The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Belle Gardner admired the portrait of Madame Gautreau. Something in the lady’s defiant stance and haughty, almost brassy look of challenge may have appealed to Belle’s own sense of unconventionality. (Eventually she would see to it that a Sargent portrait of Gautreau came to her museum.) Belle also liked John Singer Sargent the man. There were disturbing similarities between Sargent and Frank Crawford. Like Crawford, Sargent was an American born and brought up by an American family in Italy. Like Crawford, Sargent was tall and dark and lean and handsome. As the painter Julie Helen Heyneman described him, he had “an air about him of singular freshness and calm, he had a look as of some serene and beneficent Jove.” Like Crawford, Sargent was some years younger than Belle—sixteen years younger, in fact.

  Naturally, Belle Gardner immediately wanted John Singer Sargent to paint her portrait. But unfortunately there was no time. The Gardners were due to sail for America within a few days. Before departing, however, she got Sargent to promise to paint her on his next trip to the United States.

  Back home in Boston in the late autumn of 1886, Belle Gardner found no shortage of attractive young men. One was twenty-five-year-old Denis Bunker, who Belle quickly decided was a painter of great promise. Denis Bunker, whose family background was a little vague, had been born Dennis Bunker but, after studying art in Paris, had Gallicized his first name by dropping an “n,” and become Denis. He liked to explain that his prosaic surname had probably originally been Boncoeur. Bunker, blond and handsome, had already had some experience as a rich woman’s pet. He had been taken up by one of the great operatic sopranos of her day, who called herself Nordica (née Lillian Norton of Maine). Bunker had been Nordica’s escort and constant companion for the better part of a year, but he had finally dropped her, claiming that she had become “trop exigeante,” too demanding. Now Belle Gardner filled Nordica’s place, and presently Bunker was receiving commissions to do portraits of nearly all the members of the large Gardner clan.

  Bunker also delighted Belle by introducing her to all sorts of little night spots and cafés that were frequented by students and theatre folk, and that Belle had never known existed. He also helped her arrange some Bohemian entertainments of her own. In those days women were not permitted to attend prize fights. With Bunker’s assistance, Belle decided to correct this injustice. They hired a hall, a referee, a pair of local boxers and their trainers, and staged an invitation-only fight, to which all of Boston’s society matrons were invited. The women-only audience cheered and stamped and practically stood on their seats with excitement through the event, loving it all the way through to the bloody end.

  That Belle’s unconventionality did not shock and scandalize Puritan Boston is interesting. If Belle had had children, of course, it might all have been different. Mothers might have cautioned their own children not to associate with Belle’s, lest they pick up her worldly ways, and Belle herself might have been ostracized. But, as it was, Belle’s behavior posed no threat. In fact, it was welcome; Belle dared to do all the things that Boston women had always wanted to do but had been afraid to try. In the winter of 1886–87, the boxing career of John L. Sullivan was at its height, and Belle Gardner was going through a kind of prize-fighter phase. That was the winter when she invited a group of her women friends to tea at 152 Beacon Street, where, she promised them, she would offer them a special treat. The treat was a young prize fighter, whom Belle had asked to strip down to his trunks and pose against a window, but behind a semitransparent screen, so that the ladies could admire his physique. The ladies, however, would have none of the screen, and demanded that the young man come out in full view to flex his biceps and ripple his pectorals before their wondering eyes.

  The ladies of Boston had grown accustomed to the fact that, whenever Belle went out, she was usually accompanied by one or another of her youthful protégés. It seemed hardly worth noting that, as Belle approached fifty, the young men she sponsored got younger and younger. Again, she posed no threat, since she seemed to have no interest or designs whatever on the husbands of her contemporaries. Belle’s young men were beautiful aliens, strangers from another place who had come for a while to nest with her. Most of them, like Denis Bunker, were witty and amusing, attentive to women’s comforts and pleasures. They opened doors, kissed hands, ran little errands. If one of Belle’s women friends wanted something from a shop, one of Belle’s young men could be dispatched to fetch it for her. Some of the young men were even recognizably talented. One was named George Santayana; another was a fledgling poet, T. S. Eliot.

