Strapless (24 page)

The lily bulbs had a symbolic significance as well. Sargent was putting down roots in a new life. He was unwilling to sever all ties to the past, though, and moved two meaningful canvases to his London studio: a depiction of Albert de Belleroche, and the portrait of Amélie.

Madame X
was locked away in Sargent’s studio, visible only to the artist and his guests, but it remained an obstacle he could not overcome. Prospective clients, afraid he would produce something radical or unflattering, were still reluctant to entrust him with their images. With its taint of scandal, the portrait kept Sargent from receiving the important commissions he needed.

The best way to carry on during this difficult period was to keep painting. Sargent returned to Broadway in the summer of 1886 to finish
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.
He was at once drawn into the Millets’ antics and celebrations, including a birthday party for Lily Millet. Edwin Austin Abbey boasted, “We have music until the house won’t stand it,” and even stuffy Henry James was persuaded to dance until he was breathless.

Sargent’s daily ritual of working on the canvas continued as it had a year earlier. Some observers questioned whether the painting would ever be completed, since Sargent worked and reworked his canvas every night, repeatedly scraping it down “to the quick” and starting over with fresh paint at the next session. But the nightly attacks were purposeful and productive: after five weeks of work, he was finished with the painting.

Measuring 68½ by 60½ inches,
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
depicts two children standing in a lush garden amid a riot of colorful lilies, poppies, roses, and carnations. An affirmation of life, innocence, natural beauty, and spontaneity (even though every effect was meticulously planned), the painting is in every way—artistically and thematically—the antidote to
Madame X.

At Broadway, Sargent had developed a genuine appreciation for the pastoral, and he expressed that feeling spectacularly in this work. But the painting also signaled the return of sound business instincts. There was a very good chance that the same people who rejected
Madame X
because they thought it was decadent and artificial would find this idyll more to their liking.

Sargent took the painting to London in October, where it joined
Madame X
on his studio wall. He started to move about in society again after his weeks in the country, and often spent time with the progressive young artists of the New English Art Club. While meeting new people, he began to discover that the lingering memory of
Madame X
was working in his favor. Now there were women, especially in America, who liked the idea of appearing seductive in a portrait and who believed—as Amélie was coming to realize—that any kind of fame was better than anonymity.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, a wealthy American patron of the arts, was one of these women. She had heard about
Madame X
—news of the scandal at the Paris Salon crossed the Atlantic quickly—and was eager to meet the artist who had created the notorious portrait. Gardner, born to a wealthy New York family, was rumored to have climbed out of a convent window to elope with John Lowell Gardner II, called “Jack,” the son of a wealthy and aristocratic Boston family. She was a flamboyant society woman who refused to observe the rules of etiquette imposed on ladies of the time: she served tea to her guests—male and female—in her boudoir, she dressed daringly in form-fitting gowns, and she made no secret of the fact that she preferred the company of men to that of women.

In 1863, while in her early twenties, Gardner gave birth to a son, named after his father. Jackie died two years later of pneumonia, and Gardner was instructed by her doctor to take a long trip to lift her spirits. Like Mary Sargent, she hoped that travel would distract her from her grief. She and Jack went to Europe, where she listened to music in Vienna, shopped for gowns at Worth in Paris, and became a connoisseur of fine jewelry in London. Over the next twenty-three years, the Gardners traveled frequently, visiting Paris and London regularly, and venturing farther, to the Holy Land, Cambodia, and Japan.

A fabulous fortune generated by the family shipping business enabled them to indulge every whim. Gardner owned among other items a necklace strung with forty-four perfect pearls and topped with a giant diamond clasp; she habitually purchased magnificent rubies and other jewels. The Gardner house in Boston, featured in magazines, had a novel glass-roofed atrium and was packed with expensive furnishings.

The Gardners spent lavishly but without any real purpose, until they began collecting rare books and manuscripts. Following the examples of nineteenth-century American millionaires such as the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and the industrial and banking titan John Pierpont Morgan, they turned their attention to paintings. Gardner liked to be an informed shopper, so before she made any purchases of contemporary work, she would try to meet the artists. Thanks to the
Madame X
business, Sargent was on the list of artists whose work she wanted to see.

