plantations of Brazil. His canvases sold for a reasonable sixty or seventy francs at the time Eliza was in Paris.
¹³
She possessed four French rococo portraits by Jean-Marc Nattier as well—
Louis XV in the Dress of Bacchus
gives their flavor—and genre scenes and an allegory by his contemporary Jean Raoux.
¹⁴
The titles—
Lovely Courtesan: Summer Scene
, for example—suggest a sun-drenched charm. All these paintings were probably bargain-priced, painted in a mode dismissed as reactionary and corrupt since the rise of neoclassicism and the French Revolution.

The question of why Eliza began collecting is unresolved. However, her turn toward the fine arts was consistent with her evident eagerness for self-cultivation: reading, studying the piano, improving her facility in French. It accorded equally with her desire for acceptance by the upper classes. A sophisticated and wide-ranging collection would help Eliza distinguish herself from parvenus such as a businessman's wife who displayed a cast of a bronze by “Bologny” (i.e., Giambologna) and announced that she was going to put pantaloons on it before receiving guests.
¹⁵
In contrast, Eliza's knowledgeable appreciation for art demonstrated cultivation and taste. Her envisioned peers were not the nouveaux riches, but rather British aristocrats who were purchasing masterpieces in Paris: the likes of Quentin Crauford, the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Hamilton, and Sir Charles Stuart.
¹⁶
Her home, like theirs, could become a lodestone for wealthy and cultivated visitors.

That said, Eliza may have had more than one motive. The chronologic and stylistic scope of her collection, the inclusion of something to suit every taste, raises the question of whether it was compiled, at least in part, with future resale value in mind. Quality rather than quantity would have been a more sensible choice for a collection designed to have sustained value on the European market. However, if she envisioned returning to the United States, where few people had seen authentic works by the Old Masters, a diverse collection, with a solid sprinkling of works by (purportedly) well-known artists, might have commercial potential. If this was her aim, she would soon have the opportunity to put her strategy to the test. In April 1817, after less than two years in France, Eliza decided abruptly to return to New York alone.

16

A
t Le Havre Eliza boarded the
Maria Theresa
, John Skiddy in command.
¹
Puzzled and unhappy, Stephen saw her off. She seems to have made illness the excuse for her departure. In any event, there is nothing in Stephen's letters to her (hers to him from this period do not survive) to suggest that a quarrel or traumatic event precipitated the separation. “My dear wife,” he wrote in a parting letter, “It is so hard not to make the voyage together, but your health and the opinion of the doctor demanded your journey, and as for me, I did not want to disappoint you, fearing for your health.”
²

Stephen wrote to Eliza weekly during the first month after they parted, fighting loneliness and striving to understand her decision to leave. “Since your departure, my bedchamber has become insipid to me,” he wrote sadly from Le Havre on April 18, a few days after the
Maria Theresa
sailed. “I stayed on the jetty until I could no longer see the ship.”
³
In a letter of May 5, Stephen mentioned that he had paid a visit to the marquis de Cubières: “The whole family is as charming as ever and hopes to see you in a year.”
⁴
Apparently Stephen described her voyage as a visit to her homeland, not a permanent separation. He himself may not have been sure of her intentions.

If she had been considering a departure for some time, neither her husband nor her friends had suspected it. “The ladies never dreamt that you would return to New York,” Stephen wrote, “
and no more did I
”—the emphasis on the last words is his.
⁵
The “illness” that prompted her journey was homesickness—or at least that was the rationale she gave. In the early nineteenth century, nostalgia for one's native land was viewed as a condition that could cause serious—even fatal—physical infirmity. The only sure treatment was for the sufferer to return to his or her native surroundings.
⁶
“You were homesick for your country,” Stephen wrote on May 5. “For the sake of your health, I didn't want to turn you from your ideas, but you will be sorry for it.”
⁷

In spite of his feeling of abandonment, Stephen remained deeply affectionate toward his wife. He reminded her not to work too hard in the garden, as she “always does when I am not there,” and “not to work too much to put the house in order,” so as not to worsen her health.
⁸
The potential expense of maintaining separate residences worried him. “Take care of the paintings and don't spend too much,” he cautioned her, “as we have to maintain two households. And if you buy supplies, keep an account of them.”
⁹
He didn't like being surprised by unanticipated expenses. On the sea voyage, Eliza had paid for the passage of a fellow passenger, with no certainty of being reimbursed. Although she enjoyed making such lavish gestures, Stephen was unhappy when he received the bills.
¹⁰
In speaking of purchases he would make for the mansion, he warned her not to count on having as much as she wanted.
¹¹

Although a wealthy man, Stephen had many demands on his purse. He made yearly allowances of 1,500 francs to his brother, 500 francs to his sister, and 250 francs to his niece Felicie, his sister's youngest child; he also paid Felicie's tuition at boarding school.
¹²
He was equally generous to his wife's family. Eliza sent her oldest nephew, William Ballou Jones, to be educated in France in the late summer of 1817; Stephen paid for his schooling. In addition, he paid, at least for a time, for the American education of William's sisters,
Eliza and Louisa Jones, and their brother Stephen, born in 1810.
¹³
Mary's boarding school was yet another recurring charge.