The corporeal Edith might remain private and elusive, but her shadow self went public in a New York City that was fast becoming the most dynamic metropolis on the planet. Manhattan ruptured just then like a chrysalis. The city’s main function had long been its own transformation, from an outpost of empire to a commercial beehive to a cultural matrix, but the last years of the nineteenth century took the tendency to an extreme.
Sargent’s huge canvas debuted on March 17, 1898, at the annual exhibition of the prestigious Society of American Artists, then celebrating its twentieth year in existence. The Society Annual marked the beginning of the spring cultural season. In ritualized pilgrimage, art enthusiasts gathered at the American Fine Arts galleries on West 57th Street for a presentation of state-of-the-art art. It was the kind of gathering that people of Stokes and Minturn means might attend. The Society Annual acted as the Salon of America.
Hailed as the new cultural mecca, 57th Street itself was an upper-class enclave that had only recently left behind its reputation as a suburban outpost. Still unpaved, the street was “one of the broadest and finest in New York,” according to a profile of the city published in 1899, “almost uniform in the high class of its dwellings from Ninth Avenue to First Avenue.”
Brownstones predominated, of the type Henry James would lambast for their “surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper” but which offered the roomy quarters that New York’s affluent citizenry preferred. By 1898, most of the chinks between the sandpaper façades of 57th Street had been filled by newfangled “high-rise” apartment buildings, vaulting skyward for all of eleven stories. They first appeared on the neighborhood landscape in 1881, made possible by the advent of steel-frame construction and the electric elevator: the six-story Vancorlear, the seven-story Windemere, the eleven-story Osborne. Blocks north, the majestic Navarro posted six adjoining towers, with views that soared over the treetops of Central Park as far as the Croton Reservoir. A great view alone might not be sufficient to seduce reluctant Manhattanites into renting rather than owning their lodgings, so landlords threw in amenities such as refrigerators and free storage for the trendy bicycle. The once sleepy, comfortably remote neighborhood grew increasingly fabulous.
The merely fabulous intersected the even more fabulous at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. Fifth had come far from the “inaccessible wilderness” that Edith Wharton remembered from youthful visits to her aunt’s white stone mansion at the corner of 57th, when the area was dominated by “the hoardings, the quarries, the one-story saloons, the wooden greenhouses in ragged gardens, the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene.”
By 1898, a short quarter century afterward, Fifth Avenue presented an unbroken mile and a half of mansions, from 47th Street through the 70s, with a welter of materials and styles, a welter of polished marble, dramatic gables and steep-hipped roofs, punctuated by balustrades and moats and massive chimney stacks. Whether architects hewed to the gleaming white symmetries of the Beaux-Arts or the swagger of the Moorish fortress, the storybook crenelations of Bavaria or the period’s beloved French Renaissance design idiom, their creations lorded it over the sober-faced brownstones of the nearby cross streets.
In 1897, the city laid a coat of glittering asphalt over the washboard of Belgian paving blocks on Fifth, thus creating a novel, comfortable and noiseless surface for carriages. The thoroughfare was now “the parade ground of the pleasure driver,” as Munsey’s Magazine phrased it in June 1898. Comfortable stables were customary accoutrements of the fine houses in the neighborhood. By one estimate, between eight and ten thousand horses a day passed through Central Park. Many of the four-in-hands pulled out of the park drives onto Fifth, in order to test the new pavement on the avenue, with its rumble-proof, smooth-shaven finish.
Two blocks west of Fifth Avenue on 57th, the Fine Arts Building borrowed features from the faddish French Renaissance style, if on a smaller scale than the extravaganzas of the millionaires next door. Built in 1892, the structure came across as a knockoff of a sixteenth-century hunting lodge nestled in the far-off forests of Fontainebleau. The place was born with a pedigree. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who bested thirty other architects for the assignment, had already contributed several of New York’s more striking behemoths, notably the grand, turreted Dakota, the city’s first luxury apartment house.
The Fine Arts Building might have possessed less glitz than the Dakota, but it had style in abundance. High above the street entrance, the rubrics PAINTING, ARCHITECTURE, and SCULPTURE had been incised in foot-high Gothic letters across the attic of the Tennessee limestone façade, beneath an overhang that shaded the fifth-floor studio windows. The customary cherubim embellishments stared out from above each window, amid chunky garlands of foliage. The words, the decoration and the sheer solidity of the finished product bespoke a certain timelessness. Hardenbergh paid scrupulous attention to every interior detail as well, down to the intricate Roman-style mosaic of the entrance atrium floor and brass doorknobs engraved with AFAS, for the American Fine Arts Society.
“It is chaste,” commended Harper’s Weekly upon the building’s completion, “and thoroughly artistic.”
