Strapless (8 page)

Carolus-Duran’s classes were usually limited to twenty-four students, most of them English and American, although he neither spoke nor understood English and he had his pupils speak French at all times. He may have opened his door to foreigners because he knew that French students might be unwilling to study with someone who challenged the very establishment they wanted to join. But foreigners would not be afraid to test his radical teaching methods. They appreciated his expressive, freewheeling style and were less invested in the restrictive French system; they could always return to their native countries to paint if they did not succeed here.

Among Carolus-Duran’s American students was a tall, reserved young man named John Singer Sargent. He had come to the atelier at age eighteen, accompanied by his father. Sargent’s fellow students found him mature for his age and oddly cosmopolitan, speaking flawless French with no discernible accent.

While Sargent called himself an American and had an American passport, he had been born in Italy and had never even visited the United States. His expatriate parents had been in perpetual motion for more than twenty years, moving from one European city to another in pursuit of milder weather, better health, cheaper accommodations. Sargent’s lack of an accent was due to his frequent relocations as a child: he had lived in so many European cities while he was growing up that he never had time to acquire one.

His father, Fitzwilliam Sargent, was a successful doctor who came from a large and established Philadelphia family. In 1850 he married Mary Newbold Singer, who had goals that could be accomplished only in Europe: she dreamed of living in an environment that would be more hospitable to her artistic talents: she sketched, painted, and played the piano. When her first child and namesake was born in 1851, Mary was forced to concentrate on more practical matters. The Sargents adapted to a life of respectable domesticity, until little Mary’s death at age two. Her mother suffered a physical breakdown and convinced her husband that Europe was the only place where she could recover.

With the $10,000 that she had inherited from her father in 1854, the Sargents began Mary’s long-desired journey. She loved traveling. She wanted to see and experience everything Europe had to offer, and she had no interest in assuming the monotonous life she had left behind in America. So she convinced her husband that they should spend the summer in Geneva and the winter in Rome, visiting spas regularly to tend to her delicate health. Soon she was so addicted to travel that as soon as she arrived in one place, she was already thinking about the next destination. Dr. Sargent seems to have never guessed that she might be exaggerating her symptoms of illness to avoid returning to America.

The Sargents traveled from Florence to Nice to Rome, and back. Unlike typical Americans on a grand tour, they were drifters, mindful of their fixed income, forever trading one temporary address for another. They economized by visiting fashionable places in the off-season, hiring second-rate servants, and moving to cheaper locations whenever life became too expensive.

The Sargent’s second child, John Singer, was born in Florence on January 12, 1856, a strong and healthy boy. The next year, another daughter, Emily, was born in Rome. Traveling was more difficult with the larger household, but Mary could not be persuaded to stop.

The peripatetic lifestyle left Dr. Sargent feeling restless and lonely. He missed his Philadelphia medical practice. John and Emily had to learn to be best friends, playing and studying together since their unpredictable itinerary made regular friendships and formal schooling impossible. They were tutored by their parents: Dr. Sargent gave his children natural history books and Bible stories, and Mary taught her specialties, art and music. Both children were bright, and quick, open to the new languages, cultures, and histories of their ever-changing environment. At its best, the Sargents’ lifestyle was rich in experience.

In 1860, when she was not yet four, Emily suffered a serious accident that damaged her spine. The Sargents never discussed the incident, keeping the details of her condition to themselves; family members believed that Emily had been dropped by a nurse. Her parents consulted doctors, who recommend a drastic course of treatment that included long periods of complete immobility. Emily stayed in bed for years, and when she finally got up, her body was misshapen and she had to relearn the fundamentals of movement, such as how to walk.

In 1861 a fourth child was born, Mary Winthrop, called “Minnie.” The Sargents continued to travel, moving four or five times a year, setting up house in, say, Nice only to dismantle it a few months later to go to London. On gay evenings when money was good, Mary entertained the new acquaintances she had collected. John befriended the children of other expatriate families, including Ben del Castillo, who was distantly related to the Avegnos, and Violet Paget, who would later call herself Vernon Lee. When money was tight, the family’s accommodations and lifestyle declined accordingly.