  Another such was a twenty-one-year-old youth just out of Harvard. A young Jew, born in Lithuania, he had been brought up in the mean poverty of Boston’s North End, but he had the face of a poet or, some said, an archangel. His nose was long and thin and aquiline, and his brown eyes were large and deep-set. His cheekbones were high and his lips so full that they were almost feminine. This extraordinary face was set off by a mane of long, wavy dark hair. He resembled the youthful Byron, and he exuded a kind of androgynous sexuality which women, and even some men, found almost disturbing. What his talent was, precisely, was not yet clear, but it was obvious, even then, that some exceptional future was in store for this young man. His name was Bernard Berenson, and Belle and a group of her friends set up a fund for him to travel and study in Europe.

  It was late in 1887 when John Singer Sargent arrived in Boston to begin working on Mrs. Jack Gardner’s portrait. In New York, Town Topics raised its eyebrows over the fact that Sargent had moved, bag and baggage, into the house of “the married belle.” In fact, it was common practice for a portraitist to live in a client’s house while he worked. Sargent, meanwhile, had become an artistic star of the first magnitude, and le tout Boston did its enthusiastic best to see to it that Sargent had no idle evenings. So did Belle and Jack Gardner, opening the doors often to guests who wanted to meet the celebrity of the moment, driving Sargent out for week-end rambles in the Massachusetts countryside. One week end they drove him up to visit the Groton School, where Gardner nephews had studied, and to meet the famous Rector, Dr. Endicott Peabody, who was a Gardner relative by marriage. A student at the school at the time was young Ellery Sedgwick, later to become the well-known editor of Boston’s favorite magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. In Sedgwick’s memoir, The Happy Profession, he describes the following scene from the Gardner-Sargent visit:

  The time was a lovely Sunday morning in the late ’80s. There were two hours before church, and I well knew the danger of running across a master and hearing his suggestion that there is nothing like a Sunday morning walk in God’s sunshine. I had other views, and with a copy of Ben Hur, which had just burst on my excited world, I slipped into the gymnasium and, piling two wrestling mats, rolled them up in one corner, tucked myself securely behind them, and was lost to the world. For an hour I was buried in my book, when suddenly the gymnasium door was thrown wildly open and a woman’s voice thrilled me with a little scream of mockery and triumph. Cautiously I peeked from behind my concealment and caught sight of a woman with a figure of a girl, her modish muslin skirt fluttering behind her as she danced through the doorway and flew across the floor, tossing over her shoulder some taunting paean of escape. But bare escape it seemed, for not a dozen feet behind her came her cavalier, white-flanneled, black-bearded, panting with laughter and pace. The pursuer was much younger than the pursued but that did not affect the ardor of the chase. The lady raced to the stairway leading to the running track above. Up she raced, he after her. She reached the track and dashed around it, the ribbons of her belt standing straight out behind her. Her pursuer was visibly gaining. The gap narrowed. Nearer, nearer he drew, both hands outstretched to reach her waist. In Ben Hur the chariot race was in full blast, but it was eclipsed. “She’s winning,” I thought. “No, she’s losing.” And then at the apex of my excitement, “He has her!” But at that crucial moment there came over me the sickening sense that this show was not meant for spectators, that I was eavesdropping and, worse
, that I would be caught at it. There was not one instant to lose. The window was open. Out I slipped and slithered to safety.

  For me that race was forever lost and forever won. The figures go flying motionless as on the frieze of the Grecian urn.

  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

  What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

  I knew not then whether it was lost or won. What I did know was that the Atalanta of that Sunday morning was Mrs. Jack Gardner and Milanion Mr. John S. Sargent. It was that same year he painted the famous portrait of her with her pearls roped about her waist, her beautiful arms glowing against a background that might have been the heart of a lotus.

