Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Sargent was an adolescent prodigy, accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts on his first try, less than a year after his formal studies with Carolus-Duran had commenced. He exhibited his first painting at the Salon, a portrait of a young woman, the following year. Henry James, an enthusiastic booster of rising young men, wrote that the painter’s early work presented “the slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.” Sargent had had little experience with hot weather, and he hated it. Soon after he arrived in Capri, he wrote to a friend, “One generally feels used up” by the heat, and complained that he could not sleep for the mosquitoes and fleas. Things looked up after he met an English artist named Frank Hyde, who invited him to share his studio at the monastery of Santa Teresa, in Anacapri. More important, Hyde introduced him to his model, Rosina Ferrara, who became one of Sargent’s favorite subjects. Evan Edward Charteris, Sargent’s first biographer, described Ferrara as “an Anacapri girl, a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut brown, with a mass of blue-black hair, very beautiful, and of an Arab type.”

  Sargent could not get enough of Ferrara: he painted her in olive groves, in domestic genre scenes, dancing the tarantella, and a famous portrait with her head in profile, like a Roman medallion. In his paintings and drawings of Ferrara, Sargent gave free expression to a sensuous exoticism, a crucial element of the legacy of Velázquez, which remained an important theme throughout a career that was otherwise devoted to commissioned portraits of powerful men with mustaches and, more often, their handsome, vivacious wives. Rosina Ferrara was a rare case of a model who found a fame that equaled and even exceeded that of most of the artists who painted her. She was able to hold a pose for hours without a twitch, a minor talent but one that is highly esteemed by artists. Charles Coleman painted her often and hired her as his housekeeper; she might have been his lover. Years after Sargent had left Capri, Rosina Ferrara modeled for an American decorative painter named George Randolph Barse, who had studied at the academic atelier of Alexandre Cabanel, a rival of Carolus-Duran’s. Barse married her and brought her home to Katonah, New York, forty miles north of Manhattan, where she lived as a society matron until her death in 1934.

  Among the most talented artists who lived in Capri for an extended period and made the life of the island his principal subject was Christian Wilhelm Allers. Born in Hamburg in 1857, he studied art at the Karlsruhe Gymnasium, Norman Douglas’s alma mater, and made a name for himself as a portraitist. Allers was one of Bismarck’s favorite artists and became a personal friend. One of his portraits of the chancellor was reproduced in lithographs that were distributed widely in Germany. Allers had made a little fortune for himself by his early thirties and built a showy mansion in Capri. Like every artistic sojourner of the era, he attached himself to Charles Coleman. Villa Allers imitated the pseudo-medieval style of Coleman’s Villa Narcissus and was similarly stocked with tapestries, armor, and antiquities, updated with relics of Bismarck.

  Allers was an accomplished painter in oils, but his principal gift was as a draftsman. He produced hundreds of fine pencil drawings in Capri, executed with a crisp, fluid line. Allers went far afield from the usual generic subjects in detailed, realistic snapshots of the festival of San Costanzo, quail hunts, prankish children, and buffoonish tourists. He published two books of engravings, in 1892 and 1893, which did as much to arouse interest in Capri in Germany as Kopisch’s book had done half a century before. Allers’s stay on the island came to an abrupt close, for the usual reason: his lustful pursuit of the local adolescent boys he hired as models attracted the notice of the police in Naples. Donna Lucia Morgano, the owner with her husband, Giuseppe Morgano, of the café that served as the informal clubhouse of the foreign residents in Capri, got wind of it and tipped him off, and even hired a boat for his escape. After his flight from Capri, Allers continued his artistic and pederastic careers in German Samoa.

