Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  Luminaries such as Gertrude Vernon Agnew would unquestionably have had her pick of painterly attendants. But no other portraitist could deliver Sargent’s tour-de-force treatment of his subject, the delicate flesh tones glimpsed through the sheer fabric of milady’s sleeves, the smoky intelligent eyes, the exquisitely skittish fingers. When a woman sat to Sargent, she knew that from the cast of her expression to the texture of her apparel she would be delivered up to the world in a specific, delicious way, joining the parade of the world’s most celebrated women.

  THE FIRST TIME Edith and Newton entered the Tite Street loft, they stepped into a wash of light that cascaded through a grille of windows stretching a full story high. The studio’s yolk-colored walls were the legacy of James A. McNeill Whistler, who inhabited the premises before Sargent, and whom the younger artist counted his friend as much as a professional colleague and mentor.

  Among the studio props were various Louis XVI bergère chairs, pillars and plinths, Chinese lacquer screens, carved gilt panels on wheels and an enormous, ancient jar on a pedestal against a wall. Sargent had positioned a Bechstein piano within striking distance of the easel. A passionate musician, the painter was known to leave the canvas when the work wasn’t proceeding well, thumping away on the instrument, sometimes drawing his sitter into an impromptu duet.

  Sargent stalked the huge space, leonine, a man in his forties, over six feet tall, with gray-blue eyes and a thick beard. He had grown stocky in recent years as he dined out with new friends of the Mayfair district—not a few of them his subjects—at the restaurants or salons or country house weekends that defined the life of Britain’s bluest bloods.

  It was impossible for Edith to ignore Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, dominating the atelier’s central wall, his most famous, and infamous, depiction of a female subject, its presence a stubborn declaration by the painter of his work’s worth. The painting’s scathing reception at the 1884 Paris Salon had made the artist resolve never again to display the work in public. He would shelter his Madame X at Tite Street for twenty years, until 1905.

  Edith and Newton first viewed the painting in the loft, but Newton had brushed up against the portrait’s subject at a ball in Paris in the mid-1880s. In his memoir, he wrote that he would never forget the sight of Madame Gautreau circumambulating the room on the arm of Jean Casimir-Perier, the president of France, nor deny the woman’s strong erotic pull. She was already an icon, even before the painting. Madame X, a friend remarked to Newton, “could not maintain her smile for more than a few minutes without cracking the enamel on her face.”

  Sargent had been known to install a string quartet in his studio and invite in London’s leading lights to watch him perform the work of his portraits. Gautreau’s nude shoulders, virtually pornographic for the time, loomed over the scene, adding to the charge visitors got from their intimacy with the darkly handsome, charismatic painter.

  For that first session in June 1897, Sargent had Edith change from one costume to another, before finally fixing on a sapphire satin ball gown. The gown worked to pick up Edith’s most striking feature, the dark lapis of her eyes, the celebrated Minturn blue.

  Newton did his best to remain unobtrusive. He brought a book. He didn’t really need to be there. But because they were newly married, he wanted to be everywhere she was. Now and again he glanced up from his reading to admire the pearly vision of his wife, elevated on the posing platform as on a stage, her swan’s throat, her red, set mouth, the brunette wings of her hair that swept back from the straight white part. Looking up at his wife on Sargent’s stage, even as she arrayed herself in décolleté and demurely tapped her fan, the husband could see the steel that lay just under the surface. Edith even posed fiercely.

  That tap-tap-tapping of the fan had become a hallmark of the sittings. Sargent had directed Edith to grasp a Japanese fan in one hand and to strike it delicately against a walnut tabletop, a gesture she had been obediently performing for these near half-dozen sittings. Tap, tap, tap.

  Laboring for hours at a stretch in front of the easel, Sargent teetered like a Barnum bear on the balls of his feet, holding his brush poised like a dart in perfect silence, then jabbing at the canvas, never failing to exclaim a self-deprecating “pish-tosh, pish-tosh” at the completion of a stroke.

