Strapless (9 page)

Sargent needed to make money. His family depended more and more on him financially. His mother and father were getting older. Emily, his childhood playmate and companion, would never leave home; her ill health had turned her into a spinster. Violet was still a child. As the only son and the only healthy and productive member of the family, Sargent understood that it would be his responsibility to support all of them, emotionally as well as economically. He would have to command sizable fees. He decided on a career painting portraits.

Portraiture, an established genre for hundreds of years, evolved to fulfill a basic human need, providing people with likenesses of their loved ones. This was especially important after a death, when mourners wanted a way to remember the deceased. A generalized depiction of a face—a vague rendering of features and coloring—would never do. Even early portraits, however primitively rendered, had to emphasize a subject’s individuality.
The Grove Dictionary of Art
defines a portrait as an image in which “the artist is engaged with the personality of his sitter and is preoccupied with his or her characterization as an individual.” The challenge for portraitists has always been to find their own way of conveying that individuality.

In the eighteenth century, artists elevated portraiture by making it grand and heroic. Commissioned by the royal or the very rich to create artistic testimonials to power, wealth, beauty, and status, painters made their subjects took larger than life. But patrons discovered that a portrait did not have to be physically big to be effective. Miniature portraits, called limnings or “paintings in little,” also became popular. The word
miniature,
in this case, had nothing to do with the diminutive size of the portrait. In the past, illuminated manuscripts with their small illustrations—often a depiction of the patron who had commissioned the work—were created with a red lead pigment called minium. When these illustrations evolved into freestanding portraits, the term
minium
turned into “miniature.”

Executed with fine brushes in watercolor on vellum, or in oil on enamel and ivory, miniatures were practical forms of portraiture because, mere inches long, encased in delicate frames, they could be held in the palm or worn as jewelry. They were also easy to transport, and proved especially useful in negotiating marriages: they could be sent to prospective brides and bridegrooms, and their parents, to show what the betrothed might look like.

The silhouette, a profile traced onto and cut from black paper, was a simple alternative for people who could not afford other forms of portraiture, which, in the eighteenth century, was still an expensive proposition. They were named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French government official who in 1759 imposed such harsh economic demands that his name became synonymous with anything done very cheaply. The quick outlines, created at virtually no cost, came to be known as
portraits à la Silhouette.
A clever artist could create likeness even with such rudimentary tools as paper and scissors. Parts of these silhouettes, for instance the lips, were sometimes colored to add life to the image.

A more technologically advanced method of obtaining an image of a loved one was announced in France in 1839 by Louis Daguerre. With the arrival of photography, portrait miniatures fell out of favor; this new process captured images quickly and accurately. Posing for a photograph was far less tedious—and less expensive—than sitting for a portrait.

With wider prosperity in the nineteenth century, however, and the rise of the bourgeois, more and more people wanted to announce that they were wealthy enough to have their portraits painted. A portrait was a sign that one had arrived, socially. What people wanted above all was a portrait that was flattering. While serious artists were advised not to idealize their subjects on canvas into looking completely different from their real-life counterparts, they were expected to create portraits that enhanced the subjects’ best features.

In the past, that enhancement might involve depicting subjects in classical or mythological settings, clothing them in fanciful but emblematic costumes, or seating them before garden backgrounds. But a new movement in portraiture in the late nineteenth century presented subjects more realistically. Painters like Léon Bonnat, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Carolus-Duran showed people in real settings, with an “increased sense of life and personality.”

With his penetrating eye and quick hand, Sargent was especially qualified for a career as a portraitist. At this early stage in his career, he was already demonstrating his versatility, his talent at working in the style of the old masters, like Velázquez, and the new renegades, like Manet.

In the late spring of 1876, Sargent traveled to the United States. An American by birth, the twenty-year-old was required by law to visit the United States to maintain his citizenship. He left Liverpool in May with his mother and Emily. Dr. Sargent stayed behind to take care of six-year-old Violet, who was thought too young for such a long trip. Mary Sargent, who had resisted making the trip west for at least the past twenty years, was now going home, while her husband, who had always yearned to be reunited with his family in America, was remaining in Europe. He had to comfort himself knowing that his son and daughter would finally meet their American relatives.

In her typical fashion, Mary never sat still while they were in America. The Sargents docked in Jersey City in May, proceeded to Philadelphia, went on to Newport, then Montreal and Niagara Falls. The weather was unbearably hot that summer, too hot for so much traveling. Though tempers among his relatives might have been short during the four months the Sargents moved from place to place, everywhere he went, John Sargent charmed and impressed with his formal, but quaintly endearing, ways. He struck his relatives as being far more European than American.

The biographer Stanley Olson suggests that Sargent’s trip was liberating for him artistically. While at sea, he became fascinated with the idea of distorted perspective and examined different ways of representing it. He treated the ocean as new subject matter—though he had lived near the water in St.-Énogat, he never painted it until he went on this voyage—presumably inspired by a dramatic storm during the crossing. Sargent believed that his trip to America represented a new beginning for him, even a rebirth. The next time his name appeared in an art catalogue—to which he had supplied the accompanying biographical information himself—he was identified as “Sargent (John S.) né Philadelphia,” born in Philadelphia. In his mind, his birthplace was America.

Sargent returned to Paris in the fall. He applied his newly acquired sense of perspective in a painting of a popular Paris musical group,
Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver.
Emily told Vernon Lee that her brother worked “like a dog from morning till night.” He was consumed with creating the perfect painting for his first Salon submission.