  The portrait that resulted from Sargent’s Boston stay is certainly extraordinary. Sargent painted Belle standing, full length. The design of the painting was a series of curves and ellipses. There are the curves of her hips and bosom, of the double strand of pearls at her waist. Then there is the downward curve of her white arms, joined loosely at the fingertips. Finally there is the curve of the heart-shaped neckline of her dress and the curve of the enigmatic half-smile on her face, giving the impression that she is just about to speak. The whorls of the floral tapestry which Sargent used as a backdrop appear to be a series of halos radiating about her face.

  Mrs. Gardner’s portrait went on exhibit at the St. Botolph’s Club, a literary-artistic men’s club in Boston, and drew considerable comment from the press. But from the published accounts one wonders whether any of the reporters had actually seen the painting. One reporter wrote that Belle’s dress was white. The dress is black. Another claimed that the dress was cut very low at the back, but Belle’s back is not even visible. Still another wrote that Sargent painted Belle dripping with diamonds. The only jewels are the pearls, and a ruby pendant at her throat. One report claimed that the dress was sleeveless; the dress, which was by Worth of Paris, has short sleeves. The most damaging comment was that Belle’s dress was “very décolleté,” though it is certainly no more low-cut than anything that was fashionable at the time. Still, rumors that Sargent had portrayed more of Belle’s poitrine than was entirely proper continued to circulate, and one wag commented that Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner “all the way down to Crawford’s Notch.” The reference was to a popular resort in the White Mountains, but was there another meaning intended here? Was the name of Frank Crawford also being slyly dragged into the controversy?

  Word of the possible double-entendre got back to Jack Gardner. Usually serene, he was not amused. He would not tolerate his wife being made the butt of coarse jokes, and the portrait was withdrawn from exhibition. Despite many requests, the painting was never again shown publicly during Mrs. Gardner’s lifetime, though Belle always insisted that it was the finest work Sargent had ever done. Today it hangs as one of the centerpieces of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  8

  THE PALAZZO

  By the 1890s, Belle and Jack Gardner had more or less established a fixed routine that involved spending alternate summers in Europe. Jack Gardner’s shipping business was prospering—indeed, in that wonderful era of gaiety and extravagance, every American business venture seemed to prosper and the poverty that lay beneath it was successfully hidden—and Gardner could leave the day-to-day handling of the office to talented nephews. In 1891, Belle’s father, David Stewart, had died, and this self-made man had left an estate valued at $3,500,000. Nearly half of this, about $1,700,000, went to Belle, an indication that she was the favorite of all his children. Though not imposingly rich from this inheritance, she was now very well off, and her money gave her a certain independence. She no longer had to turn to her husband for the pretty things she wanted to buy.

  She was also acquiring a somewhat imperious and autocratic manner, and a habit of hurling expletives that were then unprintable at people who did not do exactly as she wished, though she usually said them in French or Italian. (Once, to an overtalkative dinner partner, she shouted “Basta!”—“Enough”—and word circulated that Mrs. Gardner had called a prominent Bostonian a bastard.) At regular intervals, when anything in the running of her household displeased her, she would fire all her servants, crying, “Out! Out!” The servants, however, soon learned that if they hid in the wings until the master of the house came home for the evening, he would straighten things out, and despite her periodic rampages, her servants remained remarkably loyal.