  After five weeks of pish-toshes, Newton and Edith had grown friendly with the man. The three Americans had sat together in the English moonlight discussing history and theology. The Boston library murals filled Sargent’s head and spilled over to his discourse. It was interesting, of course, one of the high points of their young lives, hearing the artist hold forth on Arab religious traditions. Nonetheless, Edith and Newton hoped one day soon for the portrait to be completed, so they could depart Jubilee London and resume their life in Paris.

  Then came the afternoon Sargent set down his brush and took up his blade.

  Attired in her now familiar trailing blue gown, Edith watched as the painter reached for his palette knife and confronted his easel. She saw him stop himself and survey the portrait he had spent five full weeks coaxing into being.

  Then she looked on as, without a word, he began to scrape. The fresh paint from that afternoon came off easily, in gobs of wet cobalt and cream. Working, the painter muttered to himself, and a scowl twisted his even features.

  The tap-tap-tapping abruptly stopped. Had the great man gone mad?

  Again Sargent pulled the knife across the canvas, deeper now. Dried pigment chipped away, layer upon layer of painstakingly applied colors. He would scrape and scrape until every brush stroke was erased.

  There were a few rules Sargent had come to believe in over the years. The necessity of good, thick brushes to hold the paint, say, or the resolve never to “starve the palette” but instead to lay the pigment on abundantly so that the colors would flow from one into the next. Still, finding the form was the first law. John Singer Sargent would eradicate every attempt until he got it right.

  On this June afternoon, the painter’s exquisite model could only watch the destruction begin from her assigned perch atop the platform of raw wood to one side of the studio. Five weeks wasted.

  Edith put down the fan. Newton had risen from his customary spectator’s post, an Empire chair in front of the modeling platform. What possible explanation could there be for rendering useless all of their efforts when anyone could see that the picture was coming along so well?

  But the only explanation came in the scrape, scrape of knife against canvas. The likeness of a perfect society lady crumbled to the floor.

  Edith and Newton were unsettled, thinking that surely the whole enterprise could fail. No wedding gift, no portrait to immortalize the bride in cerulean and cadmium. But the newlyweds were not ready to give up, nor was the painter.

  A week later, the couple hustled through the summer heat of Chelsea to try to rescue the project. They crossed the studio threshold, stepping into the familiar silvery diffusion of northern light. Below the arched window, the hospital grounds glowed green. Edith headed for the trunk of clothing she had sent over after the last sitting. She held up another satin dress, then turned her eyes to Sargent.

  The painter considered the fashionable gown, its ribbons, its gauzy frills, the customary wardrobe for the women he so lushly depicted. Then he appraised his model.

  She wore street clothes, a plain white skirt and a cotton blouse. Her face was flushed from the exertion of hurrying. Her hair was mussed. She practically vibrated with energy.

  Sargent stripped the garment from her hands and tossed it aside. It did not reflect the real woman he had in front of him, the woman he had come to know over the past weeks. Nor could a formal gown possibly reveal all that was new and young and American, all that Edith Minturn represented.

  “I want to paint you just as you are,” Sargent said.

  The couple were nonplussed by the abrupt change in the great man’s direction. “We thought it wise to submit to his whim,” Newton recorded later. “Although
we had, even then, some apprehensions about what our friends at home, and especially Mister Scrymser, might not approve.”

  Just as you are. A small concession to change, perhaps, but in the hidebound traditions of portraiture and femininity, a significant one. More to the point, isn’t this what we all want to hear? Isn’t “come as you are” always a welcome invitation, a suitable answer to the question of how women (and men, too) want to be accepted by the world?

  It would be twenty-five sittings, according to Newton’s count, before Sargent finished the painting in triumph.

  THE PORTRAIT FINISHED, the English sojourn over, Edith and Newton decamped from Jubilee-maddened London and took up once again their newlywed idyll in Paris. This was Gilded Age luxury, a dream honeymoon that stretched not weeks but years. They returned to Rive Droit, to their apartment in elegant Rue Saint-Dominique, opposite the Russian embassy.

  Since their wedding, the City of Light had come through for the couple, providing them with what the phlegmatic Newton would term “among the happiest times.” The setting might have been fin de siècle Paris, and the Moulin Rouge might have been packing them in, with the great Sarah Bernhardt onstage and society ladies laughing themselves into unconsciousness at the eloquent flatulence of Le Pétomane. But in contrast to Newton’s stag days in Paris, he and Edith partook of the demimonde virtually not at all.

