The women joined a long tradition of artists studying the nude, a practice that had become increasingly important for artists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, des Beaux-Arts employed a handful of male models, most wearing beards, ever ready to pose as biblical characters. The senior-most among them wore royal livery and, like other members of the academy, lived in the Louvre. Female nude models, on the other hand, worked only in private ateliers until the mid-nineteenth century, when they began to pose at the École des Beaux-Arts, and as images of female nudes came to dominate the art scene.
To be sure, the female model’s position was precarious. “In effect, for us the sight of a nude young woman on the model table, in full daylight, is so far removed from any sensuality,” the manager at Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s studio noted carefully, “that the model understands immediately that she is dealing only with a painter, not with a man.” Interlopers were not welcome. One afternoon, as Ingres worked with his students, the model leapt down and “threw herself beneath the model stand, taking all her clothes and hiding herself as best she could,” the manager remembered. A worker making repairs outside was caught with his nose pressed against the window.
Some female models became artists themselves. The curvaceous Victorine Meurent (1844–1927), who posed nude for Édouard Manet’s most provocative works—wearing a ribbon necklace in his Olympia and even less in Le déjèuner sur l’herbe—was later recognized as a fine painter in her own right. Painter Gwen John (1876–1939) moved from England to Paris in 1904 and modeled to support her artistic career. She found that working for other female artists was easier than working for men, except for one client who left her mid-pose while she retired to another room for a quick romp with her boyfriend. John eventually took up with Rodin, becoming his lover and his model. Occasionally she posed for herself, sketching nude self-portraits in her rooms on the rue du Cherche-Midi.
The queen of bohemia in fin-de-siècle Paris, however, was the artist’s model supreme, Sarah Brown (1869–?), a favorite at the École des Beaux-Arts and at Académie Julian. “She has the virginal features of the Middle Ages,” an admirer wrote, “hair the colour of fire, and she is built like a statue.” The former circus rider also knew how to stir things up. When a student flirted with her while she posed at the Académie, she hurled paint at him and sparked a full-studio brawl. “She would desert an artist in the middle of his masterpiece and come down to the studio to pose for the students at thirty francs a week,” one writer sighed. “Gorgeously dressed, she would glide into a studio, overturn all the easels that she could reach, and then shriek with laughter over the havoc and consternation that she had created.”
She topped that by appearing as Cleopatra in a tableau vivant styled as “The Last Days of Babylon,” arranged on a parade float during the Bal des Quat’z-Arts in 1893. Her costume consisted of a few strands of pearls, several gold bracelets, some well-placed baubles, and black net stockings. She was arrested for public nudity and the uproar over her trial erupted into a full-scale riot, with enraged students laying siege to the police headquarters and rampaging through the Latin Quarter for a week. She would have had a better legal argument if she’d posed in the thick flesh-colored tights of the sort an acrobat might wear. “She only saw the artistic side of things,” a journalist reporting on the proceedings explained, “and she adds that everybody thought she had tights on.”
When laying the royal table during the Elizabethan era, those entrusted with the task left nothing to chance. Preparing the banquet hall, a pair of servants—one carrying a rod, the other the tablecloth—entered the room as if the queen herself were present. After kneeling three times with “the utmost veneration,” they spread the cloth with the rod, and then proceeded to kneel again. Sometimes, before the cloth was laid, the chief table setter kissed his hand and placed it on the center of the table, showing his sidekick where to put the damask. By William and Mary’s reign, table-setting maneuvers might begin at ten o’clock in the morning and go on until dinnertime. The setters were like priests preparing the altar. It was a solemn business freighted with symbolism. To “share the cloth” with a nobleman meant to be treated as his equal, while one might say of an unworthy man, “He and I are not of the same cloth.” It was meant literally. If an aristocrat ate at a table with his servants, for example, everyone’s plate sat on the bare tabletop except for that of the great man himself.
