Strapless (15 page)

In addition, Pedro was running for local office that summer and was spending more time at home because of a falling-out with his rich and powerful uncle, Charles La Chambre. Pedro and his brother had been employed by La Chambre as agents in his guano-importing business. The older man unexpectedly sold the company, and he may have divided the profits unequally and thus propelled the families into a full-fledged feud. Pedro shifted his attention to local government and to domestic matters at the château.

His efforts to insinuate himself into the government of Châteauneuf-du-Faou, a neighboring municipality, in the summer of 1883 were not successful. The Breton newspaper
Le Salut
ran a heated editorial outlining residents’ complaints against him. Pedro Gautreau didn’t know their township and had no understanding of how to represent it, they said; he was using money and influence to force himself into a community that did not want him. Ultimately, Gautreau was rejected in favor of a native politician.

Sargent continued struggling with what he termed “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau.” He realized that there would be no routine for—and possibly no results from—the difficult job ahead. He was able to turn out gemlike sketches and studies of Amélie, but he became paralyzed whenever he tried to work on her formal portrait. He was blocked. The most basic decision, even the size of the canvas, eluded him. He waited for inspiration, but it just didn’t come.

Sargent tried to maintain his sense of humor, at least when communicating with Albert de Belleroche. “Dear Baby,” he wrote, “Despite the ridiculousness of conversing with a child, here I am answering your letter. But please don’t write me anymore! Oh no. I am still at Paramé, basking in the sunshine of my beautiful model’s countenance. Mme. Gautreau is at the piano and driving all my ideas away.” Sargent illustrated the letter with an impish pen-and-ink drawing of Amélie’s head peeking over the top of a piano, presumably playing the annoying tune.

Sargent, frustrated and discouraged, needed a change of scenery. Nothing had happened the way he had anticipated when he agreed to paint Amélie at the château. After weeks of false starts, he had run out of ideas for the portrait. Amélie, whom he hoped would be his muse, was not particularly interested in him or his painting. Her looks, which at first had been inspiring, if challenging, were proving downright difficult. Hoping to clear his head, Sargent returned to Paris in mid-July.

The city was crowded with people who had come for the Bastille Day festivities. Sargent persuaded Belleroche and another artist friend, Paul Helleu, to accompany him to Haarlem to see paintings by Frans Hals; there was a night train from Paris. Sargent had made the trip before and had found it enlightening. Artists often traveled such distances to see works they had read about; these trips were an important part of their education. In Sargent’s case, travel was a natural and necessary part of his life, just as it had been in his childhood. His letters repeatedly refer to trips he had taken or trips he was planning.

Night trains, with their fully appointed dining rooms and sleeping cars, offered a romantic form of transportation. Belleroche sketched Sargent while he was sleeping in his berth, producing an intensely personal vision of the artist at his most vulnerable and exposed.

Although Sargent had been consumed by Amélie’s image and personality for the past few months, Belleroche had never really left his mind. There is a small Sargent pen and ink drawing of a head that for years had been thought a sketch for
Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast.
The head is turned at the same angle as Amélie’s in the painting. One image fits perfectly over the other. But a recent theory holds that the head in the sketch belongs to Albert de Belleroche. Sargent had started to draw Amélie, as faint marks on the paper indicate, but he transformed her into Belleroche, shortening the ears and nose and adding more masculine touches.

 

 

Sargent was in fact thinking about Belleroche when he was painting Amélie. With a few quick pencil marks, he merged one obsession with another. True, there was a distinct physical resemblance between Amélie and Belleroche, at least in the way Sargent sketched and painted them. Both subjects had fine, albeit exaggerated features, and looked dreamy and enigmatic in their poses. This provocative theory suggests Sargent’s emotional confusion in the summer of 1883. His blending of the two images was not just a drawing exercise. As the art historian Dorothy Moss puts it, Sargent saw a “woman in a man and a man in a woman.” He drew Amélie and Belleroche over and over, using his art to express his obsession with the two people he desired most.

If Sargent was torn between desires, the excursion to Haarlem pushed him in Belleroche’s direction. By the time he left his friend in Paris and returned to Amélie in Les Chênes, Sargent’s feelings for her had changed. His romantic haze lifted and his artistic block disappeared. Sargent was back in control: he knew exactly how to paint her portrait, and he was ready to begin.

S
argent would now make up for lost time. He decided on a full-length portrait of Amélie, 82⅛ by 43¼ inches, since a smaller painting would get lost in the thousands of entries that decorated the Salon walls. An oversized work had a better chance of being seen, and accordingly, some of Sargent’s recent Salon works had been enormous.
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
was 87⅜ by 87⅝ inches, and
El Jaleo
94½ by 137—impossible to miss. Sargent wanted the same visibility for his latest work.

