The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (71 page)

The character of the indomitable admiral “shines from the sculptured face,” said the critic for the
New York Evening Post.
The sculptor’s work impressed one not as a statue but as a living man. “The spectator does not feel the bronze, he does not feel the sculptor; he feels the presence of the Admiral himself.”

“In modeling severe, broad yet minute in finish … full of dignity and reserved force,” wrote Richard Gilder in
Scribner’s
, making no mention of the legs he had posed for. Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut, he continued, might be called the work of a “new Donatello,” which must have pleased Saint-Gaudens as much as anything said in print.

Praise came from all sides. Most touching for Saint-Gaudens were the reactions of his fellow artists and friends. The statue took his breath away, wrote Maitland Armstrong, who had also returned from Paris. “The sight of such a thing renews one’s youth, and makes one think that life is worth living after all.”

A few days after the unveiling, at about midnight, Saint-Gaudens and Gussie and a friend were walking up Fifth Avenue, on their way home from a party. As they approached Madison Square, they saw an elderly
man standing alone in the moonlight looking at the statue. Recognizing his father, Saint-Gaudens went to him and asked what he was doing there at such an hour.

“Oh, you go about your business!” his father answered. “Haven’t I got a right to be here?”

It had been fourteen years since Augustus Saint-Gaudens had sailed for Paris in steerage at the age of nineteen with little more than high ambition and the $100 in boyhood earnings his father had put aside for him.

Now he had a wife and a son of his own. The last three years in Paris had been for him and Gussie as difficult, productive, and as happy as any they had known. With his brilliant debut as an artist he had indeed “soared into the blue” and achieved recognition such as he had dreamed of. There seemed little likelihood he would ever again have to struggle to find work, or depend on the support of others. He and Stanford White were already started on another project.

Further, he had established himself as an artist brilliantly capable of doing justice to the memory of the Civil War. In time he would sculpt six of the most remarkable public monuments to the war ever created. And another of these, like the Farragut, would be made in Paris.

Paris! We are here! …
We feel our speechlessness keenly …

—
ROBERT HENRI

When Mary Cassatt made her debut as an Impressionist at the opening of the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1879, she was thirty-four years old. John Sargent, then at the start of his career, was her junior by eleven years. Cassatt’s family was still with her in Paris and to a large degree her life remained centered around them. Sargent’s family, on the other hand, had resumed their nomadic ways, departing Paris late in 1878 for Savoy, then Nice, leaving John to fend for himself.

The Impressionist Exhibition opened on April 10 at a gallery on the avenue de l’Opéra. Cassatt had eleven paintings and pastels on display, including her portrait of her sister Lydia,
Woman Reading
. A few weeks later Sargent’s first major portrait, of his teacher Carolus-Duran, could be seen at the Paris Salon.

The work of both Americans received warm acclaim. “The
Woman Reading
… is a miracle of simplicity and elegance,” said one review. Mademoiselle Cassatt and Monsieur Degas were “perhaps the only artists
who distinguished themselves in this group,” said another critic who in general looked askance on Impressionists.

Sargent’s
Carolus-Duran
received an honorable mention at the Salon, and much approval from the public and critics. “There was always a little crowd around it, and I overheard constantly remarks of its excellence,” wrote his father, who had made a return visit to Paris for the occasion.

“No American had ever painted with such quiet mastery … equaling the French on their own ground,” declared an American review. “There is no feebleness, no strain, no shortcoming in the art … it is alive.”

May Alcott of Boston, who was studying art in Paris and had made a conscientious effort to see nearly everything by Americans shown at the galleries and the Salon, concluded that, were one to leave out the work of Sargent, women clearly ranked first among American painters, with Mary Cassatt at the forefront. Miss Alcott, who was the sister of Louisa May Alcott, would write:

If Mr. John Sargent be excepted, whose portrait of Carolus-Duran alone undoubtedly places him in the first rank of painters, there is no other male student from the United States in Paris today exhibiting in his pictures the splendid coloring always found in the work of Miss Cassatt of Philadelphia. …

With their upper-class demeanor, fluency in French, general sophistication, and extraordinary talent, Cassatt and Sargent had a great deal in common, despite the differences in gender and age. They lived and worked in the same city—of their own choice and for many of the same reasons— and Sargent, with some of his fellow students, had met Cassatt sometime in the 1870s. But they had no more than a passing acquaintance and their lives remained worlds apart.

Where Cassatt’s days were confined almost entirely to her studio and the fifth-floor family residence on the avenue Trudaine, life for young Sargent was as free as it had ever been. He had a number of companionable friends and was frequently off and about, at times traveling more even than his parents, with the difference that he kept working wherever he was.

Most of the summer of 1877 he spent at the small Breton port of Cancale. The next summer he traveled to Naples, then sailed to Capri before returning to Nice to be with his family. In the summer of 1879 he went overland to Madrid to copy masterworks at the Prado Museum, as urged by Carolus-Duran. From Madrid he moved on to Granada, then Morocco and Tunis.

