The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (75 page)

In the years since his exit from Paris, John Singer Sargent had returned several times, traveled to Nice to see his parents, engaged a London studio on Tite Street that had once belonged to James McNeill Whistler, gave up his Paris studio, and continued working no less than ever and with outstanding results.

In his naturally affable fashion he had also acquired a number of new friends, such as Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the American painter Edwin Austin Abbey, all of whom were to mean much to him for as long as they lived.

“We both lost our hearts to him,” wrote Stevenson, speaking for his wife as well, after Sargent came to their home in Bournemouth to do their portrait. At first, Stevenson continued, Sargent seemed to have “a kind of exhibition manner,” but on closer examination proved “a charming, simple, clever, honest young man.” As for the portrait, Stevenson thought it “poetical but very chicken-boned.”

To Sargent, Stevenson was “the most intense creature” he had ever met, and, wishing to paint him again, he asked if he might return. This time it was a scene with long, lean Stevenson striding across a room, in a black velvet jacket, twisting his long mustache, as if caught in the midst of a thought, his American wife, Fanny, slouched on a sofa off in the background to the far right, wrapped in a glittering shawl from India. She looked like a ghost, Stevenson thought. She adored the picture. “Anybody may have a ‘portrait of a gentleman,’ but nobody had one like this,” she wrote. “It is like a box of jewels.”

“Walking about and talking is his main motion,” Stevenson wrote, describing
Sargent’s manner at work. Palette in one hand, brush in the other, Sargent would look at his subject then advance on the canvas, as if in a duel, make a few swift strokes, back off, look again, then advance again and again, and all the while talking.

With such constant back-and-forthing in his studio, Sargent himself once calculated, he covered four miles a day. Work, work every day, work, was his way. “John thinks of nothing else,” his friend Edwin Abbey wrote, “and is always trying and trying … he is absolutely sincere and earnest.”

He painted indoors, outdoors, portraits, landscapes. On a return trip to France, during a visit to Giverny, he did a scene of Monet painting by the edge of a woods. And again he chose to do children in one of his most ambitious canvases, which he called
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
, after a popular song of the day, which he happened to be humming as he worked. Two little English girls in summer dresses, the daughters of an artist friend, Fred Barnard, are seen lighting paper lanterns in a garden at twilight. It had been inspired by a scene Sargent witnessed one evening on the Thames, and it took a considerable time to complete, since he insisted on working on it only at dusk when the light was right and then only for twenty minutes or so. Many considered it his finest picture to date.

Portrait commissions were plentiful as his reputation continued to spread. And he was traveling no less than ever, always packing books in his luggage. It was said no one traveled with more books than Sargent, who usually chose several on a particular period if, say, history was his interest at the moment, or if it were fiction, a number by the same author. He loved French literature especially—Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal—and read with remarkable speed.

In September of 1887 he boarded a steamer for Boston to paint portraits there. He had his first-ever one-man show at Boston’s St. Botolph Club, and included his
El Jaleo
and
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
. In New York, Stanford White hosted dinners at which Augustus Saint-Gaudens and others of “the Paris old boys” raised toasts in his honor. By the start of 1889, he had six paintings ready for exhibit at the Exposition Universelle.

The number of American artists working and studying in Paris in the 1880s had never been greater, and nearly every new arrival was young. Frank Benson, Dennis Bunker, Willard Metcalf, Edmund Tarbell, John Twachtman, Childe Hassam, and Robert Henri were all in their twenties, and all enrolled in the Académie Julian, now the most popular of the Paris ateliers, with nearly 600 students. Among the American women were Mary Fairchild, Ellen Day Hale, Anna Klumpke, Elizabeth Nourse, Cecilia Beaux, and Clara Belle Owen.

A group of aspiring young Mormon painters who called themselves “art missionaries” arrived from Utah, many to enroll at the Académie Julian. Their expenses were being provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in return for work they would later contribute, painting murals in the Temple at Salt Lake City. As one of their leaders, an especially gifted painter named John Hafen, said, their motivation was the belief that “the highest possible development of talent is the duty we owe to our Creator.”