Fitzwilliam Sargent thought about America constantly and wrote to his relatives with great longing, wishing for a reunion. But whenever he broached the subject of a return to the United States, Mary dismissed him with one excuse or another, usually claiming that she and the children were not healthy enough to make the trip.

Health, not surprisingly, became Dr. Sargent’s obsession. His letters described in detail each family member’s physical condition at the time of writing, as if his wife and children had become the patients who were denied him when he gave up his practice. He wrote that Mary was “improved,” Emily was “weak,” and the family in general suffered from “rather delicate health.” His diligent observations could not forestall tragedy. In 1865, only four years old, Minnie Sargent died.

John was the only healthy child in his family. His size and robust constitution made him a good athlete: he enjoyed sports and physical activity and, like his mother, hated to sit still. Dr. Sargent, a patriot who wrote a pamphlet entitled “England, the United States and the Southern Confederacy” to show his support for President Lincoln and the Union army, fondly imagined his strapping son growing up to be an officer in the U.S. Navy.

But John had other plans. His interests were those of an artist, not a soldier. By the age of thirteen, he was spending hours in museums studying the works of the old masters. He took a notebook with him everywhere, and filled its pages with images from life done in pencil and watercolor. Mary’s friends in the art world were impressed by the boy’s talent and urged the Sargents to arrange for him to have professional training.

As the family moved through Spain, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, Mary had two more children; Fitzwilliam Jr., who was born in 1867 and died two years later, and Violet, born in 1870. The death of one child seems to have brought the birth of another. The Sargents’ financial resources were increasingly strained, and so they moved to the affordable destination of Brittany, an area Violet later called “the land of rocks and cheeses” because of its stony terrain and omnipresent dairy products. The Sargents rented a small house in St.-Énogat, a suburb of the busy resort town of St.-Malo.

While the move may have eased the family’s financial stress, they weren’t quite happy. Mary’s social ambition had never abated, and even the successful salon she organized in St.-Énogat did not satisfy it. Dr. Sargent, though pleased at having settled somewhere, was unhappy with the continued nomadism. He wanted his family to establish permanent roots.

While neither Mary nor Fitzwilliam Sargent had achieved the adult life they had wanted, they were sensitive to their talented son’s needs. In 1874, acting on their friends’ advice, and knowing that the capital would offer the best instruction, they moved to Paris to find an art school for him. John had admired Carolus-Duran’s work, and after one meeting with the artist he made up his mind to study at his atelier. Carolus-Duran judged John’s portfolio accomplished and promising; he accepted him as a pupil on the spot and straightforwardly told him that although he had to unlearn some things, he showed great potential.

Sargent was enthusiastic about his acceptance into the studio. Yet he must have felt apprehensive too. His mother had instilled in him a rigorous work ethic, and he knew he didn’t fit in with the high-spirited and self-consciously bohemian students, who would stage sponge fights in the studio and tease each other with pranks. Sargent was shy and taciturn. He dressed formally and was very serious about his work.

His classmates could easily have ostracized him for being different, but instead they treated him with great respect. His painting astonished them. Sargent’s work, his classmate James Beckwith wrote in his diary, “makes me shake myself.” Another student described Sargent as “one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across; his drawings are like the old masters’.”

Sargent was always the first to arrive at the atelier on Monday mornings, beating the other students to the best spot to position his easel. When Carolus-Duran’s class was finished and the model dismissed for the day, Sargent would talk other students into posing for him so he could keep painting. In the evenings, he would study drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts, then, after a hasty dinner, attend a night class with the artist Léon Bonnat.