The steady production of work resulting from these expeditions was phenomenal. He found interest in everything. At Cancale he sketched and painted studies of oyster gatherers on the beach—women with large baskets and the children who accompanied them—and produced three major canvases on the subject. He did ships and boats, boatmen and wharf scenes in both oil and watercolor. He painted portraits and studies of women in Capri, children bathing on the shore, olive groves, and more than a few of an especially beautiful model named Rosina in silhouette dancing on the white rooftops.

At the Prado he devoted weeks to painting a copy of the Velázquez masterpiece
Las Meninas
. He did pencil, ink, and oil sketches of Spanish dancers and musicians in Madrid, and at Granada, luminous watercolors of the architectural details of the Alhambra. In Morocco he painted street scenes, mosques, and Berber women wearing their haiks.

No subject seemed to daunt him. Once back in Paris, he undertook scenes out in the city itself, something very few American painters had yet attempted. Two brilliant black and white oil paintings of the Pasdeloup Orchestra in rehearsal at the Cirque d’Hiver amphitheater on the rue Amelot left no doubt of his amazing virtuosity. A scene of a couple strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens at twilight, which he painted twice, evoked the romantic spell of Paris as few works ever had. And he was only getting started.

He and Carroll Beckwith continued to share the studio apartment at 73 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and counted French as well as American painters among their “circle,” including Paul Helleu from Brittany, who introduced Sargent to Claude Monet.

Unlike Mary Cassatt, Sargent had no impulse to embrace the Impressionist mode, nor would he allow himself to be so classified, as much as he admired the work of Monet, Manet, and others. It was to portraits above
all that he devoted the most time and effort and that were rapidly bringing him attention and increasing income.

He painted his American student friends Ralph Curtis, Francis Chadwick, and Gordon Greenough. Paul Helleu—lean, dark, and a lifelong friend—seemed never to tire of posing for him. FitzWilliam Sargent sat for his melancholy portrait, and the French playwright Édouard Pailleron became the first full-fledged patron, commissioning not only a portrait of himself but two more of his wife and children.

But it was the portrait of Carolus-Duran that launched Sargent’s career, just as he hoped it would, and intrinsic to its appeal was an unmistakable feeling for the theatrical that was to characterize his strongest, most arresting works to follow.

So relaxed, confident, almost flippant was the pose struck by Carolus-Duran, he might well have been seated downstage at the footlights about to deliver an entertaining soliloquy, or produce a rabbit out of a hat. He looks at the viewer straight on, as though his dark eyes never blinked. An actor assigned to play the part would have only to look at the painting to know what to do.

It was seeing the portrait of Carolus-Duran that led playwright Pail-leron to ask Sargent to paint him in a comparable pose. Sargent’s brush-work and use of a dark background to accentuate his subjects in both portraits were unmistakably in the manner taught by Carolus-Duran, yet still more an expression of Sargent’s own genius for catching the essence of the subject with only a few, seemingly effortless brush strokes.

A small, candid portrait done in London the next year, 1881, of an American novelist and essayist, Vernon Lee, was another virtuoso performance. It was a brilliant likeness that appeared to have been captured in a flash, without a moment’s hesitation.

Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget. She had been one of Sargent’s childhood playmates in Nice, where her parents, too, were living the expatriate life. Describing for her mother the day she sat for Sargent, she wrote, “I enjoyed it very much; John talking all the whole time and strumming the piano between times.” She thought the painting “extraordinarily clever,” if “mere dabs and blurs.” “He says I sit very well; the goodness of my sitting seems to consist in never staying quiet a single moment.”

She was as much a whirlwind talker as he, and the “dabs and blurs” caught the animation of her chattering face, the glints of light from her eyeglasses and uneven teeth. It was, she conceded, “more like me than I expected anything could [be]—rather fierce and cantankerous.”

Greatly as they enjoyed each other’s company, Sargent and Vernon Lee rarely talked about art. As a writer and critic, she had become interested in the “application to art of psychological research.” But like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Sargent wished only to be spared such talk. “In his eyes,” she later wrote, “all this was preposterous, and I suspect, vaguely sacrilegious.” And she went further:

Now, as I declined to yield to my dear old playfellow’s dictation on this subject, and failed to make him recognize that art could afford to other folk problems quite apart from those dealt with by the artist and the art critic; as, moreover, Sargent did not like opposition nor I dogmatism, a tacit understanding henceforth kept us off anything which might lead to either. So our conversation turned more and more to books, music and people, about all of which John Sargent was a delightful talker and an often delighted listener.

Word spread that he made sitting for a portrait highly pleasurable, and affluent women in increasing numbers wished to do so. Among them were Eleanor Jay Chapman and her sister Beatrix, the daughters of a New York stockbroker, and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, the wife of the Chilean consul in Paris, who later described going with her husband to Sargent’s studio and finding it, to their surprise, “very poor and bohemian while the artist himself seemed a very attractive gentleman,” though “very young.” Her sittings took place at the Subercaseaux apartment on the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. He had her pose at her piano, her right hand on the keyboard as if about to perform.