Strapless (27 page)

Meyer-Zundel moved in with Gautier, who was fifty-nine at the time, and insinuated herself into every corner of her life. When Gautier died in 1917, she left her entire estate to her companion. In 1934, Meyer-Zundel sold Gautier’s art collection at auction in Paris. One of Sargent’s paintings of Gautier—a Japanese-style portrait in which she poses much like Madame X—was purchased by Jean Pozzi, the doctor’s son; the painting has since disappeared. Gautier and Meyer-Zundel are buried in a cemetery in St.-Énogat, near Le Pré des Oiseaux, so close that they are practically in the same grave.

After his intense relationship with Sargent, Albert de Belleroche was determined to become more independent artistically. He was afraid that the more experienced painter exercised too much influence over his work, tying him down to painting when he might experiment with other art forms. Belleroche wanted to find his own style and medium, separate from Sargent’s preferences. When Sargent invited him on a trip to Palestine, the younger artist declined, fearing that “a journey like this with Sargent might influence me in my art and affect my individual expression.” It is likely too that Belleroche feared becoming overly close to Sargent emotionally. He was only nineteen when he met Sargent, an age when it was not uncommon to be sexually adventurous. But it was a dangerous time for two men to explore the possibility of an intimate relationship, especially after Sargent moved to London in 1885. The British government had recently passed the Labouchere Amendment, criminalizing sex acts between men, and placing sexually active homosexuals in danger. This law was used against Oscar Wilde for his affair with Alfred Douglas in 1895.

Over the years, Sargent and Belleroche maintained their friendship, using each other’s studios and corresponding regularly. But they were never as close as they had been during the summer of
Madame X.
Belleroche pursued other interests and other relationships. Following the lead of many young artists, he moved into a studio in Montmartre, opposite the Moulin Rouge, and painted popular models of the day such as Victorine Meurent, who posed for Manet’s
Olympia,
and Lili, the favorite of Toulouse-Lautrec. Aggressively asserting his heterosexuality, Belleroche had a tempestuous ten-year affair with Lili and became a familiar figure in Montmartre’s bohemian circles. A gifted painter who could have led a successful career as a portraitist, Belleroche in 1900 set aside his easel to spend more time on lithography. His lithographs, generally romantic depictions of women, were so finely executed, so painterly in their details, that the artist Frank Brangwyn said of Belleroche that “no one else has succeeded in making lithography the rival of painting.”

In 1910, Belleroche ended his affair with Lili to marry Julie Visseaux, the daughter of a sculptor. Lili, disturbed by her lover’s betrayal, took to behaving irrationally and unpredictably: she tried repeatedly to break up the marriage. Belleroche and Julie moved out of Paris, out of France, to escape her rage and start a new life. They had three children and lived quietly in the English countryside while Belleroche developed his reputation as a master lithographer.

Until the end of his life, Sargent kept a painting of Belleroche hanging at Tite Street, just as he kept
Madame X.
Today most of Sargent’s depictions of his friend are in private collections; the one of Belleroche in a fur hat is in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Lily Millet treasured Sargent’s portrait of her her entire life. In April 1912, her husband, Frank, on his way home to her after a trip to England (the Millets maintained residences in New York and at Broadway), perished on the
Titanic.
Lily went on with her life, spending more time in the United States and turning her homemaking talents into a livelihood by opening an interior design firm in New York. She died in 1932 at the age of seventy-seven.

Lily bequeathed her portrait to her son, a doctor and Sargent’s namesake. When John Millet died in 1976, the painting was left to relatives. In 1996,
Mrs. Frank D. Millet
was purchased by an American family, and it now hangs in their dining room, not far from a preliminary oil study for
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.
The family was careful to hang the portrait and the oil study out of the way of their children’s swinging backpacks. From the moment Sargent finished his tribute to his lovely friend, the portrait has hung in one private home or another—a fitting fate for the woman portrayed as a domestic goddess.

