Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  The Fakirs’ presentation took place in a separate part of the Fine Arts Building, to coincide with the Society Annual. This season, the student parodies of “masterpieces” featured no less than thirteen versions of the Sargent portrait. One caricature, taking the first prize of $25, rendered Sargent’s Edith cunningly on a convex sheet of tin. Another effort lampooned her as a dressmaker’s dummy.

  Then something strange happened. As the painting wended its way to other exhibitions around the country, the initial resistance transformed into a different kind of appraisal, a positive one. It would go first to a Carnegie Institute show in Pittsburgh, then in 1899 to the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, then to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in 1901.

  By the time Edith’s portrait reached Philadelphia, it had assumed the status of a cultural phenomenon. The western wall of Gallery F, the biggest space at the Academy of the Fine Arts, had been established as the wall of honor for exhibitors, and now it was dominated by the Sargent, “one of his best-known” portraits, according to the Century’s review of the show.

  By the end of its debut tour, in 1901, the writer for International Studio called the portrait “brilliant,” a “tour de force,” and praised the “wholesome fragrance that such an apparition produces.” By 1904, the writer of the omnibus Painters Since Leonardo would deem Edith’s portrait Sargent’s “most important picture.”

  THE EMBRACE OF the picture was a double take that could only be explained by the unique historical moment of the painting’s creation. Just as viewers took in Sargent’s most daring work to date, isolated stirrings of interest in women’s equality took on the resonance of a profound, society-wide movement. It would lead, in the years to come, to the revolution of national female suffrage, and to a perhaps more revolutionary phenomenon—a change in the ideal for American women that would replace elegant fragility with strength and athleticism.

  The iconic female, in other words, had risen off the fainting couch to fiercely confront her new reality, bringing to bear some version of Edith’s unabashed energy. This was the second time the same person had been cast in the role of the symbolic American woman: on this occasion Edith wore a shirtwaist, where previously she had been garbed in gold. In both cases, she was both literally and figuratively larger than life.

  In Newton’s memory, Edith Stokes sat to John Singer Sargent fully twenty-five times, including the poses in the jettisoned blue dress and nine attempts to execute the perfect image of her perfect face. A tremendous number of posings. Somehow, amid all the distractions, the false start and the repeated sittings, the portrayal kept its freshness. Edith stands at full height against a generalized background of tarnished silver. Her clothes and her posture are what many Americans of her day still thought of as shockingly mannish. A tailored jacket of dark serge, its shoulders, padded and broad as a linebacker’s, cloaks her singularly plain gray shirtwaist. In her right hand she carries a straw boater, the hat favored by 1890s male dandies. Her strong, angular left hand appears at her narrow waist. Her left elbow she holds cocked.

  Out of the dozens of youthful heiresses upon whose countenances Sargent bestowed permanence, there was not another whose demeanor departed so radically from the standard feminine ideal. The accepted female type in classical painting was the sugary, dimpled nude, pressed into allegorical use as nymph or mermaid, standing in for the dawn, perhaps, or representing the evening star. This was the kind of painting designed to appeal to nineteenth-century American art collectors. These were the two-dimensional women found on canvases decorating every well-to-do parlor wall.

  But with Edith-by-Sargent suddenly came a new avatar: stripped of her chiffon, matching frankly masculine dress and demeanor with a face that was flushed, delicate and disconcertingly pretty.

  Yet the portrait drew sharply back from a simple exercise in androgyny. The first element a viewer would notice was the zinc-white flare of Edith’s skirt, sweeping like a massive Greek column from her leather-cinched waist to the floor. Yards of spotless cotton pique flowed to the bottom of the canvas.

  The work nearly became a portrait of a skirt as much as of a woman. Sargent had been so consumed with getting the skirt’s proportions right he had begged the architect Newton to help him capture its “mysteries of perspective.” With the skirt’s preeminence juxtaposed against the macho trappings of jacket and hat, the painting hinted at a changing style of female agency with which Americans of the Gilded Age were just beginning to grapple.