In October 1886, while on one of her tours of Europe, she begged her friend Henry James to take her to Sargent’s studio to see the famous portrait. As soon as she saw it, she knew she was in the presence of a thrilling talent. She was determined to have Sargent paint her. This woman who gladly disobeyed rules of propriety loved the idea of shocking staid Boston society. If she returned to the States with a portrait as daring and controversial as
Madame X,
it would affirm her as a social maverick. Unfortunately, she was unable to linger in London for a sitting. She arranged for Sargent to paint her the next time she came to Europe.

In May 1887,
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
was shown at London’s Royal Academy of Art, at an exhibition much like the Paris Salon. The painting was a smash hit. Critics were charmed by its dazzling display of color and light.
The Spectator
described it as “purely and simply beautiful,” while
Art Amateur
said it was “the talk of all the studios, as it is now the talk of the town.” Sargent was paid the highest compliment when the Chantrey Bequest, a fund dedicated to the acquisition of great works of art, paid £700 to acquire the work for the Royal Academy’s permanent collection.

Sargent’s Broadway friends, many of them Americans, carried the news of Sargent’s triumph to their acquaintances in New York and Boston. Henry Marquand, a banker and avid collector of Vermeer, Van Dyck, Hals, and other old masters, who in 1889 would become president of the Metropolitan Museum, had heard compliments about Sargent’s work from Lawrence Alma-Tadema and other artists he trusted. He invited Sargent to the United States to paint a portrait of his wife.

Sargent, sensing he was on the verge of recognition in London, was reluctant to accept the job. Half hoping that he would be refused, he named an inflated fee—at a time when artists far more established than he typically made $3,000 for a portrait, he asked for $2,000 to $2,500—and was shocked when Marquand agreed to pay it. Sargent had no choice but to pack his bags and head for the Marquands’ summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. He planned to make quick work of the portrait so he could return to London as soon as possible to profit from the success of
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

Newport during the 1880s was a popular destination for the rich. Every summer, affluent vacationers from New York, Boston, and other cities would arrive in this picturesque seaside town, lured by its scenic beaches and exclusive social scene. In the 1850s, in an ostentatious display of fortune, wealthy families had begun building enormous mansions, their summer “cottages.” They brought with them massive amounts of luggage and troops of servants, maintained full households, and kept busy social schedules through the season, which sometimes extended into the early fall. Days were devoted to swimming and lawn tennis and arranging extravagant entertainments for friends and associates. One summer, the owners of Chateau-sur-Mer, the first of the monumental Italianate residences bordering posh Bellevue Avenue, hosted a French picnic attended by two thousand guests. It was not unusual at the time for a family to spend as much as $70,000 on a lawn party or a ball.

By the time Sargent arrived in Newport in the early autumn of 1887, new wealth had begun to move in. The Vanderbilts and other self-made barons, who had amassed large fortunes in short periods of time through ingenuity and industry (but also through more questionable means), and who tended to spend their cash as quickly as it came in, were building Renaissance-style palaces even more elaborate than existing mansions. The houses built with new money were deliberately ostentatious, routinely boasting dining rooms large enough for dozens of guests and ball-rooms trimmed in real gold leaf.

Sargent’s clients the Marquands were, however, long-standing members of Newport society. A local paper announced their guest’s arrival: “Mr. J. S. Sargent of London who has become somewhat renowned as a portrait and figure painter is in town and is staying with Mr. H. G. Marquand on Rhode Island Avenue.” Sargent set up a temporary studio in the Marquands’ home and warmed to them instantly. He considered the portrait of Elizabeth Marquand carefully, because he liked her personally and because he knew this was his chance to impress a new audience in a new country. He decided to emphasize the sixty-one-year-old Mrs. Marquand’s refinement and dignity, seating her in a tasteful Chippendale chair and having her wear a simple yet expensive-looking gown with a lace shawl and cuffs. He worked on the portrait from late September to the end of October, and as he had intended, the result was quietly glamorous, even noble. The painting was admired by critics and socialites alike.