  They had first gone to Paris in autumn 1895, almost two years before Edith sat to Sargent. Newton had planned to study architecture privately, in several different studios. After attending the wedding of Newton’s sister Ethel to John Sherman Hoyt in Lenox, and staying with Susanna Minturn in Gramercy Park, the newlyweds sailed first class to Cherbourg. The crossing fatigued Edith and she took to bed. The cause of her malaise was never precisely identified, but this nonspecified illness would be a harbinger of her future as a frequent invalid. A French physician advised that she spend a quiet week in Cherbourg, but it was already November, and Monsieur and Madame Stokes were eager to set up housekeeping.

  Newton still had his bachelor apartment on Saint-Germaine, but it had the flaw of too many steep stairs, which a young wife might not appreciate were she to become pregnant. So, temporarily quartered in a hotel in the Rue des Saints-Pères, Edith and Newton went house hunting. The meticulous couple inspected more than one hundred apartments, searching for one that offered character, charm, enough floor space and a garden. They combed the old quarter and the Rive Gauche and found plenty of charm and foliage. But a beautiful garden couldn’t compensate for inadequate plumbing or rooms that were too small.

  Finally they wound up on the other bank of the Seine, at 30 Rue Saint-Dominique. The apartment consisted of a foyer, a salon, a library, a dining room and pantry, two bedrooms, two baths and a kitchen. The maid would bunk on the top floor of the building. From this delightful but unassuming base, Edith and Newton did not go forth and trip the light fantastic. They did not feel the necessity to sample the Paris nightlife. They nested.

  Newton also worked. When he rode his bicycle two miles every morning to the architectural firm Atelier Monclos-Chiflot, a cry went up along the way, the younger pedestrians saluting him as “Monsieur Tête d’Asperges,” Mr. Asparagus Head. Newton, prickly about his appearance, had to assure himself that the urchins were doing so with affection rather than derision.

  The Atelier Monclos-Chiflot boasted a decidedly progressive atmosphere. Two young women in the studio had the hope of designing skyscrapers. All the employees were what Stokes would later call “serious-minded,” which for his whole life would strike him as the highest virtue.

  While he went to work, Edith attended a language school to become proficient in French and Italian. “I feel that I may be quite ‘finished’ before I leave this center,” she wrote one of her sisters. She planned to throw herself into some form of philanthropic work. Newton, in the meantime, traveled to London to visit model housing developments. On one occasion, the high-minded young architect sought out Samuel Augustus Barnett, the Anglican clergyman and social reformer. Over lunch at Toynbee Hall, Newton heard the pioneer lay out the concept of university settlements, whereby wealthy, educated people would live alongside and contribute to the welfare of the poor; in Barnett’s words, “to learn as much as to teach; to receive as much as to give.”

  In those early Parisian days, Edith and Newton pursued their version of an unassuming life, dodging social invitations, sharing quiet bistro meals. For diversion, they called on Edith’s aunt Greene, a Havisham-like expatriate from the Minturn side of the family who spent her days sunk in bed, gossiping with visitors and gesturing with long kid gloves, a lace cap snugly fastened beneath her chins.

  How enthralling it was to consider their future together, shaped by a passionate idealism for social justice, art and love. During this time Edith and Newton decided they had experienced enough society balls in America to last them for quite some time, thank you very much, enough hundred-room mansions and seaside resorts so exclusive no one had heard of them. They intended to help people less fortunate than the impeccably well-heeled Stokeses and Minturns. In addition to paying calls on Tante Greene, the couple spent time with another of Edith’s aunts, Annie Gould Shaw, the widow of Robert Gould Shaw. The grand bas-relief honoring Shaw and his regiment, for the Boston Common in 1897, was just now undergoing completion by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

  Edith and Newton attended church on Sunday, strolled in the Bois de Boulogne and took tandem-bike excursions at Fontainebleau and Giverny. They made a ten-day sojourn to château country. They debated art. Impressionism fell short, in Edith’s opinion. She wrote her sister Mildred in April 1897 about a traditionalist painting that was “nice in colour and tone, and in feeling—all three of those things being strikingly absent from most of the French work at present.”