Since the faux hunting lodge opened its doors in 1892, visitors to West 57th Street couldn’t help but notice that the neighborhood had distinctly trended to the arts. Andrew Carnegie had applied his largesse to creating a concert hall with the best acoustics in New York City, with Guastavino vaulting and fortified with concrete and masonry. Soon an Italian Renaissance façade of terracotta brick materialized at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street. On opening night, May 5, 1891, carriages lined up for a quarter mile in front of the music hall to hear the New York Music Society’s orchestra performing a Marche Solonelle under the direction of its composer, the international sensation Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The cultural profile of the neighborhood had also received a boost with the construction of two apartment houses designated for artists, one called the Rembrandt and the other the Sherwood, where bohemians such as Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey rendered their imposing Hudson River landscapes. When she wasn’t sulking in front of Sargent’s easel, the celebrated dancer Carmencita had been known to perform in a studio at the Sherwood.
From the litter of scaffolding in the side streets to the thunder of explosives blasting bedrock for foundations to the deep shadows cast by the tall new apartment buildings, the sense of rampant progress was palpable. At the southeastern lip of Central Park, at 59th Street, blocks away from the Fine Arts Building, a monument had gone up to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of America. Sculpted from Carrara marble, the glowering incarnation of Columbus balanced atop a thirty-foot column, surveying the spacious plaza below, where horse-drawn vehicles coursed around a new traffic circle (the automobile had been introduced at a trade show in 1897 but would not add to the hubbub for a few years yet).
The year 1898 would forever be known as New York’s ultimate transforming moment. The city reinvented itself, becoming Greater New York, a political process whereby Manhattan consolidated itself with Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. On New Year’s Eve, the populace celebrated the merger with fireworks, floats, field guns and marching bands. With a population of three million, New York was now larger than Paris, and gaining on London.
Into this maelstrom of progress, commerce and art floated that golden flake from the brush of a great artist, to assume its place in front of querulous critics, the admiring public and Edith and Newton’s social familiars. Edith Minturn Stokes would have a second, much grander debut than any debutante ball could ever afford her.
“THERE IS A lull just at present in art novelties,” judged the culture critic for the New York Evening Post a week after the Society of American Artists opened the doors of its annual exhibition. “Everywhere there is a tendency toward conservatism.”
Conservatism, at that time, was exactly the state of affairs that would gratify most Manhattan culture mavens. Art enthusi
asts typically attended exhibitions not to thrill to the shock of the new but to find art that would fit right in to their overstuffed and glacially staid living rooms. Convention-bucking surprises were rare, and unwelcome. (At the World’s Columbian Exposition, with its roomfuls of international works of art, The Kiss by Rodin—then the most famous artist in the world—so unsettled fairgoers that organizers determined they must sequester the sculpture in a private room.)
Perhaps because the world around them was changing so much, what the public valued more than novelty was a sense of ambience. The new French painters made few inroads in the United States. Some bolder collectors picked up paintings by Seurat and Degas in the 1880s, and Monet’s kaleidoscopic brush strokes impressed viewers at Boston’s St. Botolph Club in 1892, but these were isolated instances.
That is not to say that American art enthusiasts lacked the Francophile impulse. They loved the classical, conservative, allegorical, literal work of the French Academy. Every Fifth Avenue mansion dweller sought a salon dressed up in Meissonier, Gérôme, Bouguereau. But the breakthroughs of the French impressionists left them cold. The prevailing American view could be summed up in the observation of one critic around the time of the 1898 Society of American Artists show: the new French painters, he wrote, “appear to have declared war on beauty.”
Some American artists flouted tradition. Winslow Homer, for example, produced dreamy semi-abstractions that borrowed expertly from current trends. Thomas Eakins captured the new spirit of the country in his unflinching paintings of nearly nude wrestlers with perfectly rendered, realistic sunburns. William Merritt Chase shocked the staid and the timid with his bravura brushwork. Other American painters had also grown a bit looser in their technique, their brushstrokes a little more ragged, their palettes lighter. But the majority of work on display in New York that year would not differ greatly from canvases that had been shown in any decade of the past century.
During the three weeks of the Society Annual, patrons strolled the crimson carpets of the Fine Arts Building, winding around the splashing fountains. A multitude of incandescent chandeliers and an enormous prism skylight illumined the double-height galleries. Reclining on ornate benches strewn throughout, visitors could make the social scene, and perhaps coincidentally take stock of the works on the walls. Four galleries, totaling four thousand square feet, were set off by walls described by one rapt Harper’s Weekly writer as a lovely “shade of greenish fawn.”
The youngest grandson of “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Washington Vanderbilt II, was just thirty when he handed the Fine Arts Society $100,000 to fund the gallery that bore his name. Sargent captured the young scion’s artsy eccentricity in a portrait that focused attention on Vanderbilt II’s intense, liquid eyes and sinewy poetic hands. The Vanderbilt Gallery, commented the New York Times, was “one of the most suitable and magnificent in this city for the purpose of exhibitions and the presentation of art in its many forms.”
When the gallery was furnished for shows of the Society of American Artists, the red carpets and walls of greenish fawn might see a dramatic transformation. Curators stocked the place with backdrops of full-grown date palms, old tapestries, casts of well-known statues, a stone frieze of heroic figures and other enhancements to the lavishly traditional setting.