The French were passionate about art, and they approached paintings with the same enthusiasm they would demonstrate for movies in the next century. The annual Salon, like the Cannes Film Festival today, was a monumental event, with all the attendant publicity and press coverage. It was a place to sell paintings and launch reputations. Art dealers, critics, and buyers could take the artistic pulse of Paris simply by noting which paintings commanded the most attention and who was looking at them. The Salon was a giant entertainment, however, not an academic experience, and so it was popular with nonprofessional audiences as well. During the show’s six-to-eight-week run, hundreds of thousands of people would crowd into the exhibition hall, the Palais de l’Industrie, on the Right Bank. Attendance would spike dramatically on Sundays, when admission was free, reaching numbers as high as fifty thousand.

The Palais de l’Industrie was enormous, with walls that rose to meet impossibly high ceilings. It could hold up to seven thousand works of art, including paintings and sculptures, which were wedged into every available space. The Salon was so big that even the most ambitious and energetic visitor could not see everything in one day.

Every year, a few artists would emerge as Salon favorites among the thousands who exhibited. Their works instantly became dominant images in popular culture: reproduced on the covers of newspapers and journals, copied onto posters, cards, and candy boxes, even reenacted onstage in dramatic tableaux vivants. Most important, these lucky artists would be bombarded with commissions, so they could actually make a living in art. Although the chance of being plucked out of obscurity in this manner was extremely rare, young artists held out hopes that they might achieve instant success. These aspirants as well as established artists would subject themselves annually to the arduous process of submitting a painting to the jury.

On Submission Day, anxious artists would transport their works to the Palais de l’Industrie, struggling to keep their top hats on while wrestling with often oversized masterpieces. They would have been a funny and familiar sight to Parisians, who knew they were placing their art, and their egos, in the hands of the forty-member Salon jury.

The procedure for creating the jury should have been democratic, since the judges were elected by artists who were veterans of the Salon. But as with most elections, it was frequently a popularity contest. The veteran artists would vote for their own patrons and teachers, hoping to gain from them a good word on the final selection day. Each painting submitted would be reviewed by all forty judges, who determined whether an entry would be accepted. The fortunate artists whose works had won a medal or an Honorable Mention at previous Salons bypassed this process: their paintings were accepted automatically. The judges also determined where in the Salon each accepted painting would hang, as placement was everything. The paintings that excited the jury were guaranteed visibility. The less impressive ones were “skyed,” or hung close to the ceiling. Many artists were condemned to anonymity simply because their works were difficult or impossible to see at the Salon.

The Salon opening, always on May 1, was tense and exhausting for artists. But it was one of the most important and anticipated days on every fashionable Parisian’s social calendar. It was
the
place to see and be seen. The festivities began with the exclusive vernissage on Varnishing Day, the morning before the official opening. Ostensibly a private preview for artists, critics, journalists, and other members of the art world, this intensely social event attracted celebrities of all kinds. Artists stood on ladders and attempted to apply varnish to their paintings so the glossy finish would be perfect at the next day’s opening, while trend-setting Parisians crowded around them, vying to identify the next rising star.

Edward Simmons, the American artist who was so captivated by Amélie Gautreau, described Varnishing Day as “the next excitement. Everyone of importance and all fashion turned out. New York society cannot conceive of what a place the fine arts have in France. . . . Inside, great masses of people go through the galleries together, with some such person as Sarah Bernhardt at the head and the lesser following.” Newspapers reported on the famous people who climbed the Salon steps. Great beauties always attracted attention. At one Salon opening, a
New York Herald
reporter witnessed the arrival of Amélie Gautreau: “Later on came Mme. [Gautreau], who does things in the way of art, but always distracts the artistic eye when she appears. She strolled slowly through the rooms, finding more interest in admiring the throngs than in the pictures.” Amélie was not the only Parisian who came to the Salon to be seen. Gyp, a satirist who typically lampooned socialites, wrote a short play that featured two characters exchanging dialogue about the Salon: “Then which paintings are you looking for?” asked one. “None!” answered the other. “[The] paintings are all the same to us!”

After spending a few hours at the Salon, spectators would walk the short distance to Ledoyen, a restaurant located in a park setting at the end of the Champs-Élysées. One of the oldest and most elegant dining establishments in Paris, it was rumored to have been where Napoleon met Josephine. Every year, the restaurant staged a special luncheon on Varnishing Day, setting up a tent to accommodate the hordes of artists and admirers who crowded into the gardens surrounding the dining rooms. A constant line of people waited for tables, and waiters were in such short supply that it was not unusual for impatient artists to serve themselves bread. Ledoyen was famous for its food, but most of the people who came on Varnishing Day were more interested in celebrity-spotting than eating. If they waited long enough, the artist of the moment was sure to make an appearance.

Seeking to make his mark at the 1877 Salon, Sargent settled on his first submission. He had started a portrait of a young woman, Frances (Fanny) Watts, and it seemed to offer possibilities. Fanny was a childhood friend who traveled the expatriate circuit, like Sargent’s friends Ben del Castillo and Vernon Lee. Sargent may have had a crush on Fanny, and this may have motivated him to paint her in the first place. But if he had these feelings, he did not pursue them. Fanny’s relatives believed that Mary Sargent discouraged a romance between the two because she had higher marital aspirations for her son.

Sargent finished the portrait in March of the year. A proud Dr. Sargent wrote about what he called his son’s “opus magnum” in a letter to his sister in America: “To my uneducated eye it is—particularly if one considers that it is his first attempt at a serious, finished work—a very creditable and promising one.” The portrait was especially ambitious in capturing motion and repose at the same time: Fanny is caught in the moment between sitting and standing, her body subtly poised to move.

The educated eyes agreed with Dr. Sargent. The Salon judges accepted the painting for the upcoming Salon, and expressed their enthusiasm for this work by an unknown twenty-one-year-old by hanging it where the crowds could see it. Critics responded favorably: Henri Houssaye, in the
Revue des Deux Mondes,
for example, called it
“un charmant portrait”
—exactly the kind of notice a young artist wanted.