  She also continued to enjoy her reputation for eccentricity and outrageous behavior, and whenever there was an opportunity to do something a bit outré, she seized it. For a Boston Symphony concert, she might wear diamonds in her hair, or she might wear a red ribbon advertising the Boston Red Sox. When a lioness at the Boston Zoo gave birth to twins, Belle succeeded in persuading the keeper to let her borrow the cubs for an afternoon’s outing in her carriage, and she then brought them home to let them romp about her Beacon Street house. Later, at the zoo, she appeared in the lion’s cage to play with the babies, and the rumor circulated that Belle had actually adopted the lions and brought them home to live with her. On another occasion, going to a picnic in the country by train, she asked—and was permitted, since she had hired the train—to ride up in the cab with the engineer, and spent the trip gaily pulling the whistle. She arrived at the party with her white Paquin gown covered with soot, but insisted that the adventure had been worth it. Such exploits inevitably made their way into gossip sheets like Town Topics, invariably exaggerated. The more distorted the accounts, the more Belle liked them. She loved reading about herself. And, as always, wherever she went she was surrounded by her adoring coterie of fresh-faced, flattering, bright young men.

  Friends noticed, too, that Belle and Jack Gardner had fallen into a habit of bickering. It was just that—not real quarreling. They never said unkind things to each other, but whenever her husband voiced an opinion Belle would immediately take the opposite view. “Wrong!” she would cry in response to whatever statement he had just made, and he, in return, had given her the teasing nickname of “Busy Ella.”

  The Gardners had bought their first important painting in 1888 in Seville. It was a seventeenth-century Madonna and Child by Francisco de Zurbarán. Now, in 1894, the Gardners broke their every-other-summer routine by sailing for Europe with plans to spend more than a year, and their purpose was to buy art seriously. Learning of their arrival, Bernard Berenson, then twenty-nine, wrote a shy note to Belle wondering whether his former patroness still remembered him. The traveling fellowship to study art which Belle had helped establish had long since run out, but Berenson had decided to live more or less permanently in Italy and he was, he explained, in the process of making himself an expert on Italian Renaissance art. He was refining and perfecting techniques of art appraisal, such as examining canvases with microscopes and studying characteristics of individual brush strokes, to sift genuine Old Masters from the countless copies and forgeries that were being routinely palmed off on gullible rich Americans. Indeed, Belle Gardner remembered Berenson. Who could forget that classically beautiful face, those huge dark eyes? Berenson offered the services of his expertise to Belle. Thus a long relationship began.

  It was not, however, altogether a smooth one. Berenson was opinionated, but so was Belle. Also, now that Berenson was in the art business, Belle was never entirely sure she trusted him. He was, after all, making a living from commissions charged to customers for whom he bought. Belle was aware that Berenson was Jewish, and a Jewish reputation for alleged sharp practice was a commonplace of the time. Belle, though not a Yankee by birth, had very much become one in spirit, and her Scottish heritage made her a woman who disliked being outsmarted on a deal. As their relationship developed, Belle would regularly send friends as envoys to visit Berenson to appraise his character and assess his integrity. “Well, what did you think of him?” she would then demand. “Is he on the up-and-up?” She was usually assured that Berenson seemed a thoroughly honest man, but she was never entirely convinced. He might, she said, not actual
ly be deceitful in his dealings with her, but that did not mean he could not be deceived by others. Therefore, it was wise to keep checking on him about the authorship and provenance of the pieces of art he was recommending that she buy. In her approach to buying, she was the opposite of Eva Stotesbury, who looked on Joseph Duveen as a kind of teacher. In the case of Bernard Berenson, it was Belle who was the demanding schoolmistress and he the pupil who was required to show her that he had done his homework. With her exacting standards, of course, she was also helping to train Berenson to become what he would one day be acknowledged to be—the world’s foremost expert on Italian Renaissance art.

  For Berenson, this also meant that in Belle Gardner he had acquired a suspicious and difficult client. To his annoyance, she refused to let him be her exclusive dealer, as Eva Stotesbury let Duveen. Belle insisted on shopping from other dealers as well, which meant that Berenson was constantly competing with others for her attention and her business. Often, she would reject his recommendations, and send him scurrying off instead in search of an entirely different painting which might or might not be for sale. If the painting was unavailable, Berenson had Belle’s temper to deal with. He cajoled her with blandishments and flattery, but nothing he undertook for Belle was ever easy.