The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (27 page)

He coolly turned over my sheet of grey paper [Healy would remember] and sketched the model, who resting, had fallen into a far better attitude than that which we had copied. The outline drawing was so strong, so full of life, so easily done, that I never had a better lesson.

The rough-mannered student, Thomas Couture, was to become one of the celebrated French painters of the day, and as a teacher have great influence on many more Americans to follow. He and Healy became fast friends. “There was in Couture’s talent such vigor, such frankness, and so much of life and truth that my admiration for the artist equaled my liking for the man.”

Genial by nature, always well-disposed to others, Healy made friends
easily, a quality that was to serve him to great advantage in his career. He loved good conversation, and the more his French improved, the more he caught on with the others in the studio, one of whom, a particularly affable young man named Savinien Edme Dubourjal, who painted miniature portraits, became another favorite.

Healy openly revered the master, Antoine Gros, who had studied under the great Jacques-Louis David and won acclaim for paintings glorifying Napoleon. Gros was still widely respected, but he had become, in his sixties, “a saddened and almost despairing man,” brooding constantly over the fact that he was no longer in fashion. In some quarters he was often the subject of outright dismissal. “
Gros est un homme mort!
” one critic had exclaimed. “He had outlived his popularity, and his heart was broken,” wrote Healy.

On June 25, 1835, Antoine Gros drowned himself in the Seine. Shaken by the loss, his studies in the atelier at an end, Healy refused to despair.

My life at this time was a life of extreme sobriety and very hard work. I was full of respect for the dollars I had brought with me, and my noonday meal often consisted of a small loaf with fruit, or cheese when there was no fruit. But I had good health, high spirits, and immense pleasure in the progress I felt I was making day by day.

His physical appearance was also in his favor. He stood about five feet eight and had by this time, in the Paris mode, succeeded in growing a small mustache. He parted his full head of dark brown hair down the middle and the beginnings of a frown, a vertical crease between the eyebrows of the kind that comes from much close concentration with the eyes, gave what might have been simply a handsome face an appealing degree of intensity. All this he captured quite well in his early self-portraits. In time he would wear eyeglasses and add a small goatee. In self-portraits done some years afterward, he looks very much like Eugène Delacroix.

His energy was phenomenal. He was seldom still. In 1837 he accepted an invitation to London to do portraits there. A year later, with two young
French artists, he set off from Paris on a painting tour of France and Switzerland on foot, often covering twenty or thirty miles a day. Then he was back again in London filling more canvases with the faces of English gentry.

Word of his talent spread. In Paris in 1838, the American minister to France, General Lewis Cass, asked Healy to paint his portrait, then another of Mrs. Cass, for which Healy would later win his first medal at the Paris Salon. The general was exceedingly proud of his gifted young countryman and spread the word further still.

In June of 1838, Healy was back in London in time to witness the coronation of Queen Victoria, and later decided to introduce himself to John James Audubon, much as he had once gone to see the beautiful Mrs. Otis on Beacon Hill, knowing that Audubon, too, in his youth had made ends meet painting portraits. Audubon was in London to supervise production of the fourth and final volume of his monumental work
The Birds of America
and was living with his wife on Wimpole Street. After protesting he was too busy to take time to sit for a portrait, Audubon said yes. Lewis Cass had been Healy’s first chance to paint an American notable. Audubon was the second, but also a hero to Healy and considerably more picturesque than the buff, well-fed general. He painted Audubon in the garb of a backwoodsman with his bird gun in hand.

Life for Healy was advancing rapidly, for by now he had met a shy young English woman, Louisa Phipps, one glimpse of whom, he said, was “enough to fix my destinies.” Fond of talking as he worked, Healy told Audubon he was in love. Audubon, who had been married for thirty years, immediately became more animated, assuring the young man the only real happiness in life was a good marriage.

In the spring of 1839, Healy received word from General Cass of an important commission awaiting him in Paris. He at once proposed to Miss Phipps. They were married in a quiet ceremony at St. Pancras Parish Church in London. Louisa wore her traveling dress, and as soon as the ceremony was over, they started for Paris. Healy had a hundred dollars; Louisa, “not a penny.” Nor could she speak a word of French.

General Cass, who was on excellent terms with King Louis-Philippe, had told His Majesty he wanted very much to have a portrait of the king
for his Paris residence and that he wished to commission young Healy to do it. Cass, who had fought bravely in the War of 1812, and afterward served as the territorial governor of Michigan and as secretary of war under President Andrew Jackson, was a man of considerable charm, as well as ample means, and lived on the avenue Matignon in as grand a manner as any American in Paris. After being shown the large, assured portrait Healy had done of Cass, the king agreed to sit.

The first session at the Tuileries Palace commenced with a moment of unanticipated drama.

Before beginning the portrait [Healy wrote], I advanced toward the King, so as to take the measure of his face, using a compass for that purpose. One of the courtiers, seeing the gleam of steel in my hand, rushed upon me and pushed me aside. With a smile, Louis-Philippe said, “Mr. Healy is a republican, it is true, but he is an American. I am quite safe with him.”

Like other Americans, Healy found Louis-Philippe easy to talk to and particularly happy to recall his own years in the United States. As the painting progressed, and the king grew increasingly interested in it, he recounted for Healy how once he had watched Gilbert Stuart at work on a full-length portrait of George Washington.

Healy had never been happier. He was delighted with his work, blissful in his new married life. He and Louisa had moved into tiny quarters on the Left Bank, on the rue d’Assas near the Luxembourg Gardens. The larger of two rooms served as a studio, the other as their bedroom.