  Fashion was not the only painterly hint that the traditional nineteenth-century dynamic between the sexes had begun to erode. Standing tall at frame front, the beautifully fierce Edith literally overshadows a second likeness, one Sargent decided would give his portrait a useful visual foil. This time, the painter chose not an ornamental fan or marble-topped table but a human being: the model’s husband.

  Sargent originally intended to place a Great Dane by Edith’s side, preferably one with a brindled coat, then a fashionable breed. The animal would act as a likely homage to a seventeenth-century painting by Anthony van Dyck that had recently entered the collection of the Metropolitan. In van Dyck’s work, a golden-haired, arrogant James Stuart, Duke of Richmond, strokes the head of a waist-high, long-bodied greyhound, which stares up at him with adulatory eyes.

  But the required large-breed dog a friend of Sargent’s had promised to loan him never materialized. Conveniently, a substitute happened to be close at hand. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, the long-suffering husband, constantly present during Edith’s sittings anyway, stood ready and willing, if not to grovel like a canine, then at least to obey Sargent’s instructions diligently. Bemused by the development, and wanting his lovely wife’s painting to be all that Sargent said it could be, Newton took his place on the posing platform.

  So Edith’s picture became a double portrait. In the finished composition, she glows under the pewter wash of studio light, smiling forthrightly, seemingly delighted to be rid of her gown and fan. To her side, in heavy shadow, stands her accoutrement of a spouse, a casual fop in his cream-colored summer flannels. Newton crosses his arms, radiating remoteness, and has a countenance as gloomy as Edith’s is open and engaged, with features half hidden by a full dark beard and mustache. So different are they in affect that husband and wife appear linked mainly through the black cravat each one wears, encircling identical high, stiff collars.

  Then comes the bright straw boater Edith holds in her right hand, just where the missing Great Dane’s head would have been, directly in front of Newton’s groin. The gesture could be interpreted—though never, in polite Victorian circles, articulated—as a wife’s obscuring if not downright obliterating her husband’s manliness.

  The drama of the wife’s assertive boater and the husband’s retiring hips played out larger than life on the greenish walls of the Vanderbilt Gallery. Because the painting was itself so big—at a height of seven feet, even monumental—the two figures were elongated almost to the point of absurdity, covering nearly the entire height of the canvas. Sargent had completed other portraits of similarly grand proportions, and the Stokes painting’s dimensions exactly matched those of the intimidating Madame X. But as oversized as this portrait was, it felt somehow intimate, more immediate and personal than the artist’s other likenesses. That skirt worked a mesmerizing effect, expanding into a whirlwind of white under the gentle natural light of the Vanderbilt Gallery’s prism skylight.

  The average Gilded Age viewer would undoubtedly have questions. Who was this person with the big skirt and the boater and the . . . attitude? What about that dark, intense gentleman hovering close at her right shoulder, the one wearing a hat on his hips? Even the people who knew the couple might wonder: What was the real story here? Who were the couple in the portrait?

  NONE OF THE effects that might prompt such questions were accidental or casually conceived. Sargent’s technical virtuosity was legendary, and it included conveying the social context as w
ell as the corporeal essence of a subject. In the words of one biographer, Sargent was “a master of likenesses, capable of giving a face any expression he pleased.” He staged each portrait deliberately, with the precision of a theatrical set piece.

  A decade before capturing the rich white monochrome of Edith’s skirt, the painter created a work that demonstrated his exacting ways. Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (the title was lifted from the lyrics of a popular song) was the first of Sargent’s paintings to win over Britishers after the artist’s post–Madame X retreat from Paris. It would seem a simple depiction of two girls holding Japanese lanterns in a twilit summer garden, captured using the plein air techniques taught by the impressionists.

