Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  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?

  Regardless of their geographic separation, James pursued Sargent relentlessly. He insisted on being host, guide, and constant companion for Sargent on his upcoming trip to London to see his sister Emily. For the first time in his life, Sargent, unused to being the object of obsession rather than the obsessor, was cast in the role of the “brilliant creature.” Stanley Olson described James as having been mesmerized by Sargent, “as one is mesmerized by an exotic flower.” James’s feelings for Sargent seem to have echoed Sargent’s infatuations with Pozzi, Amélie, Judith Gautier, and Albert de Belleroche.

  Before Sargent could think about his trip to London, he had to attend to the details of Amélie’s portrait. Even as he was about to send the picture to the framer, he was making adjustments, as he reported to Ben del Castillo: “One day I was dissatisfied with it and dashed a tone of light rose over the former gloomy background. I turned the picture upside down, retired to the other end of the studio and looked at it under my arm. Vast improvement.”

  A Salon entry had to look important in its presentation, and Sargent selected an ornate French frame for the portrait. Its multileveled gold surface featured a busy design of overlapping leaves and cross-straps, all complementing the painting without overwhelming it. Back in his studio, Sargent applied a coat of varnish to the framed painting, as was his custom. Portrait de Mme * * *, as Madame X was called at the time (a polite gesture to keep a respectable woman’s name out of the notices and reviews), was ready for the Salon.

  A year had passed since he had commenced his sketches of Amélie. He had lived with her image for so long that he must have felt a combination of reluctance and relief when he sent her painting to the Salon in March. Sargent’s previous awards guaranteed that the portrait would be accepted. Yet there was a difference between acceptance and accolade.

  Sargent left for London, where he found James to be the perfect host, orche
strating a schedule that kept the two men in constant and furious motion for a week. In an attempt to persuade Sargent to move closer to his home, James introduced him to some of England’s most successful artists. He dazzled him with his connections, arranging, for one day, visits to the studios of nine prominent British painters, including Edward Burne-Jones, and the American illustrator Edwin Austin Abbey.

  Sargent was particularly fascinated by the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an art movement founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others. Rossetti was best known for his exotic and imaginative portraits of women, which were of special interest to Sargent. Not only was this trip artistically inspirational, it was economically advantageous. Sargent obtained several commissions for the summer, including a portrait of the three daughters of Colonel Thomas Vickers, an industrialist who made his money in munitions. This was a different sort of client for Sargent, who in Paris had made his name in the world of the rich, beautiful, and brilliant. But there was nothing brilliant or beautiful about the Vickers girls, whom Sargent described as “three ugly young women” who lived in “a dingy hole.” Though he was glad for the income this work would provide, it was a step backward from the goal of fame and fortune in Paris, which remained the center of his world.

  Sargent returned to Paris in time to attend a reception at the home of Frederic Spitzer, a wealthy Austrian expatriate who was amassing a large art collection and who owned an extraordinary assortment of antique armor. Spitzer, the son of a cemetery care-taker, had built his fortune on a discovery he made at the age of sixteen, when he found a painting by Rembrandt. Aristocrats considered him an unsavory parvenu, his new-money smell strong. More liberal-minded socialites flocked to his parties and enjoyed his generous hospitality.

  According to a report in L’Illustration, Sargent and Amélie were both in attendance at a party Spitzer staged amid the swords and helmets in his armor gallery. Amélie drew her usual compliments from the press, but the most interesting gossip afterward came from Perdican, who this time connected the two Americans in his weekly column by leaking the news that Sargent’s latest Salon submission would be a portrait of La Belle Gautreau. Amélie, he wrote, “would be even more admired at the Salon.” There was a buzz around artist and subject: Madame X, it appeared, was a hot item even before anyone saw it.

  Dancing on a Volcano

  At the end of March, Sargent traveled again to London, and again he saw Henry James. While there, he solidified some of the relationships he had established the previous month, spending time with Edwin Austin Abbey and other new friends. He visited artists’ studios and attended exhibitions, among them the Grosvenor Gallery show of paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of eighteenth-century notables Sargent admired for their strong lighting effects. Still nervous about his own portrait of Amélie Gautreau, Sargent was preoccupied with thoughts of the rapidly approaching Salon.

  He returned to Paris on April 29, just as insiders would get their first look at the exhibition. Sargent went to his club that night, hoping to find a friend to ease his jitters. He ran into Ralph Curtis, his dashing distant cousin who, like him, led the expatriate life in Europe, traveling and studying art.

  Sargent and Curtis dined together at Sargent’s studio. Even though the portrait of Amélie no longer dominated the room, she still directed their conversation, as Sargent imagined various scenarios for the following morning. The apprehensions he and others in his position might have felt were expressed perfectly in the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young Russian painter who was also exhibiting at the Salon. She spoke for all the nervous artists when she fretted: “To-morrow is varnishing day. . . . What will they say of me? Will it be good, will it be bad, or will they say nothing at all?” Some paintings would be dismissed as unimportant, or worse still, ignored completely.

  In all the years Sargent had been exhibiting at the Salon, he had never had a bad experience. His entries had always been singled out for praise and awards. But the thousands of people who in the coming days would be passing judgment on his creation would be mostly Parisians, known for their unpredictable behavior. In 1884, they were especially contradictory.