  The charge of pederasty brought against Allers was a direct result of the disgrace of Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the most spectacular of all Capri scandals after Tiberius. The Fall Krupp, as the affair is known in Germany, was as disastrous for the German homosexual underground as Oscar Wilde’s conviction had been for its counterpart in the English-speaking world. Krupp, Europe’s leading manufacturer of steel and weapons, and reputedly the richest man in Germany, came to Capri in 1898 to indulge his passion for marine biology. He outfitted yachts for marine exploration and developed an improved diving apparatus for the use of Anton Dohrn, a German zoologist based in Naples, which resulted in the discovery of thirty-three new species of oceanic fauna in the Gulfs of Naples and Salerno. Krupp was a generous patron in Capri: he purchased paintings from local artists at inflated prices, made liberal donations to charities, and commissioned Mimí Ruggiero to design the botanic garden named after himself, now the Gardens of Augustus. Krupp paid for a major renovation of the Quisisana, motivated primarily by a desire to enhance his own comfort in the floor of the hotel he reserved for his own use year-round. He built the serpentine Via Krupp, the first direct overland road from the village to the Marina Piccola, where he anchored his yacht.

  In Capri, Krupp developed a passion for the island’s young men. He threw lavish, noisy entertainments for his favorites at the Quisisana; later he moved his parties to the Grotto of Fra’ Felice, near the Marina Piccola. He was reasonably discreet, and there is no evidence that he had sexual relations with minors, but he was naively oblivious to the perils of patronage and got himself entangled in local rivalries. Ferdinando Gamboni, a schoolmaster who felt snubbed because Krupp took Italian lessons from another teacher, got in league with Manfredi Pagano, the owner of the Quisisana’s main competitor, and fed salacious gossip about wanton sexual orgies to an unscrupulous Neapolitan journalist. The Marxist press in Germany picked up the story as a part of its anti-imperialist and therefore anti-Krupp mission, precipitating the Fall Krupp. When his wife received anonymous letters with the inflammatory newspaper clippings enclosed, she went straight to Kaiser Wilhelm II and demanded that he take action against her husband’s enemies. The kaiser, as appalled by Frau Krupp’s boldness as he was by the outrageous stories about her husband, had her locked up in an insane asylum. Krupp was left to choose between acquiescing in his wife’s unjust confinement and owning up to the charge of homosexuality. A few days later he was found dead, apparently by suicide. No autopsy was performed, and he was buried in a sealed casket.

  There appears to be little doubt about the essential veracity of the main accusation against Krupp, but Gamboni’s tales of sexual depravity, as reported in the newspapers, were probably embellished by a process similar to that in Tacitus’s accounts of the Orgy of Tiberius. The details are just too exciting. After he moved his entertainments to the Grotto of Fra’ Felice, it was alleged, Krupp choreographed spectacles of sexual acrobatics, performed by good-looking porters, waiters, and barbers to an orchestral accompaniment, with orgasms celebrated by fireworks: a fanciful narrative that could have been inspired by Tacitus’s reports of Tiberius’s sexual acrobats, the sellarii and spintriae. Gamboni was a far from credible informant: a native of the Sorrentine peninsula, he had been discharged from his post as a schoolteacher there on the grounds of improper conduct with his charges, including violent disciplinary methods. Before he came to Capri, he had lived for a while in New York City, where he busked as an organ-grinder. Much was made of the golden pins Krupp gave his young friends, in the shape of artillery shells or crossed forks, which, it was hinted, were awarded for heroic sexual feats, yet such tokens were standard party favors at Krupp’s dinners in Germany.

  As with the Orgy of Tiberius and Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s cream-puff teas for the schoolboys of Lycée Carnot, what exactly happened at Krupp’s parties is irrecoverable. Not much may be inferred with certainty from his suicide, given the extreme opprobrium attached to homosexuality in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, where it was treated
as criminal immorality and punished with a severity equivalent to that of British law. It seems as certain that these revelries had some element of sexual activity as it is unlikely that they were spectacular orgies of mass buggery, but the record does not offer a reliable scenario of what went on behind closed doors at the Quisisana Hotel and in the Grotto of Fra’ Felice.

