The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (64 page)

The price was 500 francs, or about $100. By contrast, the American dry goods impresario A. T. Stewart had recently paid $60,000 for a painting by the French master Ernest Meissonier.

The purchase by Louisine Elder was the first of many to follow. She was to become, with her future husband, Henry O. Havemeyer—and with the continued guidance of Mary Cassatt—one of the great art collectors of the era and the first to bring works of the Impressionists home to America.

Mary Cassatt’s first major work in the Impressionist manner was to be a portrait of her mother.

Charles-Émile-Auguste Durand—Carolus-Duran, as he preferred—was still in his thirties, young to be the master of an atelier. Primarily a portraitist,
he was flamboyant in appearance and manner, and exuberantly unorthodox in his teaching. His atelier on the boulevard Montparnasse was the most avant-garde in Paris.

Wild black hair, a sweeping, upturned black mustache, goatee, and a swarthy complexion, made him an arresting sight quite apart from his usual showy attire. A black velvet suit might be accented by a yellow shirt, a green tie, frilled cuffs, and a good deal of gold jewelry. He looked like a magician, which to his students he was.

He had spent two years in Spain and the influence of Velázquez had been powerful. His most arresting and important work thus far,
The Woman with the Glove
, a full-length portrait of his wife measuring five by seven feet, had all the drama and strong use of black of the Spanish master himself.

As a teacher, Carolus-Duran put far less emphasis on drawing than did such long-respected masters as Meissonier or Jean-Léon Gérôme. He stressed form and color. He wanted his students to paint directly—to take up the brush and draw and paint at the same time. To learn to paint, one had to paint, he preached. Painting was no mere “imitative” art.

Unlike the masters of other ateliers, Carolus-Duran kept his classes small—ten or fifteen students—and most of them were “happy American youths” who looked upon their master “as an elder brother,” as one wrote. Work commenced at seven-thirty in the morning. Twice weekly the master gave critiques, these sometimes accompanied by his virtuoso demonstrations, most often portraits of one or two of the students done with miraculously few strokes in what seemed mere minutes. The fee for students was $4 a month, or a dollar a week.

Those young Americans at work with Carolus-Duran in the spring of 1874 included several of marked ability and substantial prior training. Before coming to Paris, Will Low had been supporting himself as an illustrator in New York. J. Alden Weir had grown up drawing and painting under the guidance of his father, a noted artist who taught drawing at West Point. James Carroll Beckwith had studied for three years at Chicago’s Academy of Design and a year at the National Academy in New York.

But none among them showed anything like the ability of John Singer Sargent, as was evident from the morning he first entered the atelier that
May. Years later, recalling the “advent” of Sargent, Beckwith said it was either a Tuesday or a Friday, the days when Carolus came to criticize the work.

I had a place near the door, and when I heard a knock I turned to open it. There stood a grey-haired gentleman, accompanied by a tall, rather lank youth who carried a portfolio under his arm, and I guessed he must be a coming nouveau. This gentleman addressed me politely in French, and I replied in the same language, but with less fluency. … He evidently saw that I was a fellow countryman, for he then spoke in English and we held a short conversation in subdued tones. … Carolus soon finished his criticism, and I presented my compatriots. Sargent’s father explained that he had brought his son to the studio that he might become a pupil. The portfolio was laid on the floor, and the drawings were spread out. We all crowded about to look, and … [we] were astonished. …

There were paintings of nudes, portrait studies, copies in oil and watercolor of Tintoretto and Titian, sketches in watercolor of scenes and figures in Venice, Florence, and Rome. Long afterward Will Low could still feel the “sensation” of the moment.

The master studied these many examples of adolescent work with keenest scrutiny, then said quietly, “You desire to enter the atelier as a pupil of mine? I shall be very glad to have you do so.” And within a few days he joined the class.

Having a foundation in drawing which none among his new comrades could equal, this genius—surely the correct word—quickly acquired the methods then prevalent in the studio, and then proceeded to act as a stimulating force which far exceeded the benefits of instruction given by Carolus himself.

At age eighteen Sargent looked even younger. He was just over six feet tall, extremely well-mannered, multilingual, and considered himself an
American though he had never been to the United States and spoke with an English accent. He had spent his whole life in Europe. His expatriate mother and father had been wandering about Europe, moving from one city or spa to another for twenty years, according to the seasons of the year, always in search of a more amenable climate or more economical accommodations, seldom settling anywhere for long. They never found reason to be anywhere for long. John, who was born in Rome, had lived in Florence, London, Paris, various cities in Spain, Pau, Biarritz, Salzburg, Nice, St. Moritz, Venice, Lake Maggiore, Dresden, then Florence again before his return to Paris in 1874.

His father, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, who gave up a Philadelphia medical practice at age thirty-two, had long since grown weary of such self-imposed exile. “I am tired of this nomadic sort of life,” he had written from Florence to his mother in the fall of 1870.

The spring comes and we strike our tents and migrate for the summer. The autumn returns and we must again pick up our duds and be off to some milder region. … I wish there were some prospect of our going home and settling down among our own people and taking permanent root.

It was not the romantic expatriate life commonly imagined, free from the constraints of provincial America. In many ways it was a captive life and his a sad case. His wife, Mary Singer Sargent, had no desire to go home. She adored Europe—its art and music were the stuff of life for her. She sketched and painted quite well in watercolor. She loved to entertain, loved to shine in cultivated circles. She also suffered spells of bad health, as did John’s two younger sisters, Emily and Violet, and so they needed Europe for their health, she insisted, and flatly refused to go home.

