Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  For women who could contrive to receive lovers in their own homes during the four-to-five, a special costume was available. The robe d’intérieur, a tea gown, was originally a bathrobe-like garment worn by married women. Loose and diaphanous, it was meant to offer a pleasant escape from the restrictive corsets women wore at other times. The tea gown, easy to put on and take off before one’s husband came home from his own afternoon peccadilloes, quickly became synonymous with seduction. It announced that the woman wearing it was sexually experienced.

  Amélie realized that she looked adorable, enticing, downright sexy in her at-home dishabille. And she had no intention of reserving the undressed look for her husband or restricting it to her home: she incorporated it into her public apparel, calling attention to her soft white shoulders, swan neck, and womanly curves with gowns that outlined her body. The inventive strategy worked. At her debut as Madame Gautreau, Amélie made a stunning impression on Parisian society. During this time, wrote Gabriel Pringue, “women wore high coiffures with false curls. They also padded their breasts, wore balloon sleeves, ample dresses”; their endless trains were often caught in doorways, they upset armchairs and footstools. Then, into this “effervescence of silk, lace and velvet,” a door opened “to let enter an antique statue, auburn hair with gold reflections, thrown back and tied in a Grecian knot, freeing a proud forehead, and admirable face of absolute regularity of feature, without the slightest defect, with the transparency of alabaster, set on a long neck, magnificently placed on perfectly rounded shoulders . . . dressed in a white Grecian cloth which molded her superb figure.” Slender yet full-bosomed, and with her singular face, nineteen-year-old Amélie Avegno Gautreau was the bold new era’s bold new ideal of female beauty.

  She completed her look with a diamond crescent in her hair, like a tiara, to make her look royal. It also served as a memento of her overseas birthplace, the Crescent City.

  In October 1878, exquisitely costumed and coiffed, Amélie began making the rounds of dinner parties, balls, and charity affairs, captivating the men and women in her own set and winning the attention of the public as well. She accepted invitations to teas, dinners, and the Japanese-themed receptions popular at the time. Before long, she had become a celebrity. Her public appearances turned into spectacles: not only did her peers notice her at balls and the opera, but when she rode in a carriage in the park or on the boulevards, crowds would push and shove, stand on benches, and even cause traffic jams, to catch a glimpse of “La Belle Gautreau.”

  In the late fall of the year, Amélie became pregnant. She was able to conceal her condition for several months, and continued participating in the social season; she then retreated into the customary period of confinement once her pregnancy became more noticeable. She moved to Les Chênes, where she spent the quiet spring and summer months resting, playing the piano, and faithfully reading Le Figaro to keep up with the society news.

  In August 1879, Amélie and Pedro’s child, a daughter, was born. They named her Louise, after Pedro’s mother, who had died earlier in the year.

  For little Louise’s baptism, the new parents hosted an elaborate fête, complete with ham, oysters, and champagne. They dressed Louise in a fashionable layette ordered from the Bon Marché. Her proud father was more generous with money than his mother had been. Amélie’s allowance was raised substantially, to 1,000 to 3,200 francs a month; she also received a one-time payment of 40,000 francs, possibly for having given birth. Although she took pleasure in the celebrating and shopping entailed in having a child, Amélie was eager to resume her Parisian society life. Pedro’s secretary, who had taken over the ledger from Madame Louise, made note of “Madame’s” purchases during and after her confinement, including white rice powder for her face and black satin for a gown.

  Amélie’s mother-in-law started a detailed ledger of family purchases, which included her daughter-in-law’s rice powder (“poudre riz”), the secret behind her legendary white complexion. (Courtesy Archives Municipales de Saint-Malo)

  The Gautreaus returned to Paris in October and climbed even higher in the social firmament. Amélie’s schedule was quite demanding. In the fall and winter, she was expected to attend bazaars and balls celebrating Christmas and Carnival and first nights at the Comédie-Française and the Opéra. In the spring, it was essential that she appear at the Fête des Fleurs, costume balls, the art Salon, and the Grand Prix and other equestrian races at Longchamps. A single day might involve as many as eight changes of clothing, hairstyle, and accessories. A promenade in the Bois de Boulogne might be followed by five-o’clock tea, dinner, the opera, a ball, and then a midnight supper, each event requiring a different costume and a complicated toilette.

  Amélie was always fashionable, with a distinctive wardrobe that received extensive coverage in the newspapers. L’Événement reported her appearance in a dress of salmon-colored velvet on one occasion, and on another in a magnificent Directoire gown of white satin with crystal drops, a shower of diamonds on her shoulders, an orange crepe de Chine scarf around her waist. Le Figaro raved about her dress of red velvet with a bodice of white satin, as did La Gazette Rose about her white satin dress with pearl netting.

  Over the next three years, Amélie’s fame spread from Europe to America. In 1880, a reporter for The New York Herald saw her in France and filed a flowery story describing her magnificence. “La Belle Américaine: A New Star of Occidental Loveliness Swims into the Sea of Parisian Society” was filled with the requisite allusions to classical mythology; the reporter noted that Amélie was the loveliest creature he had ever beheld. Other observers were astounded by her beauty, he wrote, and an admiring murmur greeted her everywhere she went; crowds “opened, as if awe-struck with her beauty, to let her pass.”