During the seventeenth century, the French made an art of cleverly creasing their tablecloths, pressing a latticework pattern of folds that looked like waves into the fabric. An accidental wrinkle was called a “coffin,” and the superstitious believed that if seen on the table it predicted death for one of the guests. Napkins held a similar fascination. Wealthy hosts hired professional napkin folders for big events, as on one afternoon in 1668 when English diarist Samuel Pepys came home to find his napkins sculpted into “figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty.” He was so “mightily pleased with the fellow that came to lay the cloth and fold the napkins” that he considered hiring him to teach Mrs. Pepys the trick. Napkins were coaxed into the shapes of frogs, fish, boats, chickens, peacocks, and swans. And they were supposed to be kept very clean, a difficult task as forks came into vogue very slowly, “to the saving of napkins,” the playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637) had noted. (The British navy forbade forks at the dinner table as late as 1897, as they were considered pretentious.)
Such was the case not only in Western Europe but in Constantinople, as English writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) discovered when visiting the Sultana Hafiten in the early eighteenth century. “The magnificence of her table answered very well to that of her dress,” Lady Mary wrote home to a friend—a lofty comparison, considering that the sultana’s tunic was decorated with diamond fringe and pearls as large as peas. But while the sultana’s knives were gold, studded with diamonds, “the piece of luxury that gripped my eyes was the tablecloth and napkins,” Lady Mary noted. They were of the lightest silk and each was finely embroidered with silk-and-gold flowers. “It was with the utmost regret that I made use of these costly napkins,” she added. “You may be sure that they were entirely spoiled before dinner was over.”
THE URGE TO TRAVEL STRIKES AT THE END OF MARCH, when early pilgrims and modern American teenagers alike have flocked to far-flung destinations. Beginning as early as 326 CE, Christian women like Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, set out as pilgrims, traveling from Rome to Jerusalem. For centuries afterward aristocrats and saints followed in a steady stream, guidebooks in hand. It was a long haul. Walking across Europe, the average traveler covered twelve miles a day, or, riding a mule, covered twenty. Once the intrepid souls arrived in Venice, they bargained their way onto ships, and were packed belowdecks in cramped quarters that were “enclosed and exceedingly hot, and full of various foul vapors,” a fifteenth-century woman remembered. The journey across the sea took a month, and it took most European visitors more than a year to make the trip to the Holy Land.
Besides the physical challenges, pilgrims faced a whole host of temptations en route. As the fourth-century mystic Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, the voyage to Palestine encouraged “moral mischief.” “Change of place does not effect any drawing nearer to God,” he argued, suggesting everyone simply stay home. “What advantage, moreover, is reaped by him who reaches those celebrated spots themselves?” he demanded. Yet the urge to visit new lands and holy sites persisted. According to Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, firsthand experience was invaluable. Writing at the end of the fourth century, he explained that seeing is believing. “Others merely hear, but we see and touch.”
Across Christendom in the Middle Ages, prospective pilgrims needed permission from their bishops before setting out, in order to prove that they hadn’t merely succumbed to wanderlust, and curiosity about anything beyond holy relics and religious sites was suspect. Curiosity itself, in fact, was a problem with historical precedent. The ancient Greeks con
demned inquisitiveness, as it led to gossip. Christian thinkers argued that too much interest in this world was a distraction from reaching the next. Saint Augustine (354–430) made a similar complaint, claiming that curiosity was “desire—cloaked under the name of knowledge and science—not for fleshly enjoyment, but for gaining personal experience through the flesh.” He cast a wide net, condemning someone, for instance, who spent too long watching lizards or wondering at a spiderweb, or anyone who listened to silly stories, watched sports, played games, or went to the theater. Santo Brasca, a fifteenth-century Italian pilgrim to Jerusalem, warned would-be pilgrims that “a man should undertake this voyage solely with the intention of visiting, contemplating and adoring the most Holy Mysteries … and not with the intention of seeing the world, or from ambition, or to be able to say ‘I have been there’ or ‘I have seen that.’ ” Eve was curious, after all, and we all know how that turned out.