When he wasn’t in school, Sargent would join Beckwith and other new friends to visit museums and galleries, and to hear concerts. He still lived with his family, who had an apartment on the Right Bank, and he often brought fellow students home for family dinners and entertainments. Mary was delighted: she finally had the salon she had always wanted.

Sargent gradually grew accustomed to the company of rowdy young artists. In a letter to his childhood friend Ben del Castillo, he described a lively evening of celebration and camaraderie at Carolus-Duran’s atelier. “We cleared the studio of easels and canvasses, illuminated it with Venetian or colored paper lanterns, hired a piano and had what is called a ‘devil of a spree.’” After years of occupying a narrow and hushed world consisting only of his immediate family, Sargent was awakening socially.

His social life never interfered with his work, however. He remained the most dedicated artist in his class, practicing long hours to master his technique. Although the other students in Carolus-Duran’s group tried to follow their teacher’s precepts, Sargent was the one who fully absorbed them and made them his own. When he took the École des Beaux-Arts’ rigorous month-long entrance exams, he passed them on his first try. He placed thirty-seventh in a group of 162 aspirants, an extraordinary accomplishment for an American.

Sargent traveled to Brittany to summer with his parents and his two sisters when the atelier closed for the season in 1875. But when his parents decided to stay in St.-Énogat for the winter to save money, he returned to Paris alone. His experiences as an art student had given him the confidence to live independently. He was on the right track professionally, with Carolus-Duran guiding him toward a lucrative career in portraiture. Sargent felt stir-rings of ambition, and he was ready to face every young artist’s greatest challenge: his first Salon.

A
s a fledgling artist, Sargent had to make decisions about what he would paint, and how he would paint it. The year 1876 was important in terms of making these decisions, because the Parisian art world was offering alternatives to traditional academic, color-within-the-lines painting. The nineteenth century, an age defined by revolutionary spirit, saw art movements that challenged conventional aesthetics. Realism, pioneered in France by the rebellious Gustave Courbet in the 1850s, called for a dramatic shift in painting. Realists wanted to replace the academy’s sanitized historical, mythological, and genre scenes with penetrating depictions of everyday life, including peasants and laborers at work. They did so in a direct way, without idealizing or glorifying the common man’s condition, and thus prompted detractors to call their work offensive and ugly. In time, Courbet inspired another generation of artists to start their own controversial movement: Impressionism.

At the second Impressionist exhibition, at the Durand-Ruel gallery, Sargent had the chance to meet in person Claude Monet—one of the crop of “Impressionist” painters who were revolutionizing art with their ideas about light, form, and perspective. Although many artists and art lovers were enthusiastic about the new movement, these rebels, including Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Édouard Manet, had more opponents than supporters.

Conservative artists, upholding the standards of the academy, considered the Impressionists to be amateurish and vulgar, and their work anarchist rubbish. But these ground-breaking painters held firm, united against the repressive academy that condemned their spontaneous approach to painting. While the Impressionists were (and are) categorized as a group, they were in fact a non-movement movement. They shared a common revolutionary spirit, but they each had an individual style. They were linked by their desire to paint life as they saw it (albeit each from a distinct viewpoint), rather than as something idealized. They also took painting out of the studio, favoring
plein air,
or outdoor, scenes that did not rely on arranged props, backgrounds, and lighting.

Sargent had heard of the controversial artists: the advantage to studying in Carolus-Duran’s relatively progressive atelier was that new approaches to painting were explored along with the old ways. Sargent was encouraged to experiment, and since Carolus-Duran was friendly with Monet, it is no wonder that some of his experiments show elements of Impressionism.

At the same time that Sargent was absorbing new ideas about color and movement, he was learning that art was big business. Talent alone rarely catapulted a living artist to success. A working artist in Third Republic Paris required keen commercial instincts and a sound business plan. Carolus-Duran set an excellent example for his protégé, who knew that his teacher’s career had advanced in no small part because of his ability to maneuver through society as a well-paid portraitist.