  As much as she disdained modernism in art, however, in approaching married life Edith seemed to embrace the new. Now that Edith and Newton had pledged a lifelong commitment, their relationship would be less traditional and more an amalgamation of peers. The progressive air of Paris might permeate their thinking, but in Gilded Age America, no law or legal standing endorsed her choice. It would be decades before American women could enter the voting booth. Once the couple returned home, Edith, like Susanna before her, would in legal terms be a woman whose public identity was completely subsumed by that of her husband. Edith could not officially own property, nor could she legally own any wages she earned. (Unofficially was another matter.) Though piecemeal acts had been passed in previous decades that assured women’s property and earnings rights, and despite the full-bore public fight for suffrage, Edith’s identity would for now officially be merged with Newton’s.

  Some years before, Alexis de Tocqueville had marveled at how American women accepted “the yoke,” at how they seemed to “take pride in the free relinquishment of their will.” Not Edith—within her private universe, in her bond with her husband, she reigned equally. Partly this was because they were monied. She did not have to assume the role of unpaid housemaid, as the couple’s servants would do the cooking and cleaning. And in this case, wife and husband brought their individual personal fortunes to the marriage. They were equally empowered when it came to controlling their bank accounts. That put them on par.

  In Paris, in their first delicate steps toward life as a unit, all was low-key. Newton and Edith had no practical reason to curtail their expenditures, yet they self-consciously dined out seldom, most likely a function of Edith’s thrift. When they did, they took their meals at nearby branches of the Bouillon Duval chain, the French equivalent of New York’s cafeterias.

  They made an exception for Restaurant Foyot, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. The establishment had garnered some attention as the culinary clubhouse of aristocrats in 1894, until an anarchist threw a bomb—a preserved-meat tin packed with nails—into a window at the noon hour. The only injury was sustained, as it happened, by another anarchist, the poet Taillade, who lost an eye in the explosion. Since
then the walls had been patched up and the glass replaced, and it felt safe for Newton and Edith to enjoy their riz de veau Foyot, sweetbreads, said to be among the best versions of the dish in the city.

  There was apparently a limit to how much these earnest aristocrats would, or could, scale back the trappings of privilege. For a wedding gift, Newton’s father presented Edith with a sum of money with which to purchase a strand of pearls. The couple decided not to bother visiting the jewelers of Paris in person, but instead ordered up sample necklaces from Boucheron, Tiffany and other top-tier establishments to scrutinize over a weekend. That Sunday afternoon, Edith draped her body in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of specimens and paraded like a maharani around the apartment for the amusement of her husband and a jury of friends, fellow expatriots.

  The average person might not be able to discern any difference between this lustrous rope or that one. But Newton and Edith had a background that trained them up for the task at hand, developing the requisite aesthetic discernment to incisively compare, say, the Boucheron pearls with the ones from Tiffany. While one strand might not be so well matched, perhaps it had other qualities, not apparent to the untutored eye.

  The pearls they preferred had a complex range of shades, from blush pink to sea foam, with some having the fine distinction of appearing “hammer-marked.” In any case, the newlyweds made their selection. The Boucheron won out. The necklace would pass down through the generations.

  Youthful idealism and hammer-marked pearls. The idyll stretched month after month. Eighteen ninety-five passed into ’96, then ’97. What could be better than to be in Paris and to be in love? Meanwhile, the Sargent portrait enjoyed a life of its own quite apart from theirs.

  10. The American Girl Herself

  Eight months after John Singer Sargent scrapped his first portrait of Edith Stokes, his reworked canvas made the rounds of America’s blue-chip art galleries, beginning with a venue in Manhattan, which by the end of the century was already considered the art capital of the nation. Although the painting was privately commissioned and paid for, the convention was for new work to be hung in gallery spaces around the country. Soon enough the portrait would go back to the people for whom it was commissioned, but for now it belonged to the wider world, for its examination, gratification and judgment.