Amélie’s position in the painting would be dramatically different from that in any of the preliminary sketches, where she had sat prettily on a couch or stood decorously at a window. Instead, he condemned Amélie, who hated remaining motionless, to one of the most tortuous poses in art history. He had her stand with her right arm leaning tensely on a table that was just a little too short to be a comfortable source of support. Her face turned sideways to draw attention to her remarkable profile, while her body pointed to the front. The muscles of her neck strained to keep her head at its awkward angle.

Sargent’s plain-weave canvas was primed probably with gray oil-based paint, as were most of his portraits at the time. This particular shade of gray was made by mixing ivory black and lead white in linseed oil; the combination gave a coolness to the painting even after colors were applied over it. Sargent was generous with his paint, and he kept his palette heavy with pigments he combined with various mediums. Whites and other pale colors were mixed with poppy-seed oil because it did not yellow as quickly as linseed oil, which was reserved for darker colors.

Sargent planned to surround Amélie’s figure with a dark, simple background, as he had done in
Mrs. Harry Vane Milbank
and
Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast.
It was difficult, however, to find a background color that complimented Amélie’s pale skin. Sargent settled on a mixture of ivory black, Mars brown, and a generous quantity of medium. He knew that this combination would produce a background resembling the brown in the works of Van Dyck and other masters.

Amélie’s unusual pallor presented other technical challenges; his work would be judged in large part on how well he rendered her skin. Sargent wanted to paint Amélie’s white flesh realistically, but in some lights it was mother-of-pearl while in others it was a sickly lavender. Candlelight, though it softened the effect of her makeup, was too dim. Sargent needed strong light, yet he feared it might be unflattering. He tried his usual approach to flesh tones, using lead white, vermilion, bone black, rose madder, and even viridian green. Against the dark background of the painting, Amélie’s skin looked macabre, corpselike, and her red-tipped ears inflamed.

Sargent fussed and fussed with his paints for a solution, as Amélie struggled to maintain her pose during endless sessions. One day, the jeweled strap of her dress slid off her tense shoulder. She may have tried to shrug it back into place. But Sargent, a genius at identifying the gesture or signal that revealed his subject’s essence, assured Amélie that it was exactly what the portrait needed to distinguish it from other paintings of beautiful women in evening dress. Pozzi’s fingers at his belt exposed the eager womanizer within, while his hand at his heart said he worshipped beauty. Similarly, Amélie’s fallen strap, which called attention to the exquisite shoulder above, was enticing. Her profile, and her eyes averted into the distance, said she was unattainable. What did she think of Sargent’s daring idea? Was she worried that people would find the painting risqué? After all, she must have known of the
Olympia
scandal. Even though Amélie wanted to be outrageous, there was a fine line between fame and notoriety, and no one, not even she, would have wanted to cross it.

From Amélie’s own words, though, it is apparent that she felt nothing but admiration for her portrait. In a note she asked Sargent to include with a letter to their friend Madame Allouard-Jouan, Amélie wrote:
“Mr. Sargent a fait un chef d’oeuvre du portrait, je tiens à vous l’écrire car je suis sûre qu’il ne vous le dira pas.”
Sargent, she believed, had created a masterpiece. She was anxious to tell her friend this, as she was sure Sargent himself would not tell her. Even in its unfinished state, Amélie loved her portrait. Sargent’s approach was bold, even risky, she knew. But her own calculated risks had served her well in the past.

Sargent now had a firm grasp of the overall look of the portrait, though he was still working on certain problems, such as the color of Amélie’s skin. He found a pleasant distraction in the arrival of Judith Gautier, who was vacationing in nearby St.-Énogat. Gautier was also an acquaintance of Amélie’s: the two women would have had many social occasions to meet, in Paris and in Brittany. One connection between them was through Pozzi. Sargent sketched the two women at Les Chênes, standing very close together with their arms around each other’s shoulders while they communicated some secret message—perhaps about Pozzi. Sargent titled the drawing
Whispers.

When Sargent visited Gautier at her beach house, Le Pré des Oiseaux (the field of birds), he encountered an environment quite different from the propriety of Les Chênes. Gautier’s house, a compact villa separated from the beach by a balustraded stone staircase, exploded with her personality. Every corner was packed with souvenirs from Gautier’s travels and memorabilia of her many friendships.

Dominating one wall in her living room was a stained-glass window designed for her illustrious father. The front rooms, including the living room, overlooked the beach, while a sun porch at the back of the house offered a lovely view of the gardens. At the edge of the property was a small wooden pavilion that enchanted and amused many of Gautier’s visitors. Robert de Montesquiou called it a “cigar box.” Yamamoto, an artist visiting from Japan, had covered the interior walls of the pavilion with delicate painted blossoms. Le Pré des Oiseaux was a place where fancy ran free.