The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (65 page)

Then he added, “I enjoyed our spree enormously, I hope not too much, probably because it was such a new thing for me.”

Of his fellow students, he got on with Beckwith especially well. In 1875, encouraged by his parents, he left the family and with Beckwith moved
into a fifth-floor studio on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs on the Left Bank. In off-hours, in a series of quick sketches, Beckwith recorded the remarkable Sargent (now sporting the beginnings of a beard) at the piano, Sargent at his easel painting, Sargent stretched in an armchair reading Shakespeare. It was as if Beckwith and the others were mesmerized by him. “Of course, we are dealing with a phenomenal nature,” Will Low explained.

“There were no difficulties for him,” remembered another American, Walter Gay. Yet John worked harder than anyone, which seemed surprising in someone so gifted. Those for whom things came easily usually made less of an effort than others, not more. Further, he had lived his whole life in a family in which no one worked, not his father, not his mother, not anyone.

It was rare, too, for any American student in Paris to have a family of such interesting and hospitable people residing close at hand, and the pleasure of being one of John’s guests at Sargent gatherings, his friends found, was great indeed. Beckwith, Alden Weir, Will Low, and others were invited frequently to join the Sargents for Sunday dinner, and always to their delight. Weir described those gathered as “the most highly educated and agreeable people I have ever met.” Among them were several young ladies—John’s sister Emily and three cousins of the Sargents, the Austin sisters—all “very sensible and beautiful,” as Weir said.

“The society of the Sargents and the Austins … has given me many charming Sunday evenings … and the habit of ease in ladies’ society, which I feared I had lost, I have again recovered,” Beckwith recorded happily in his diary.

From two portraits done by John at about this time, of his sister Emily and cousin Mary Austin, it is easy to see why the young men responded as they did.

In the spring of 1876, with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia a subject of much talk in Paris, Mary Sargent decided to take the two oldest, Emily and John, on a first visit to America. They were gone four months, during which they visited relatives in Philadelphia and toured the exposition.
Presumably, John saw the elegant portrait by Carolus-Duran prominently placed in the French art show, and the works of such American painters as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, who, too, had once studied in Paris. Nor could he or any of the hundreds of thousands attending the exposition have missed the giant hand and torch standing outdoors, the only part of sculptor Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty far enough along to display.

It was also the summer when, with much fanfare, the first wire for the cables of the new Brooklyn Bridge was strung across the East River in New York, and the summer of General Custer’s downfall at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Yet curiously nothing is known of what John or his mother and sister thought of any of this, or anything else other than that Mary found unbearable Philadelphia’s record heat of 97 degrees in the shade.

His Philadelphia cousin, Mary Hale, would remember John entertaining everyone with a performance at the piano, playing and singing his own version of a passionate Italian love song, the words composed entirely of the names of patent medicines.

The three touring Sargents went on to New York, Newport, and Niagara Falls, and for all John recorded of the trip, he might never have left France. He apparently wrote no letters. Some drawings and paintings that he did were his closest thing to keeping a diary, but they were few. The scenes he put the most time and feeling into were done at sea, in water-color and oil, and one in particular of a raging storm during the return voyage.

In spring, John’s friend Will Low liked to say, Paris “atoned” for all her “climatic misdeeds of the winter.” It was the season of renewal,
renouveau
, as the old French calendars said. On such days one felt a “joyousness,” the feeling that one could “undertake anything” or, better still, go off on a good walk across the city, over its bridges, through its gardens.

In the spring of 1877, Paris was “overflowing with people glad to enjoy
the sunshine,” reported a new English-language Paris paper, the
American Register
.

The lilac bushes at the Bois are in full bloom and the air is heavy with their fragrance. In all the public gardens and squares flowers have been planted, and are thriving. … The streets are thronged with ladies in beautiful
toilettes
. There are crowds of persons sitting in front of the cafés and restaurants, the boulevards are filled with vehicles of every description, yet there is no unpleasant hurry, no pushing.

Pedestrian traffic on the Pont Neuf, which had been freshly scraped and cleaned, and looked brand-new, was said to be 63,000 people a day.

Henry James, who only the year before delighted in saying he was thoroughly “Parisianized,” had decided in 1876, with the first sign of the return of a Paris winter, to pack up and leave. His work on
The American
finished, he was ready to move on. So by that spring he was settled in London. But, like James McNeill Whistler, who had abandoned Paris for London, James was to return often.

George Healy, after several weeks in Berlin, had come home to the rue de la Rochefoucauld, bringing his portrait of Otto von Bismarck, which he put on display in his studio. The
American Register
hailed it as a noble work of art. “Among our American portrait painters there is no one whose success has been more thorough or gratifying to our national pride than has that of Mr. Healy.”

Another of Healy’s subjects was Dr. Thomas Evans, who had returned to Paris, reestablished his dental practice, and was living handsomely as ever.

Mary Cassatt, too, was working almost exclusively on portraits, but with a much higher-keyed palette. Her range of color, now that of the Impressionists, included almost no black any longer. (“One morning one of us, having no black, used blue instead, and Impressionism was born,” Renoir once explained.) Velázquez and Correggio were all but forgotten.

She had turned a corner, inspired by a new hero, Degas, whom she had at last met. Having seen some of her work, he had asked a friend to
arrange an introduction. They came to her studio, and after an hour’s conversation, Degas asked her to join the Impressionists, making her the first and only American among the group. She would also be one of only two women. The other was the beautiful, ladylike, and immensely gifted French painter Berthe Morisot, whom Mary very much liked.