  King Ludwig II of Bavaria attended the Paris Opéra with the sole purpose of witnessing Amélie’s entrance up the grand staircase. Her Imperial Highness Elisabeth of Austria asked to meet Amélie and was so taken by her that she invited her to pose among the statues in her garden in Corfu. Amélie’s young daughter, well aware of her mother’s celebrity, responded thus to her nurse’s admonition to be better behaved: “And if I am, will the morning papers say that the little daughter of the beautiful Madame [Gautreau] has been good?”

  Of course, not all of the talk about Amélie was complimentary. Paris was rife with venomous tongues. Gossips called Amélie a professional beauty—an insulting suggestion that she worked at her appearance, when a woman of her class was not supposed to work at anything. The cause of her pallor was hotly debated. Some swore it was her true coloring; after all, it had not washed off when she’d been seen swimming in St.-Malo. “The mother-of-pearl coloring of her shoulders,” it was reported, “had not been disturbed by the . . . water.” Detractors noted that she had been swaddled in towels by an enormous African attendant before she emerged fully from the waves, and thus it was impossible for anyone to have seen what Amélie’s skin really looked like after those few minutes in the ocean. The extreme whiteness of her skin, said the skeptics, was caused by her ingestion of arsenic. She swallowed a small amount every day, it was said, just enough to maintain her otherworldly shade of lavender-white without actually killing herself.

  Although many people delighted in picking at Amélie’s carefully constructed image, one group in Paris worshipped her unconventional appearance and notoriety. Artists were always on the lookout for a new model to inspire them. For decades, French painters had favored female models with dark hair and olive skin, and advertised for “Italian types” to pose for them. The late 1870s brought a dramatic shift in style. The chic and alluring parisienne began to dominate the art scene, just as she had taken over society. Her white skin signified urbanity, and her smooth shoulders, usually framed by sumptuous evening dresses, suggested luxury and indulgence. Her sophisticated image captured the essence of cosmopolitan Paris.

  Amélie, the ultimate parisienne, inspired artists from successful portraitists to struggling students. She was the m
ost original woman around, the most sophisticated, the most fascinating. The gossip columnist Perdican planted a blind item about an artist who was known to spy on Amélie while she bathed at the shore. “In Saint-Malo-Paramé,” Perdican wrote, “I know of a painter, enamored of Greek splendors, who has taken opera glasses to see better and a canvas in order to paint from a distance the shoulders of the lovely [Madame Gautreau].” Young artists developed crushes on Amélie, who was close to them in age but who moved in a different social orbit. Edward Simmons, an American art student living in Paris, proclaimed her a goddess and confessed that he “could not help stalking her as one does a deer.” Painters and would-be painters studied her face and form, and wrote about her bewitching beauty in their journals, trying to determine what made her so special.

  Artists were eager to paint or sculpt Amélie. They bombarded her with requests, which she refused time and again. She understood that she must choose the creator of her first major portrait with great care, for it would be examined closely by admirers and detractors. Selecting a painter for a portrait was an important personal decision, as important as wearing flattering clothes or arriving with the proper escort. Paris’s wealthy and bourgeois commonly commissioned portraits of themselves, and patronized a select group of artists. Among the many candidates to consider, Amélie would not entrust her image to anyone until she was sure he was capable of creating a masterpiece.

  The Pupil

  In the 1870s, Paris was one big campus for art students. Museums offered the opportunity to learn from classic paintings and sculptures. Parks and stately boulevards presented an un-and sculptures. Parks and stately boulevards presented an unending choice of picture-perfect subject matter. The city was also home to the best teachers, whose classrooms attracted a polyglot community of creative types hoping to make their mark on the art world.

  These students, young men and women from France and beyond—British, European, American—flocked to the Left Bank and Montmartre, then a less fashionable, and therefore less expensive, neighborhood. The streets in this area were older and more intimate. The buildings, mostly residential, shared a particular feature: they had enormous windows, especially on the top floors, to permit as much natural lighting as possible. Artists coveted the cavernous top-floor apartments for use as studios. Although these spaces were freezing in winter—even with a stove—and stifling in summer, the idealistic tenants cared more about light, preferably northern, than comfort and convenience. Driven by their desire to experience “la vie de bohème,” wealthier students rented their own live-in studios, while their less affluent colleagues divided space with roommates or settled for the small rooms and shacks in forgotten corners of the city.

  Art students in Paris had at their disposal a variety of educational choices. There were government-sponsored schools such as the École des Beaux-Arts, which offered tuition-free instruction by prominent artists of the day—once students passed the rigorous entrance exams. The faculty of these institutions was often conventional, teaching art according to rigid, old-fashioned ideas. Teachers would conduct their classes in almost military fashion, insisting that pupils follow their directions to the letter. Little if any room was left for personal expression. Jules Bastien-Lepage, a successful painter in the 1880s, admitted that “I learnt my trade at the École and I do not wish to forget it, but in reality, I did not learn my art there.” Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the chief opponents of Impressionism, was an influential teacher at the Beaux-Arts for almost forty years.