  * * *

  AFTER SHE LEFT Capri to avoid her husband, Romaine Brooks quickly matured as an artist. During her years in England, she discovered and honed the nearly colorless palette that would become her signature as a painter. Yet after Capri, she found the damp climate intolerable. “It was one thing to wish to paint gray effects,” she wrote in her memoir, “and another to have to breathe the thick gray of a London fog even within one’s own home.” Brooks declared her house in Tite Street “decidedly depressing,” and that went for the stiff, stuffy servants as well. To relieve her nostalgia for Capri, she wrote to her gardener there, asking him to send his young son to come work for her. At her bidding, little Giovanni wore a Capriote fisherman’s costume, a dark blue jersey and trousers with a scarlet sash. “There was of course an incongruous background of wainscoting and Jacobean furniture, but this failed to detract from memories of the blue seas and skies of Italy,” she wrote. Giovanni, of course, fell in love with her. When he was found hiding in a corridor with a knife, “about to waylay the new French maid of whom he was inordinately jealous,” Brooks was forced to discharge him.

  She became listlessly involved in society, the inevitable result of her newly acquired wealth. Her aversion to the empty pursuits of the idle rich, “gens du monde ever seeking diversion and trouble,” who came to her for advice about “such things as lampshades and cushions,” only made her more interesting to them. In fact, most of Brooks’s new friends, indeed nearly all, came from the ranks of the peerage and royalty. Her first major romantic entanglement after her marriage failed was a public flirtation with Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s beloved Bosie, whom she met at the home of Robbie Ross, Wilde’s first male lover and lifelong defender. Brooks was surprised by Douglas’s youthful appearance: “Blond and boyish, his face showed no signs of recent upheaval, no dropping lines of bitterness.” The attraction, or the affectation of one, appears to have been mostly on Douglas’s side. “Bosie would often say, ‘How is it that we never met when I was in Capri?’” He presented her with a copy of The City of the Soul, a book of poetry he had published five years before, inscribed “To Romaine from Bosie, Nous avons souvent dit d’impérissables choses (We have often spoken of imperishable things).” Whatever the things were, they perished before there was any risk of a consummated love affair. By the time she wrote her memoir, Brooks said that the only emotion that survived her friendship with Douglas was a “definite feeling of guilt for having abandoned my work for even so short an interlude.”

  A penchant for permanently youthful gay men threatened to become a pattern until she met Princesse Edmonde de Polignac, the former Winnaretta Singer, of Yonkers, New York, the daughter of the inventor of the sewing machine. “She was a good musician,” wrote Brooks, “and her forcible character and dry American wit went to form a personality which had little in common with the title she bore.” Like Brooks, she was in a mariage blanc with a gay man whom she supported with an American fortune. Singer made a deal with Prince Edmond de Polignac, an amateur composer: she consented to the match on the condition that he never set foot in her bedroom, and in return she paid for the performances of his music. Brooks’s fascination with Princesse de Polignac was her only escape from the tedium of Edwardian society, the “fairy tale of life wherein only Queens, Princesses, Duchesses, and a few witches had the right to parade about, while such small fry as geniuses, artists, musicians, and the like were called in solely to entertain these higher beings.”

  For someone who professed a bitter aversion to the haut monde, Brooks enjoyed a sensational success as a social climber, ascending to the loftiest peak. As a result of what she called “my obsession for my American friend,” she met the eponym of Edwardian society, Himself the King, at a tea party in Marienbad. When he allotted her her five minutes of royal face time and learned that she was an artist, he asked her what she thought of the Royal Watercolour Society. She had never heard of it, “but rising to the occasion I said that I considered it ranked very highly indeed.” The king was pleased to hear it and expressed a wish to see her next exhibition in London. It was a lively chat by regal standards.

  Brooks had reached a creative impasse in her painting. “I was accustomed to the vivid colors of Southern Italy,” she wrote, “and I now found that my palette lacked range and subtlety of tones. This was a defect that had to be remedied.” She decided on a change of scene and left London to take up residency in St. Ives, on the bleak, stormy Cornish coast, “the very place where one could study an ever-changing opalescent sea.” The isolated fishing village was just beginning to be known as an art colony, primarily attracting amateurs, the idle rich, and the pensioned. In St. Ives, Brooks “spent many hours training my eyes to detect and my hands to note down an endless gamut of grays,” an exercise that eventually enabled her “to isolate tones of gray so refined as to approach imperceptibility.” An early self-portrait is a study in dark grays that compete in their approach to absolute blackness. The figure is wearing a hat bigger than the head, hung with a heavy veil, an early Brooks hallmark. The gaunt face gazes dimly at the viewer with a flicker of suspicion or even fear, on the threshold of invisibility.