Further, there was the matter of money. If one managed one’s resources prudently in Europe, one could not only get by but keep up appearances at far less expense than at home, and there was great appeal in that alone. Were one to return to the United States, one’s financial deficiencies would soon become all too apparent, and appearances mattered
exceedingly to Mary Sargent. Since it was her money they were living on, not her husband’s, her wishes prevailed.

As FitzWilliam wrote privately, “Mary’s income is only such as enables us to live on with constant effort to spend as little as possible. …” That income was approximately seven hundred dollars a year.

Mary was short, round, ruddy-faced, and brimful of
joie de vivre
when feeling well. He was lean, grey, austere, and melancholy. John’s only known portrait of his father, done a few years later, might have been titled
A Study in Sadness
. Everything about the long, thin face is downcast—the eyes and mouth, the drooping walrus mustache.

The joy of the parents in their children was expansive nonetheless, and in “Johnny” increasingly as his exceptional talent became ever more evident.

As a small boy, he had filled his schoolbooks with so many drawings his teachers despaired of his ever learning what was printed in them. He seemed not ever to have been unaware of beauty, a cousin, Mary Hale, later wrote. His first memory, he told her, was of a deep red cobblestone in the gutter of the Via Tornabuoni in Florence of a color so beautiful that he thought of it constantly and begged his nurse to take him to see it on their daily walks.

Seeing how advanced he was for his age, his mother insisted he draw and paint nearly every day. “Drawing seems to be his favorite occupation and I think he has the elements of a good artist,” FitzWilliam wrote proudly to his own father, adding in a summary appraisal what numbers of others were to say as time passed. “He is a good boy withal, and everyone seems to like him.”

He did well in school, in Latin and Greek, geography, history, and European languages. He loved music, learned to play the piano and mandolin. He also studied art in school and with tutors during the summer months. “I see myself that he studies well and with pleasure,” FitzWilliam reported, “and that he is very much pleased with his teachers—which is almost as essential to progress as that his teachers should be pleased with him.”

His mother went sketching with him, insisting always that no matter how many drawings or watercolors he began each day, one at least must be finished.

By thirteen the boy knew he wanted an artist’s life more than any other and both mother and father strongly encouraged him. In Florence in the winter of 1870 he was enrolled in classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti and on spring days went sketching with his mother in the Boboli Gardens.

Then in the spring of 1874 the whole family moved to Paris. “We hear that the French artists, undoubtedly the best now-a-days, are willing to take pupils in their studies,” John himself explained to a cousin. On May 19, FitzWilliam informed his father from Paris, “We came on here especially to see if we could not find greater advantages for John in the matter of his artistic studies.…” But to locate somewhere “comfortably and cheaply” proved difficult, “everything in the way of lodgings being very dear.”

A “smallish” apartment was found on the rue Abbatrice, close to the Champs-Élysées, and seemed near to heaven except for a nurse (to look after the young Violet), a “hard customer” who came with the apartment and soon had to be fired. She loved telling them in detail how she witnessed the whole rise and reign of the Commune and how much she had enjoyed it. She described the burning of the Hôtel de Ville and the Palace of the Tuileries and said she would love to see it all again. “So,” explained FitzWilliam, “we were afraid to trust the child to her, lest she would sell or otherwise dispose of our flesh and blood.”

As for Paris, he was exceedingly happy to be back. He genuinely liked and admired the French.

Paris is judged unfairly, I am convinced. Behind the gaiety, vice and debauchery which floats on the surface and which the transient comer only sees … there is a solid substratum of honesty and probity and economy and virtue, of intelligent, honest hard-work, and of indefatigable search for truth in morals and happiness and domestic virtues equal to what can be found anywhere in the world. …

Foremost was the importance of Paris to young John, who “works with great patience and industry and bids fair to succeed.”

With the arrival of summer, when Carolus-Duran moved his classes to Fontainebleau, John followed. That autumn he was accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts, where J. Alden Weir, also enrolled there, described him as “one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across. … Such men wake one up.” Hardworking Carroll Beckwith from Chicago said much the same, noting in his diary that Sargent’s work “makes me shake myself.”

Weir, Beckwith, Will Low, and others of the Americans, all still struggling to learn French, were hardly less astonished by the way Sargent could rattle on in perfect French—or Italian or German, whichever suited—quite as well as in English.

Work with Carolus-Duran continued, John’s power of concentration no less a wonder to the others than was his ability. One must look for the middle-tone, Carolus preached, and begin there. “
Cherchez la demiteinte
,” he would say again and again. And they must study Velázquez without respite. “
Velázquez, Velázquez, Velázquez, étudiez sans relâche Velázquez!
”

Years later, in the course of a conversation with Henry James’s brother, William, Sargent would remark of painting, “If you begin with the middletone and work up from it towards the darks—so that you deal last with your highest lights and darks—you avoid false accents. That’s what Carolus taught me.”

Living with his family, concentrating on his work, young John knew virtually nothing of after-hours student life on the Left Bank, until one night when, as he wrote to a friend,

we cleared the studio of easels and canvases, illuminated it with Venetian or colored paper lanterns, hired a piano and had what is called “the devil of a spree.” Dancing, toasts and songs lasted till 4, in short they say it was a very good example of a
Quartier Latin
ball.