In 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner realized her dream of opening a museum to showcase her enormous art collection, which included paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Manet, and hundreds of other works she had spent her life assembling. She had commissioned the architect Willard T. Sears to design her palace. When Fenway Court—inspired by the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, a fifteenth-century residence on the Grand Canal owned by Sargent’s cousins the Curtises—was completed, it featured an enormous indoor courtyard, three floors of galleries, a concert and lecture hall, and lavish living quarters on the fourth floor.

Although Gardner owned numerous paintings and drawings by Sargent, she still yearned for
El Jaleo.
The painting was owned by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, who had purchased it in 1882. When Coolidge agreed to loan it to Gardner in 1914, she proceeded to design a part of Fenway Court to accommodate it. She hung the enormous painting at the end of a hallway and illuminated it with footlights, creating even more of a stage for Sargent’s Spanish dancer. On the floor in front of the painting she placed musical instruments and pottery to add to the theatrical effect. From a distance, as she had hoped, the scene appeared startlingly real.

Coolidge took one look at the display and decided that
El Jaleo
should stay in Gardner’s home. Elsewhere in the house, in the Gothic Room, Gardner hung Sargent’s portrait of her, the one that had been such a source of embarrassment to her husband. She respected his wish to withhold
Isabella Stewart Gardner
from public view until his death in 1898. Sargent painted Gardner again, not long before her death in 1924.
Lady in White
shows this once vibrant woman reclining on her couch, swathed in white veils, like Amélie at the end of her life, her energy subdued by illness.

Sargent’s paintings hung in museums through the 1930s and 1940s, but he was overlooked, considered obsolete if he was considered at all. In the early fifties, a confluence of events thrust him into the spotlight once again. A vivid biography by Charles Merrill Mount, published in 1955, portrayed Sargent’s life as colorful and filled with incident, and it generated new interest in the forgotten artist. While Mount had a tendency to make mistakes and to exaggerate for dramatic purposes (Mount is, for example, the only biographer to suggest that Sargent had an affair with Judith Gautier), his lively writing made the artist seem accessible and appealing.

In the early 1950s and through the 1960s, a series of successful exhibitions brought Sargent’s paintings back into the public eye. Viewers who lined up to see his works in museums in Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Birmingham, England—some of whom were seeing them for the first time—were impressed by Sargent’s undeniable talents. Instead of dismissing him as old-fashioned, critics now hailed his works as classic, and recognized his extraordinary combination of unsurpassed technique and penetrating psychology.

By the 1970s, Sargent had made a comeback, and his portraits in particular were held in high regard. When asked to comment on Sargent’s work, Andy Warhol, the artist who was the definition of contemporary cool and who, like Sargent, specialized in images of the rich and the famous, said, “Oh God, I wish I could paint this good.” Warhol understood that Sargent’s subjects, though dressed in the clothing of a different era, were like many of the people he encountered at his ultra-hip Factory, brilliant creatures who used art to make a statement about their wealth and their privileged insider status.

Sargent’s star continued to rise, culminating with a block-buster exhibition that originated at London’s Tate Gallery in 1998 and traveled to Washington, D.C., Boston, and Seattle through 2001. Sargent’s triumphant tour of America featured 130 of his paintings, watercolors, and drawings, and met with awe and acclaim in every city. The new millennium brought Sargent a highly enthusiastic public, who were dazzled by his bravura painting and did not find it at all politically incorrect to admire his masterly renderings of the wealthy and their elegant, glittering world. In the end, Sargent overcame the death sentence his reputation suffered after his demise. In the words of the art historian Robert Rosenblum, the once forgotten painter was “hot stuff again,” and his most famous painting was
Madame X.

As Sargent’s exhibitions attracted huge audiences and his paintings were once again popular subjects of study, art scholars zealously turned their attention to the artist’s personal life, determined to uncover the “real” story of his elusive and ambiguous sexuality. Was he heterosexual, homosexual, or even asexual? Early biographers maintained that Sargent was uninterested in romance or sex because he worked constantly and had no time for anything but his art. Even Stanley Olson, who wrote in great depth about Sargent in the 1980s, suggested that the artist did not conceal his private passions, but simply did not have any.