  But the history of the painting’s evolution suggests it came about rather less naturally. Sargent did not sit patiently in place with his easel to record his impressions of the scene. He wielded his brush only for that brief interval each day when he considered the light precisely apropos (sandwiching, it was said, this half hour of work in between avid sets of tennis). The garden itself was synthetic. Its masses of roses had been trucked in from an outlying nursery and were arranged for each sitting to create the proper aura of profusion. Sargent sometimes commanded his assistants to tie artificial blooms to withered stems in order to maintain the beautiful illusion. In the painting, Sargent had a story to tell, as he did in the Stokes double portrait.

  Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes featured another unmissable detail that, like the skirt and the boater, reflected the calculations of the painter. A large diamond glinted on Edith’s tensile left hand, square in the painting’s center. By emphasizing such an ornament, Sargent left little doubt about the bond between this man and this woman. Newton later described how the artist labored over Edith’s engagement ring as he did nothing else in the picture. He recalled of the artist: “He was particularly well satisfied with the ‘spiral’ stroke with which he produced the diamond in Edith’s engagement ring, and cautioned me, if the picture were ever varnished, to be sure that the protruding wisp of paint was not injured.”

  Wisp or no wisp, Sargent’s composition clearly offered a new female paradigm, engineered by the artist and inspired by the character of its subject. One critic described the universality of the young woman in the portrait, “who stands there smiling at her audience with all the confidence of American assurance. It is more than an individual portrait. It is ‘The American Girl’ herself.”

  THE AMERICAN GIRL had another, more political incarnation. Edith seemed the very embodiment of “the New Woman,” a phrase coined in 1894 by the writer Sarah Grand. In the last years of the century the expression was on everybody’s lips.

  Who was the New Woman? writers wondered. Should the New Woman be condemned? Congratulated?

  The idea represented a locus of sorts, bringing together conflicting passions over female modernity and liberation with hot-button developments such as bloomers and bicycles. The word “feminism,” imported from France by way of England, would not come into use in America until 1906. But by the 1890s the concept of the emancipated woman was already in full flower.

  “Here she comes,” crowed Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a fiction writer who stood in the first rank of feminists, “out of prison and off the pedestal, chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”

  After the Civil War, a booming economy, the continued transformations of the steam-powered industrial revolution, advances in transportation and the recent decimation in battle of the male population worked in concert to propel women into the world of work. Many became grammar school teachers, clothing workers or shopgirls. But a few women went further, entering the practice of law, writing for the newspapers or even holding political office.

  The prevailing scientific theory held that book-learning would draw women’s limited energy supply from their uteruses to their brains, diminishing their fertility and leading to the decline of society as a whole. A few pioneers hazarded forth anyway. New legislation, pioneered by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, secured for women the right to hold property and to retain their job earnings. A wealthy brewer founded the first women’s college, Vassar, in 1861 to give female students access to such disciplines as mathematics, chemistry and astronomy.

  An essayist for the New Republic would extol the brave new creatures emerging from the chrysalis of higher education: “They are of course all self-supporting and independent, and they enjoy the adventures of life; the full, reliant, audacious way in which they go about makes you wonder if the new woman isn’t to be a very splendid sort of person.”

  Not everyone fell under the New Woman’s spell. In his best-selling Theory of the Leisure Class, the economist Thorstein Veblen protested that women’s desire for a “self-directing, self-centered life” was nothing less than “a menace to [the] social order.” The Reverend Charles Parkhurst took a similarly broad approach: in 1895 he cautioned Ladies’ Home Journal readers against a condition he called “andromania”—the “passionate aping of everything that is mannish.” Not only were mannish women indecent, but in the eyes of the contemporary medical establishment, they were decadent and probably lesbian.