For an ethically sensitive traveler like the great Italian scholar and poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374), Augustine’s edict posed a sticky problem. Petrarch was naturally curious. In the spring of 1336, he famously climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux in Provence, compelled by “nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height.” One of the manuscripts in his possession during that romp was Saint Augustine’s Confessions. While making the hike, Petrarch happened to open to a page where Saint Augustine railed against men who “go out to admire the mountains’ peaks, giant waves in the sea, the broad courses of rivers, the vast sweep of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars—and they leave themselves behind!” Caught in the act, Petrarch trekked back down the mountain in silence, chastened.
Only in the seventeenth century was the quality of curiosity finally redeemed, celebrated as the “singular passion” that separates humans from animals, as English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued. For Hobbes and his Enlightenment friends, curiosity offered deep gratification. It was “a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge,” Hobbes wrote, “exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal Pleasure.”
In 1928, the young Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) left Ireland for Paris, where he landed work as an English tutor at the École Normale and, through friends, was invited to dine with the famed avant-garde Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941). That night, Beckett wore a tight suit and came home so late he had to climb over the École fence to get to his rooms. It was the beginning of an unusual, and important, friendship. Joyce, Beckett’s senior by twenty-four years, was a formidable figure, dressed in his fin-de-siècle smoking jackets and eccentric cravats, sometimes sporting an eye patch, and often lounging with a cigarette dangling loosely and dangerously from his fingertips. Beckett imitated the master, sitting just like Joyce, with one leg crossed and wound around the other, posing with his cigarette just so, and even sporting the same sort of pointy-toed patent leather shoes that Joyce wore, though they pinched his feet.
As one of Joyce’s friends and followers, Beckett ran errands for Joyce, whose eyesight was failing. (Joyce’s wife, Nora, called it doing “little jobs for Jimmy.”) The apprenticeship was, in some ways, a means of paying it forward. As a young man, Joyce had met the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), who lent a hand with his literary start. Joyce, in turn, helped Beckett, introducing him to powerful people on the Paris literary scene and recommending him for magazine assignments. They shared a slightly morbid, oddball sense of humor. Beckett remembered a joke that Joyce used to tell about a man eating a bowl of soup in a hotel dining room: “Looks like rain, sir,” the waiter says, peering out of the window. The man replies, “Tastes like it too.”
Evenings chez Joyce could get rowdy. Joyce sat at the piano and sang Irish ballads while both writers put back the drinks. Yet, often enough, the two were quiet in each other’s company, comfortably sharing long stretches of silence. “Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce,” a friend said. “They engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself.” Silence seemed to deepen their friendship. While Joyce remained on formal terms with most in his circle, invariably using “Miss” or “Mister” in addressing them, Beckett was an exception. “I was very flattered when Joyce dropped the ‘Mister,’ ” Beckett remembered. “The nearest you would get to a friendly name was to drop the ‘Mister.’ I was never ‘Sam.’ I was always ‘Beckett’ at the best.”
It’s easy to imagine the two writers strolling along Paris’s Quai de Branly overlooking the Seine, as they often did on Sunday mornings. When they reached the Île des Cynges, a sliver of a tree-lined island, they continued along without speaking. Anytime Joyce called to invite Beckett for a walk, Beckett hustled over, “honored by the demand, which it was a privilege to fulfill.” With his eyesight fading, Joyce didn’t like to go out walking alone. Beckett gingerly took him by the elbow whenever they crossed the street. “There wasn’t a lot of conversation between us,” Beckett said. “I was a young man, very devoted to him, and he liked me. And he used to call on me if he needed something. For instance, someone to walk with him.”
Fashionable women during the mid-nineteenth century ventured into the slums of London or Paris once a week, usually between nine and noon, to visit the poor. In the days before social welfare, private philanthropy kept the urban poor afloat, and an overwhelming number of ladies’ societies formed to address the issue, their membership determined to make improvements. London’s parishes were divided into districts, with visitors assigned to each, usually with one lady responsible for visiting twenty to forty families, delivering blankets, food, coal tickets, and religious tracts door-to-door.
The tradition was long-lived in Europe. “Often, when they had no more agreeable occupation at hand, the Misses Murray would amuse themselves with visiting the poor cottagers on their father’s estate,” Emily Brontë wrote in Wuthering Heights (1847), “to receive their flattering homage, or to hear the old stories or gossiping news of the garrulous old women; or, perhaps, to enjoy the purer pleasure of making the poor people happy with their cheering presence and their occasional gifts, so easily bestowed, so thankfully received.” Boredom drove them to kindness. For a lady of standing, the only other irreproachable undertaking outside the home was teaching Sunday school. Visiting had advantages over simply writing a check.