“I accepted with joy,” she wrote.

She who was so entirely, properly conventional in dress, manner, and background felt fully free now from the constrictions of conventional art. “Finally I could work with absolute independence without concern for the eventual opinion of the jury. … I detested conventional art and I began to live.”

Wellborn like Mary and ten years older than she, Degas was dark-eyed and dark-haired, with a grey beard. He dressed always in the dark suit and black top hat of a gentleman. Further, unlike all but a very few French painters, he had been to the United States and loved it. His mother was an American, and in 1872 he had made a trip to New Orleans to visit a brother. One of his finest paintings,
The Interior of a Cotton Broker’s Office at New Orleans,
had resulted.

Degas called frequently at Mary’s studio to talk and comment on her work. With her excellent French, she could converse readily and comfortably. It became an open friendship, but apparently no more than that. By nature contentious, he was not an easy man to get along with, and there would be long spells when she would have little to do with him. The American art student Walter Gay, who greatly admired Degas’s work and received “much good advice” from him, later said he was extremely hard to know. “He was very difficult, very witty, but his wit left a sting.”

Years later, when Louisine Elder Havemeyer asked Mary what Degas was like, she replied, “Oh, my dear, he is dreadful! He dissolves your will-power.”

How then could she get along with him?

“Oh,” Mary answered, “I am independent … and I love to work. Sometimes it made him furious that he could not find a chink in my armor, and there would be months when we just could not see each other. …”

Great as Degas’s influence was, she never became a disciple. He painted ballet dancers and laundresses, scenes in Paris cafés and at the
racetrack. Only rarely did she choose subjects anywhere beyond her own private, domestic circle.

In the fall of 1877 she found her métier of choice, when her mother, father, and sister all returned to Paris to move into a new apartment with her. It was another momentous change for her. The Cassatts had given up the family home in Philadelphia and come to Paris to stay, and largely for the same reason the Sargents had chosen their self-imposed exile. Faced with diminishing means, they could expect their money to go further in Paris. Contrary to what was often assumed, then and later, Mary never had limitless family resources to draw on.

A further reason for the move to Paris was sister Lydia’s health, which had become a cause for concern for all of them.

Father, mother, Lydia, and Mary moved into a sixth-floor apartment at 13 avenue Trudaine, on the heights just below Montmartre, not far from the Healy residence. “You know we live up very high,” Katherine Cassatt wrote to a grandchild, “… but we have a balcony all along the front of the house from which we can see over houses opposite, so we have a magnificent view!” Paris was “a wonder to behold,” wrote Robert Cassatt, whose primary pleasure was to go off alone on long walks.

Mary had always been close to her mother, whose company she thoroughly enjoyed. Extremely well read and a lively talker, her mother was, as Louisine Elder Havemeyer wrote, “interested in everything, and spoke with more conviction and possibly more charm than Miss Cassatt.” To give her mother something to do—and the opportunity for them to get caught up with each other after so long a separation—Mary asked if she would sit for a painting. Thus with the onset of winter, 1877, Mary began work on the portrait that was to mark her debut as an Impressionist.

The setting for the painting was entirely private, her mother plainly at ease comfortably seated in an upholstered chair reading
Le Figaro
through dark shell pince-nez glasses. She wore a casual white morning housedress. The chair was chintz-covered with a floral pattern. Behind, on the left, was a large gilt-framed mirror, a favorite visual device among the Impressionists and one Mary was to employ repeatedly.

It was the antithesis of a formal academic portrait. The subject was not set off by a conventional dark background. Nor did the subject look directly
at the viewer. She was busy at something else, her mind elsewhere. She could have been anyone and she seemed altogether unaware of anyone else’s presence.

The title did not provide the subject’s name. The painting was called simply
Reading Le Figaro
and would be greatly admired for portraying its subject so honestly, so entirely without pretense. “It is pleasant to see how well an ordinary person dressed in an ordinary way can be made to look, and we think nobody … could have failed to like this well-drawn, well-lighted, well-anatomized, and well-composed painting,” an admiring American art critic wrote. For her part Katherine Cassatt was extremely pleased. She thought it made her look ten years younger.

With her work and her family about her, Mary had little time for much else. She also had subjects to paint right at hand as she never had, as well as her own approving audience. Shipping the portrait of Katherine off to their son Alexander in Philadelphia, Mary’s father said in a note, “Here there is but one opinion as to its excellence.”

Sister Lydia agreed to pose next, and Mary undertook the first of a series of portraits—Lydia reading the paper, Lydia at tea, Lydia crocheting in the garden, Lydia working at a tapestry frame—the settings always private, domestic, refined, safe, quiet, and secure, with never a hint of the world beyond.

Since the move to Paris, Lydia’s health had continued to decline, and in 1878 a Paris physician warned that her trouble could be Bright’s disease, a degenerative disease of the kidneys. But the diagnosis was not conclusive. “The doctor frightened us out of our wits,” her mother wrote. “It seems it isn’t as hard to cure a person as it is to find out what is the matter. …” Much of the time Lydia felt too miserable and weak to go out. On days when she felt better, sitting for Mary gave her a sense of playing a constructive part, and like her mother, she was good company.

Mary also undertook a portrait of a little girl in a white party dress sprawled in a big blue chintz-covered armchair and looking totally uninterested in anything around, not even the small dog lying in another chair beside her. She was the daughter of a friend of Degas’s, who continued to take a close interest in everything Mary was doing. In this case Degas advised her on how to do the background, “
even worked on the background
,”
as she herself later acknowledged, never at all reluctant to give credit where it was due.