  Images of the New Woman shocked the tradition-bound Victorians. They were fond of passive, nonthreatening females who were the stock in trade of the classical salon. Artists such as Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase depicted women seated unchaperoned on park benches, toughing it out on hiking trails in the mountains, sitting in buckboard carriages, firmly managing the reins and even snapping the whip on occasion, with males as mere passengers. Edith’s seemingly innocuous blouse, skirt and topper, the attire Sargent employed to characterize his subject, wielded as great a psychic wallop as any horse whip. Her image fully incarnated the New Woman, dressed in the uniform of her newfound freedom.

  The clothing suggested that she was en route from a game of tennis or golf, but perhaps the most immediate impression, in the late 1890s, was that she might have just hopped off from a spin on a bicycle. Bicycles had potent associations for the New Woman. Depictions of glamorous cyclists found their way onto the covers of such magazines as Puck, Life and Scribner’s. Gossip columnists eagerly described how far a certain socialite rode her bike on a Sunday, to what chic hostelry, the minutiae of her bike’s mechanical workings, the costume she wore for her adventure.

  The problem with the newfangled sport, of course, was the question of dress. Edith’s simple shirtwaist, snug belt and flared linen skirt lent her an outfit equally suited to tennis, golf and cycling. The costume informed the world that this was a woman who ran and breathed and moved her limbs in ways her mother never did.

  The shirtwaist-skirt combo suffered a killing defect, though, when cycling. It could be problematic to straddle your steed when your legs were bound by three yards of pique. Contemporary photographs show female cyclists in ankle-length skirts draping the crossbar, brushing the wheels in a manner that would seem to negate the safety of the so-called safety bicycle.

  Yet any woman who wore another kind of costume could expect outrage. One cycling advocate, Mrs. Mary Hopkins of Boston, vehemently decried the wearing of Amelia Bloomer’s bifurcated trousers. “It has made wheeling just another way for a woman to make a fool of herself,” the New York Times quoted Hopkins as saying. “She has made a half-way sort of creature of herself. She can’t be a man, and she is a disgrace as a woman.”

  Sargent’s Edith stood squarely between two ideals. She represented the popular athletic girl, yes, as she stood squarely in the light, bursting out of the shadows behind her. But she remained committed to the skirt. Sargent himself was said to frown upon pants for women.

  To exist in tension, hovering between two feminine ideals, the Victorian and the modern, was exactly the mode of the 1890s. The covers of magazines and product ads in periodicals featured ladies swatting tennis balls with determined looks on their liberated countenances. Henry James characterized his winning heroine Daisy Miller as “an inscrutable combination of audacit
y and innocence.” Edith was John Singer Sargent’s own Daisy Miller.

  She could as easily have stood in as a model for Charles Gibson, the greatest pen-and-ink artist of the age. Gibson just then debuted his own fetching ideal of female power, active, pretty, fun-loving. So popular was the Gibson Girl that her likeness soon covered mass-marketed china plates, souvenir spoons, slipcovers and wallpaper. Engaged in a faddish passion for wood-burning, hobbyists of the day meticulously scorched Gibson Girl profiles onto leather strips and wooden panels.

  One Gibson drawing, titled The Weaker Sex, shows three gorgeous ingénues who wield a magnifying glass and hat pins over a bug-sized helpless man. In the American future, as construed by Gibson in his cartoons, Vassar would mow down Yale on the football field, matrons would rule as a council or war and a horde of New Women would storm the cloistered dining room of the Knickerbocker gentlemen’s club.

  The real New Woman, the American Girl portrayed in Sargent’s oils, did not seem quite so menacing, but looked as though she could hold her own in any conflict of wills with an ordinary gentleman. She appeared not so much dominant as empowered. Her sense of self was not dependent on attachment to a man. Quite the opposite, it would seem.

  Frequently on loan to exhibitions and galleries, Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes lived only intermittently with its subjects. Whenever it was home with them, they gave it pride of place, making the massive portrait the center of their lives together. Edith and Newton returned from Europe and embarked upon their connubial life, growing, maturing, encountering their serial triumphs, to be sure, but also facing a brand of heartbreak that did not show itself easily in art.

  11. For Richer or Poorer