The Society of American Artists might have refined, conservative quarters, but it considered itself progressive in outlook. For twenty years, the group had attempted to uphold the standard it set for itself when it broke off from the National Academy of Design, which had grown less adventurous with every passing year. The National Academy occupied a handsome if slightly over-the-top headquarters at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, in the heart of the Ladies’ Mile shopping district. The edifice aped the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Every spring, the National Academy’s fellows installed shows that rivaled the Society’s for attendance. It had become the custom to schedule the annual offerings of the Academy and the Society during the same span of weeks.
In its announced opposition to the Academy, the Society energetically declared its openness to showing new work. Leading magazine and newspaper reviewers responded by rejecting any less-than-traditional works the Society exhibited, and used a scathing tone when describing riskier paintings: works were “sloppy,” “immature,” “ill-considered,” “brainless” or out-and-out “bad.” They were even, scolded one newspaper, “at times slightly impertinent.” One writer critiqued the entire 1895 exhibition for being too “French”; that is, for devoting too much wall space to the “bizarre achievements of the half-baked Impressionists.”
Conservative or progressive, French or American, art had by the end of the century become more accessible to all. In 1880 the Metropolitan Museum of Art relocated to a red-brick Victorian Gothic building at the edge of Central Park, on the site of a meadow that the city had formerly fenced in for use as a deer park.
The museum’s new building was a bit classier than its previous venues. The museum had first opened on the top floor of a lower Fifth Avenue dancing academy, with a skylight punched in to illuminate the picture gallery. It then moved to a provisional space in a townhouse on West 14th Street. As people clamored for entrance, the Metropolitan was forced to open on Sundays, to give the workingman exposure to high art.
When patrons entered the Vanderbilt Gallery, in the Fine Arts Building, that opening-day Saturday in March 1898, they saw an assortment of history paintings, the grandly titled, hyperrealistic portrayals of myth or history that had persisted in popularity for most of the century. Many other pictures had been imbued with the long-standing classical French idiom of firm outlines, smooth finishes and controlled brushwork, the very techniques the Manets and Monets of the Continent had long since abandoned.
Landscapes took up almost as much space as story paintings. A number of artists attempted to evoke moonlight, either splashed across walls or illuminating stretches of lonely road or bogs (the bog depiction won a prize of $300). With Night and the Waning Day, George Randolph Barse set himself ever so slightly apart from the traditional by applying his Parisian training to a symbolic representation of a man and woman—floating “as softly as swan’s down,” in the words of the Harper’s critic. In the main, the landscapes, genre paintings and historical treatments in painterly styles were technically accomplished. They were also virtually indistinguishable from canvases displayed in America at any time during the past half century.
The most radical of the canvases on display belonged to Whistler, the London-based painter, dandy and wit (and former Tite Street resident), who had earned the admiration of Americans despite a body of work that was clearly linked to the reviled French modernists. For forty years Americans had traced his progress, from the shocking White Girl of 1862 to the delicate tonalism of his current seascapes and nocturnes. Perhaps it was due to the realism that underlay his smoke and mists, or simply because the works he showed were unquestionably ravishing, but Whistler now found himself widely saluted by Americans as a genius, even though others who used some of his methods received nothing but withering scorn from critics and the public alike.
Whistler’s canvases were the finest of the show, the critics and the public agreed. They were not the only critical darlings, but aside from the Whistlers, there seemed little in the Society of American Artists’s twentieth-anniversary exhibition to acclaim, little to protest, little to stimulate comment, aside from the Annual’s welcome predictability.
Which rendered the reaction to the massive Sargent portrait, centrally displayed in the Vanderbilt Gallery, all the more exceptional.
FROM THE START, most periodical reviews singled out John Singer Sargent’s monumental painting for attack. Sargent was too free with the conventions of portraiture, ran the customary thinking. The head of Edith Stokes “resemble[d] a winter apple, without any idea of correct artistic proportion,” wrote the New York Times critic. According to Harper’s, the problem could be traced back to Sargent’s decision to indulge in portraitur
e at all, since it was, after all, “a minor branch of art.”
His detractors thought Sargent guilty of utter nonsense, flattening the space of the painting, changing up the perspective, fusing a velvety abstract background with a solid figure. In this instance, his painterly approach matched his taste for the unconventional, and the style didn’t go down well with his critics. The portraitist’s presentation of perspective offended traditionalists. If the canvas were a window, its subject would be pressed up close to the glass. Contemporary convention dictated a more acceptably distant perspective, with the subject taking her place as part of a naturalistic tableau.
The canvas appeared unfinished-looking, raw, a clear case of the dreaded “Frenchifying.” Perhaps, suggested reviewers for the International Studio and the Times, Sargent’s technique was just too clever for its own good. Art Amateur: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Art in the Household harrumphed that there was “nothing artistic about it but the handling,” and concluded that the portrait was “not necessarily the best work that will best catch the eye across these galleries.”
Fellow artists mocked the picture with equal fervor. A group of Art Students League painters had formed a coalition that called itself the Fakirs (a young Georgia O’Keeffe was among them). The Fakirs staged shows that took their elders to task, satirizing work that they thought was wrongheaded, badly executed or just plain ridiculous. The group’s activities were, according to the Century, “the great art students’ frolic of the year.”
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