  After the Franco-Prussian War, the French had examined themselves under a magnifying glass and were horrified to find signs of weakness everywhere. The death rate in France was higher than the birth rate. The average height of Frenchmen was decreasing rather than increasing. Farms were underproducing. There were signs of social and cultural deterioration as well. Censorship of the printed word had relaxed, permitting writers such as Zola and Huysmans to profile the most depraved members of French society, including alcoholics, prostitutes, and hedonists. There was nudity onstage, a brisk market for pornography, and widespread alcoholism, all symptoms of a pervasive decadence. Great thinkers saw parallels between France and the Roman Empire on the eve of its decline, and predicted a similar fall for France.

  Religious leaders, concerned about rampant immorality in Paris, conceived a church that would be visible from everywhere in the city. It would remind citizens that God was watching the capital and everyone in it, thus inspiring them to behave. In 1875 work began on Sacré-Coeur, an impressive white basilica located on the hill of Montmartre, overlooking the rest of Paris.

  The highly adaptable French didn’t stop their wicked ways, however. They merely figured out how to conceal and refine them. The French perfected two kinds of morality: public and private. Married men supported their households financially while maintaining separate residences for their mistresses. Married women fiercely protected their daughters’ virtue, chaperoning them at all times, but enjoyed private dalliances with lovers. Restaurants even opened private dining rooms, restaurants particulières, for illicit rendezvous, capitalizing on a legal loophole that deemed liaisons not adulterous if they were pursued in a public place.

  In 1884, to accompany the city’s decaying morals, a stench was permeating the streets of Paris; to some it smelled like burning, while others thought it was more like rot. For months, the source was untraceable. Zola might have invented it as a metaphor, but it was a fact, discussed at length in the newspapers. One theory, that a volcano was buried beneath the streets, gained credence when a regional newspaper reported that underground workers had discovered evidence of an active, sulfur-spewing volcano near the neighborhood of St.-Denis. But Parisians were indifferent to the news. If there was a volcano under their feet, a Vesuvius that could erupt and bury this modern-day Pompeii at any moment, the best thing to do was dance on it.

  Pleasure, decadent or otherwise, was actually a new concept for many in Paris. Life for the lower classes had always been grim and difficult, a constant struggle for survival in a city that was apathetic and even hostile to its poor. The population was stratified into distinct social groups: Day laborers, including domestics and unskilled workers, lived hand-to-mouth, while artisans, clerks, and salespeople enjoyed small but steady incomes. The rich, of course, lived for pleasure and had the money to do so.

  The 1880s brought sweeping changes and new prosperity for every economic group. Between 1852 and 1882, men’s wages rose about eighty-four percent on the average, and the cost of living fell. In postwar Paris, there was a bit more money for everyone, and a lot more for people who were already wealthy. The elite of the Third Republic were successful businessmen and politicians who celebrated capitalism and upward mobility, and worshipped at the Paris Bourse. The little people too had a better chance of succeeding in the new Paris. They could aspire to becoming middle-class by prudently managing their money and attending to hygiene, nutrition, and education.

  Parisians with even limited disposable income could now enjoy public entertainments, the biggest growth industry in the city. Curiously, when they looked for ways to escape from reality, they often turned to reality-based entertainments. Tabloid newspapers offered faits divers, stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Some were victims of crimes, others were criminals. In either case, the newspapers empha
sized the juicy details of their stories with sensational copy and bold illustrations, anything to turn banal, everyday life into marketable news. The discovery of an unidentified baby’s body in a river would keep a story running for days, as readers clamored for more information—or misinformation—about the incident. In 1869, the crimes of Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, a young mechanic who killed a man, his pregnant wife, and their six children, were reported in Le Petit Parisien, which sold as many as 500,000 copies each day the story was covered.

  When Parisians wanted to experience the most up-to-date reality-based entertainment, they visited the Musée Grévin, the city’s first successful wax museum. The moment the Grévin opened, it was patronized by people from every class. It was located directly across the street from the popular Variétés theater—which also welcomed a socially diverse audience, from customers who purchased private boxes to those who took the cheap seats of the fourth balcony—and was adjacent to the fashionable Passage Jouffroy. The museum building was handsomely designed and appointed, featuring a marble staircase, an ornate chandelier, and velvet curtains. The wax renderings of famous people from past and present were extremely realistic: they had lifelike skin, which was carefully articulated with oil paint, and piercing eyes molded from medical-grade glass. The Grévin was likewise faithful in its depiction of historical details. The wax figure of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, for example, was displayed in the actual hip bath where he was assassinated. Visitors had seen nothing like it before.

  Called a “true spectacle” by the press, the Grévin packaged and promoted itself as a “living newspaper” and promised to reproduce scenes from the headlines so spectators could experience them firsthand. Tableaux were regularly changed and updated, according to developments in the news, and visitors would return repeatedly for new figures and up-to-the-minute scenes. One of the Grévin’s most popular early tableaux was “History of a Crime,” which mimicked popular contemporary serial novels with its depiction of a crime from start to finish, complete with the perpetrator’s execution.