Mrs. Henry Marquand
initiated a rapid social and professional ascent for Sargent in America. With the attention he was receiving, he abandoned his plan to rush back to London. American aristocrats, it turned out, appreciated the European flair Sargent demonstrated in his painting. They liked the flashy brush-work, the startling poses. The same affluent men and women who shopped for couture clothes in Paris and commissioned homes resembling Italian palazzos and French châteaus desired the services of an artist who could make them look grand. Observing his portraits, said the English writer Osbert Sitwell, rich people “understood at last how rich they really were.”

For the next three months, from November to January, Sargent traveled from Newport to Boston, Boston to New York, and then back to Boston, winning lucrative commissions in each city. Henry James helped him by seizing every opportunity to promote his name. He wrote an article that appeared in the October issue of
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
that celebrated his friend’s virtuoso talent and technical genius. Sargent, James proclaimed for the benefit of upper-class America, was the only artist worth patronizing. The writer praised Sargent’s ability to recognize and accentuate the individuality of his subjects. Sargent, he said, saw “each work that he provides in a light of its own” and did not “turn off successive portraits according to some well-tried receipt which has proved useful in the case of their predecessors.”

Sargent established himself in the artistic community as well, seeing several Americans who had been students with him in Paris and who had returned home to the East Coast. James Beckwith, his former roommate, was in New York seeking to further his career. Sargent had been approached by so many New Yorkers about commissions that he felt he would have more than enough work to pay the rent on a modest studio. He asked Beckwith to help him locate a suitable space. His new address, on fashionable Washington Square, would be convenient for his high-society clients.

Before Sargent settled in here, the Boits, his old friends and patrons who had been supportive in the early days of his career and throughout the
Madame X
debacle, invited him to visit them in Boston. They hoped he would have the time to paint Mrs. Boit. In November, Sargent put New York on hold and moved to Boston, where he rented a studio, unpacked his paints, and applied himself to painting not only Mrs. Boit and the sons of the magnate J. Malcolm Forbes, but also the irrepressible Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Mrs. Gardner would be a challenge. Unlike Amélie, Gardner was neither young nor exotically beautiful. She was forty-seven, short, with an unremarkable face. But she was blessed with a voluptuous figure, a tiny waist, and a generous bosom that she loved to flaunt. She encouraged Sargent to devise a pose that emphasized these features.

With Gardner standing in front of an intricate, multicolored tapestry whose pattern framed her head like a halo, Sargent pushed and pulled her into a position that was, in its own way, as forced and artificial as Amélie’s in
Madame X.
Gardner faces the viewer in a simple black gown that outlines every curve. She appears to be bending ever so slightly at the waist, an almost indecent move that thrusts her buttocks back and her bosom forward. Her gown’s plunging neckline draws the eye directly to her breasts. Gardner wears her signature piece of jewelry: the strand of South Sea pearls that her husband had purchased early in their marriage. A painter might have been expected to place the necklace around her throat to attest to her wealth, but instead Sargent wrapped the priceless pearls around Gardner’s waist, to call attention to her figure.

Gardner invited Sargent to stay at her lavish Beacon Street home while he was working on her portrait. He moved in, and although her husband was always there, Sargent’s presence set Boston tongues wagging. They assumed he and “Mrs. Jack” were having an affair. She took pleasure in the rumors and did nothing to dispel them—after all, they accorded with the outrageous reputation she cultivated.

Sargent worked through the Christmas holiday and finished the portrait in January 1888. Gardner loved the painting and repeatedly tried to make Sargent agree that it was his best work, perhaps competing with
Madame X
for his attention. She wanted more than a mere artist-client relationship with Sargent: she wanted to be his patron, muse, and intimate. He was the first painter whose works Gardner wanted to collect. She coveted
El Jaleo,
a painting far too large to fit comfortably in most homes, and envisioned building a Venetian-style palace to house it.