Other experts, however, Trevor Fairbrother among them, hold that Sargent was a sensualist in his life as well as in his work. Fairbrother argues that biographers and critics have sidestepped the fact that many of Sargent’s paintings and drawings are charged with homoeroticism, and proposes that “the visual edge and emotional volatility of his work may have been shaped by his attraction to male beauty.” Throughout his career, Sargent frequently drew and painted naked and athletically built men, including his manservant Nicola d’Inverno, numerous Venetian gondoliers, and the models who posed for his Boston Public Library murals. His male nudes hint at a sexual side that he otherwise tried to suppress and keep hidden, as do the portraits born of his romantic crushes of the early 1880s, when he was young and still exploring his desires. The impassioned brushstrokes evident in these works may well indicate deeper—and unfulfilled—longings on Sargent’s part.

After decades of study and debate, experts have established that Sargent’s portraits were never just pretty pictures. They were always powerful and insightful character studies that exposed the essence of their subjects and the passionate nature of the artist. In Sargent’s hands,
Dr. Pozzi at Home
was both ironic and prescient: Pozzi, the chronic philanderer, was never at home. It is as if Sargent conceived his painting, which hung in the doctor’s salon, as Pozzi’s perpetual stand-in. In
Lady with the Rose
and
Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise,
Sargent seems to have intuited Louise’s sad and tenuous future, just as in
Mrs. Frank D. Millet
he sensed Lily Millet’s grace and strength—the traits that later sustained her in the face of personal tragedy.

In
Madame X,
Sargent’s greatest psychological portrait, he revealed the unattainable beauty and self-destructive narcissism of both the woman and the decadent society she embodied. “I do not judge, I only chronicle,” went Sargent’s credo.
Madame X
can, of course, be seen as the abstract and iconic image of dangerous beauty. But the subject of the painting also had great personal meaning for Sargent. On the fateful day at Les Chênes when Sargent determined Amélie’s pose, he painted her with her face turned away from him, a disturbing vision of a woman he could never possess and a world he could never inhabit.

M
adame X
was described as sphinxlike when she debuted at the 1884 Paris Salon. She had an ineffable quality of mystery and elusiveness—a quality that has made her, in the ensuing century and more, among the most studied of the paintings of a much-studied man. Hundreds of Sargent scholars spend hundreds of hours discussing the portrait’s meaning.
Madame X
has been described, analyzed, and deconstructed. Scholars have argued over her position in the Sargent oeuvre, picked apart her every detail, and debated her significance.

In spite of all this attention, however, the story of Amélie’s fallen strap was overlooked until 1981, when the Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother uncovered and published evidence that had been buried in nineteenth-century art journals and archives. In an 1889 issue of
Art Amateur,
he saw a passing reference to the fact that Sargent “repainted one part of the picture which gave offense to the lady’s friends.” The offensive detail, Fairbrother discovered, was the strap of Amélie’s dress. He realized that the
Madame X
hanging at the Metropolitan Museum differed markedly from the one that had outraged Belle Époque Paris. There are two known representations of the portrait in its original state—an engraving by Charles Baude that appeared in the Salon issue of
Le Monde Illustré,
and a photograph of the painting at the Salon. Fairbrother called attention to these images and the story they had to tell.

Subsequently, Fairbrother turned his eye to another mystery involving
Madame X.
At the Tate Gallery in London was an unfinished copy of the portrait, which Sir Joseph Duveen had purchased from Sargent’s estate in 1925 and then presented to the gallery. The copy had confounded experts for decades. Had Sargent painted it at the same time he was working on
Madame X
? Or had he painted it after the Salon version was finished and exhibited? If so, why would he attempt to re-create a painting he had already completed?

Upon examining the version at the Tate, Fairbrother noted that, while incomplete, it more or less matched the finished
Madame X.
Thus it was not an early, experimental study, but in fact a replica, a copy Sargent may have been rushing to finish and then exhibit at the Salon. Because Sargent left his subject’s shoulder bare in the copy, Fairbrother suggested that the artist might have had second thoughts about the positioning of Amélie’s strap and wasn’t sure whether to paint it off—or on—her shoulder. Had Sargent finished the copy in time, he might have offered a far less scandalous version of the painting to Salon audiences.