It broke “the langour and monotony of life; opening those fountains of benevolent sensibility, which unbroken prosperity is so liable to dry up,” read one etiquette guide. Consequently, visiting the poor became a “fashion and a rage,” according to English writer Lucy Aikin (1781–1864). “A positive demand for misery was created by the incessant eagerness to relieve it.” It could be an awkward exchange. In their exuberance, or ignorance, ladies often barged into tenement houses with only the slightest perfunctory knock, imagining their hosts to be so bowled over with gratitude as to not mind the intrusion. “In order to acquaint ourselves with the circumstances of these persons, no formal introduction will commonly be found necessary,” another etiquette writer suggested. Some guides reminded visitors to dress with utmost simplicity, with “the absence of anything that might remind those you go visit of the advantages denied them,” as one cautioned. On the other hand, Jane Ellice Hopkins (1836–1904), a volunteer who once interceded between a drunken man and his wife by banging spoons on a tea tray, recommended dressing in silk, as one would in one’s own drawing room, to demonstrate respect for one’s hosts.
No matter what their motivations, however, wealthy visitors developed sympathy for circumstances they might not otherwise have understood. And many learned to become not only benefactors to those they met visiting, but also friends, dissolving some of the social distance between them, but also countering the growing geographical divide. “It is our withdrawal from the less pleasant neighbourhood to build for ourselves substantial villas with pleasant gardens
, which has left these tracts what they are,” wrote social reformer Octavia Hill (1838–1912). By their mere presence, she argued, visiting ladies could change the status quo. “See then that you do not put your lives so far from those great companies of the poor which stretch for acres in the south and east of London,” she wrote, “that you fail to hear each other speak.”
Standing on a New York pier, having just arrived from England in 1882, and wearing a fur-trimmed coat and patent-leather shoes, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) couldn’t be missed. His cravat was sky blue. His hair hung in dark waves to his shoulders. And “his shirt might be termed ultra-Byronic,” a reporter noted, “or perhaps–décolleté.” Wilde, then twenty-eight, a poet and a self-described aesthete, was on a mission to promote the Aesthetic Movement then popular in England. Though he’d planned to stay in America only for several weeks, his cross-continental tour stretched on for more than a year, during which the press followed his every move, noting his likes, dislikes, impressions, and opinions, his “irregular and protruding teeth,” his velvet knee breeches, and his every accessory, including the occasional heliotrope boutonniere.
On the pier that morning, he detailed his creed for the “crowd of admirers who surrounded him.” “Aestheticism is an attempt to color the commonplace,” Wilde proclaimed, “to make beauty stand out wherever it is.” A reporter asked him to describe, for instance, the beauty of a grain elevator over on the other side of the river, but Wilde said he was too nearsighted to see it and that he’d have to have a look some other time. Wilde and the tenacious reporters in his wake developed a love/hate relationship over the coming months. The celebrity interview was a recent American invention and didn’t yet exist in England, but Wilde was quick to learn the ropes. “Interviewers are a product of American civilization, whose acquaintance I am making with tolerable speed,” he told The Boston Globe several weeks later. “You gentlemen have fairly monopolized me ever since I saw Sandy Hook. In New York there were about a hundred a day.… But then,” he added, “I am always glad to see you.” He liked to give interviewers a real show, flinging himself across the sofa and playing the languid poet, providing reams of material. “I love flowers, sir, as every human being should love them,” he told one newspaperman. “I enjoy their perfume and admire their beauty.” He didn’t always appreciate the resulting articles, however, and claimed that only the English newspapers still held “an old-fashioned regard for truth.” Yet, with so much on his agenda, who could fret over bad press? “Our duty is to admire and worship the beautiful and the good,” Wilde said. “Everything else, including the annoyances, is mere failures, simply shadows.”
All the Time in the World Page 4