  Like it or not, any artist who aspired to rise to the top of his profession had to win the patronage of the École des Beaux-Arts and its governing bodies, the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The artists who served on the boards of the Institut and the Académie determined which younger artists would be successful, as they were responsible for awarding prizes and medals and, more important, for deciding, through their own old-boy network, which lucky new talent would join their ranks. The winners could expect fame, prime commissions, and generous compensation. Artists who were excluded from this network would, naturally, have a harder time making a living.

  In the government schools, impatient young artists had to curb their creativity while following a strict program of lessons that progressed from copying plaster casts to painting flesh-and-blood models in life-study classes. Their schedule was demanding. Classes began early in the morning, so students who had spent the night carousing or working had to force themselves awake.

  Aspiring artists who didn’t pass the exam to attend a government school could choose a less structured form of training. Paris was home to dozens of independent ateliers, private studios hosted by individual artists. Each atelier had a personality to reflect the style and temperament of its artist founder. He would teach his particular technique and encourage students to imitate the masters he admired. The independent ateliers served two important purposes. They were often used as feeder programs, polishing students who needed more experience before they could meet the standards of the École des Beaux-Arts. And they provided bolder and more confident young artists the chance to work closely with professionals who were more accessible and flexible than the teachers at the more regimented academic schools.

  The ateliers may have been part of the refined art world, but the attitude there was fraternity house. Very often, the artist in charge was too busy with commissions, appointments, lunches, and other engagements to attend to the everyday matters of running the school. He might delegate to a student the responsibility of collecting fees and keeping order. Many students of college age possessed an age-appropriate appetite for pranks. New arrivals were subject to hazing and burdened with cleaning and other menial chores. Once they proved their worth, however, these newcomers became part of a brotherhood. Students who attended the same atelier would spend hours together in cafés, restaurants, and elsewhere, sharing ideas and one another’s company.

  A promising atelier was that run by the artist Carolus-Duran, who was for a period Paris’s most in-demand portrait painter. Born Charles-Auguste-Émile Durand, he was flamboyant and cosmopolitan, and a rising star in Third Republic society. He was an overnight sensation in the art world in 1869, when he presented his painting The Woman with the Glove at the Salon, an annual art show that had the power to make or break an artist’s reputation. In Carolus-Duran’s case, fortune was kind. Critics raved about his simple yet dramatic portrait and proclaimed him the painter of the moment.

  Subsequently, admirers would compete for invitations to his studio, desiring to be in the company of a celebrity. Carolus-Duran was so confident of his lasting popularity that he created his own rules: his fees for paintings were not negotiable, and his studio was open to the public only in the early morning, when most of society was still asleep. Albert Wolff, a journalist, observed that “a Parisian woman never rises before midday except on Thursdays to visit Carolus-Duran.”

  The artist had opened his atelier after two students asked him to oversee their work. If they rented a studio in Montparnasse, another neighborhood popular with artists, and recruited other students to share the operating costs, Carolus-Duran agreed, he would come twice a week to offer advice, criticism, and lessons in technique. As his specialty was portraiture, among the most profitable genres at the time, his studio easily drew a following. Carolus-Duran was sought after as a portraitist because he knew how to make his subjects look attractive and important but not at all boring or conventional. His appealing style guaranteed him a long and lucrative career.

  As a teacher, Carolus-Duran was inventive and inspiring, especially compared with the dogmatic professors at the École. He was not interested in academic painting, a widely accepted, and conformist, method that relied on neat sketches and polished surfaces. He instead encouraged his students to capture the big picture: to work rapidly and even passionately, to paint what they saw directly onto their canvases, au premier coup, at first touch. He impressed them with his characteristic h
abit of backing away from the canvas to check perspective, then racing forward with his brush to render exactly what he saw at that moment.

  Carolus-Duran expected his students to have excellent drawing skills, which they had to demonstrate before being admitted to his atelier. But he did not believe that drawing was the foundation of art. He was more concerned about the use of valeurs, or values, the juxtaposition of light and dark to create an image. One of his primary influences was the seventeenth-century Spaniard Diego Velázquez, whose paintings taught him the power of simplicity. He would dramatically chant the artist’s name to his students while they worked, so they would get the point. His maxim was consistent with Velázquez’s lesson: “En art, tout ce qui n’est pas indispensable est nuisable”—“In art, everything that is not indispensable is harmful.”

  Carolus-Duran’s classes were usually limited to twenty-four students, most of them English and American, although he neither spoke nor understood English and he had his pupils speak French at all times. He may have opened his door to foreigners because he knew that French students might be unwilling to study with someone who challenged the very establishment they wanted to join. But foreigners would not be afraid to test his radical teaching methods. They appreciated his expressive, freewheeling style and were less invested in the restrictive French system; they could always return to their native countries to paint if they did not succeed here.

  Among Carolus-Duran’s American students was a tall, reserved young man named John Singer Sargent. He had come to the atelier at age eighteen, accompanied by his father. Sargent’s fellow students found him mature for his age and oddly cosmopolitan, speaking flawless French with no discernible accent.