The concierge kept the place clean, and we went out for our meals. It was not a complicated way of living, but it never struck us that we were not the happiest mortals under the sun.

They began entertaining. To compensate for a complete lack of silverware, their friend Dubourjal, the miniaturist, would arrive at the door with his coat pocket full of knives and forks, and bearing several bottles
of wine, which he loved to uncork and pour with due ceremony. Thomas Couture came also, though his loud voice and idea of humor did not sit well with shy Louisa. Where Dubourjal offered silverware from his pocket, Couture would pull out a live lizard and delighted in provoking disgust by showing raw oysters still alive at the moment they were swallowed.

King Louis-Philippe had chosen not to present himself in the portrait as the bourgeois gentleman frequently seen in the Garden of the Tuileries with his black suit and green umbrella. Instead he posed with his head held high by a stiff, gold-embroidered military collar, and wearing a chest full of decorations, heavy gold epaulettes, and a bright red sash over his right shoulder. Healy included the jowls, but the lift of the chin helped to compensate, and there was no suggestion that the head of black hair was a wig. In the completed work the overall look was of a vigorous man of military bearing clearly fit for his royal role. It was a long way from the pear-shaped Louis-Philippe of the political cartoons, yet a strong likeness nonetheless, and with life in it. All were pleased.

Healy rose early every morning and worked all day. On the rare occasions when he took time off, it was usually to go to the Louvre to stand for an hour or more studying a Rembrandt or Titian.

A larger, more commanding full-length portrait of Foreign Minister François Guizot followed that of Louis-Philippe. Guizot was the king’s chief advisor, and if not the real ruler of France, as many contended, he was possibly the greatest parliamentary manager of the age. A brilliant intellectual and former professor of history, he, like the king, spoke English fluently and preferred to converse in English while Healy worked. As a young man, he told Healy, he had translated Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and more recently had published a biography of George Washington. The conversation between painter and sitter never flagged, Healy would remember. He found Guizot courteous and “perfectly charming,” but beneath it all, “cold.”

On a canvas measuring nearly 8 by 41/2 feet, Guizot was shown standing at a table covered with official documents, his right hand clasping one
of them. He was in a black coat, straight of spine, and he stared straight at the viewer with the unmistakable look of a man of keen mind and substance, with no time for fools or views contrary to his own. “Inflexible” was another word Healy used to describe Guizot. It was one of Healy’s finest portraits yet, not just a deft likeness, but delineating character as well.

Thomas Appleton, who had known Healy and admired his work since Healy painted his sister Fanny in Boston, was in Paris again in the summer of 1841 and saw Healy at about the time the Guizot portrait was finished. “Healy is an excellent fellow,” Appleton wrote, adding prophetically, “and, if he perseveres [he] will come back to us someday with the best reputation for portraits of any American of his time.”

To what extent Healy’s fees may have been increasing all the while is not known, but he and Louisa moved from their two rooms on the Left Bank to “a rather better place” on the other side of the river, on the rue Saint-Lazare, with a studio “more fitted to receive distinguished sitters,” and more space for their expanding family. Louisa by now had given birth to two children, a boy and a girl, Arthur and Agnes.

In 1842, at the request of the king, Healy departed for America for the first time in eight years to make a copy of the Gilbert Stuart full-length portrait of Washington, which was hanging in the White House. Before the year was out, he was back in Paris with the Washington copy, as well as portraits he had done of President John Tyler and Senator Daniel Webster. When the king and others at the palace gathered for a first look, it is said, the portrait of Webster, “a magnificent-looking man,” attracted the most attention.

In the spring of 1845, Louis-Philippe asked Healy to go again to the United States and as soon as possible. Word had reached Paris that former president Andrew Jackson was seriously ill and the king wanted a portrait done from life while there was yet time. Further, he wished Healy to paint for him a whole series of portraits of living American statesmen to hang in his private gallery at Versailles. It was a commission such as no American artist had ever received until then, not Stuart or Copley, not Charles Willson Peale or Trumbull or Sully.

It was late May by the time Healy reached the Hermitage, Jackson’s
home near Nashville, Tennessee, and the gaunt old president, propped up with pillows in a big armchair (as Healy would remember), told him he was too late.

“Can’t sit, sir—can’t sit!” Jackson said.

“But, General, the King of France …” Healy began.

“Can’t sit, sir, not for all the kings in Christendom!”

Nashville was a world apart from Paris, as Healy knew from the time and effort it had taken him to get there. Yet he was pleased to find the plantation home of the supposedly rough-hewn Jackson decorated with fine French wallpaper and French mirrors. The dining room table was heavy with French china, the cellar stocked with French wine. The visitor from Paris was made to feel immediately at home and with the urging of young Mrs. Jackson, the general’s adored daughter-in-law, the old president changed his mind and agreed to sit. As it turned out, Healy painted two portraits, one for the king, the other, at Jackson’s request, for the daughter-in-law. When Jackson died on June 8, Healy was among those at the bedside.

From Tennessee, Healy traveled on to Kentucky to paint Henry Clay, then to Massachusetts, where he did the aged John Quincy Adams, who was still serving as a member of Congress. In their conversation over several days, Healy found him as fascinating as anyone he had ever met, and particularly when Adams began reminiscing about his boyhood years in France with his father.

It seemed odd [Healy would recall] to talk to one who had been in France before the [French] Revolution, whose father had spoken to him familiarly of Voltaire, of Buffon, of the Encyclopédistes, of the French court; who had been at school near Paris with Franklin’s grandson … the sensation was a strange one.