  When she returned to London, she found the house on Tite Street more intolerable than ever. The front rooms resounded with the cries of sick children at the hospital across the street, and the rear rooms echoed with doleful hymns from a Protestant chapel at the other end of the garden. After a neighbor sent her the third black-edged announcement of a death in the family, she started packing. “When at last the all-pervading gloom drove me away from Tite Street, it was to Paris that I again proceeded.” Another motive for the move might have been that Princesse de Polignac lived there.

  Brooks’s public career as an artist was successfully launched in 1910 with an exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, one of the most influential venues in Paris. In the same year, the gallery exhibited paintings by Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir; at his gallery in London, Paul Durand-Ruel had represented Whistler. Imitating her compatriot, Brooks covered the gallery’s red walls with a beige fabric to harmonize with her paintings, as Whistler had repainted the walls gray to suit his. For her debut, Brooks chose thirteen canvases she had painted at St. Ives, studies of women and young girls dressed in the extravagant fashions of the era, observed with a mild satirical eye. Only two of the pictures were formal portraits that identified the sitter by name, but the artist’s gift for psychological penetration was evident in every work. The reviews were triumphant: Robert de Montesquiou, who had previously patronized Baron Fersen, wrote in Le Figaro, “These pensive portraits, these severe yet penetrating harmonies, reveal a genuine originality and emerge with much charm.” He singled out the portrait of his close friend Madame Cloton Legrand as a masterpiece and bought it. He called Brooks “the Thief of Souls” for her uncanny gift of psychological insight, a nickname that stuck.

  Brooks’s apartment, on the avenue du Trocadéro, was furnished in a style as distinctive as that of her paintings and reflected their grisaille palette. An interview with her in Le Figaro, the first of many newspaper stories to publish a detailed description of her interior designs, reported that pale gray dominated in the wall coverings and carpet, with black accents. The sparse intrusions of color came from old master paintings and Oriental ceramics (again, the influence of Whistler). The furnishings mixed antiques and chairs covered in black mohair. The apartment’s most distinctive feature was the roof garden, which was enclosed by plate glass. At the rear, Brooks painted a trompe l’oeil mural depicting a crowd of people on a balcony, strolling through a pergola hung with billowing black drapery into a garden. Dramatic
displays of white flowers lightened the pervading darkness.

  As in London, Brooks was sought out by the gens du monde in Paris, but she instinctively fled their attention. “I had neither friends nor pleasant outside relaxations of any kind,” she wrote of her life in Paris. “What I called grown-up games, such as teas, dinners, receptions, and such like, bored me intensely. As time went on I even stopped going out in the evenings altogether. I would draw the curtains at the close of day and retire to my library. There for hours at a time I read and studied and tried to be as happy as I had once been in Capri.” So she said, yet it is difficult to square her description of herself as a solitary recluse with the lengthy catalogue of her new friends and acquaintances, many of whom sat for portraits.

  In 1912, she painted a portrait of Jean Cocteau at twenty-three as a dandy, lounging limply on a balcony, with the Eiffel Tower, the subject of one of his poems, looming in the background. The tower was still new enough to be controversial. In her memoir, Brooks wrote that people asked her how she could paint anything so hideous, and she explained, “This colossal steel structure had ushered in the machine age and was now boldly defying a city of low uniform lines.” The tower, she said, was “a rebel that fascinated me.” The portrait of Cocteau cost her Montesquiou’s friendship. Notoriously jealous, the count coveted the distinction of being the subject of a Romaine Brooks portrait and despised the vain, ambitious young poet, who had perfected a devastating mimicry of his mincing airs, behind his back. Brooks wrote, “It was the ‘lettré,’ the aristocrat, versus the clever, ultra-modern young arriviste.” The painting originally included a pair of women on the balcony, standing apart from Cocteau; she cut the painting in half, making the Eiffel Tower the focus of the composition. Brooks would later delight in quoting Maugham, who predicted when the painting was first exhibited that Jean Cocteau would be remembered only because of Romaine Brooks’s portrait of him.