Though no exact count was made of the American art students in Paris at the time, they undoubtedly numbered more than a thousand. And nearly all, judging by what they wrote then and later, were thrilled at the chance to be in Paris and found themselves working harder than they ever had.

Anna Klumpke, a tiny young woman who walked with a cane as a result of a childhood injury, was one of those in the women’s classes at the atelier of Rodolphe Julian. As a child in San Francisco, she had a doll named Rosa Bonheur and even then knew of Bonheur’s acclaimed painting
The Horse Fair
. Bonheur was her hero. Now in the atelier she heard Julian say, “Prepare yourselves to compete favorably with my men students.” There was no reason, he said, why one should not succeed “even as Rosa Bonheur.” In 1898 Bonheur would sit for a portrait by Klumpke.

Cecilia Beaux from Philadelphia, another enrolled in the Académie Julian, decided that for all one learned from such instruction, it was of secondary importance. “The immense value to the student in Paris,” she wrote, “lies in the place itself.”

A number of them were, like Mary Cassatt, greatly influenced by the Impressionists. Willard Metcalf, John Twachtman, and Childe Hassam
were to become foremost American Impressionists. Hassam, like John Sargent, got out into Paris to paint the city itself. “I am painting sunlight,” he wrote when doing his
Grand Prix Day
, a scene set near the Arc de Triomphe. He painted Notre-Dame, winter along the Seine, and
April Showers
on the Champs-Élysées. Asked long afterward what his greatest pleasure had been in those years, he said, “To go about Paris.”

Like generations of ambitious students before them, many devoted hours to making copies at the Louvre, an experience they found unsettling at first. Robert Henri was not alone in thinking, as he set up his easel in front of a Rembrandt, that everyone was staring at him. He had never seen a Rembrandt before, let alone tried to copy one.

Clara Belle Owen actually found encouragement in the work going on around her. “The people I saw copying at the Louvre were not doing so wonderfully well,” she reported to her mother at home in Chicago. “I can do better than they do, I know. …”

Rather than enroll in an atelier, she spent every available hour painting at the Louvre or the gallery of the Luxembourg Gardens. “The day was so short, and the weeks go by so rapidly,” she wrote again to her mother one December evening. “I do not have time to do half what I want to. Perhaps it is because I want to do so much.”

She liked especially working at the Luxembourg Museum and appreciated “the privilege we have of working there more and more. …

Just think how they keep the place warmed, furnish people with easels and stools, take care of your pictures, and charge nothing for it, except what one has a mind to give.

She had thought she might get homesick, but no. “I am too busy for that.”

When it came time, in 1885, for John Twachtman to leave Paris and sail for home, he wrote, “I hardly know what will take the place of my weekly visit to the Louvre … perhaps patriotism.”

“Paris! We are here!” Robert Henri had written boldly in the “Log” he kept. “We feel our speechlessness keenly. …”

A lanky New Yorker, Henri was twenty-one years old and highly talented. He and four other American students had rented an apartment on the Right Bank, on the rue Richerand, five floors up a spiral stairway.

“Dust and dirt are everywhere,” he wrote on September 26, 1888, after moving in:

But with soap and muscle we did great work. The red tiles in the kitchen fairly shone and everything was in good shape for the reception of the little iron beds, the straw seated chairs and other bits of furniture which we soon got in order. …

When we turned in, it was with feelings of pleasure, we were in our house at last! Our own little iron beds!

Not even the population of fleas or his “bungling attempts” at French seemed to bother him. “The other fellows admit the same [inability with French] and we all laugh at the ridiculous situations we get ourselves into.”

So crowded was the studio at the Académie Julian every morning that it meant a scramble for a place close enough to see the model, “a pretty woman.” Emphasis at the academy was on mastering drawing in advance of painting.

“Made start—poor one—hard lines and poor expression,” he recorded of one morning’s effort. But then the day brightened:

Julian treats the school—all hands to [the] café. Usual noise and circus, wine, fully 200 fellows. Leaving the café the crowd formed in line—hands on shoulders and went running up [the rue] St.-Denis, stopping wagons, creating excitement. … All out of breath, return to studio. The model was along with us, undresses and work is resumed. …

In a letter to his parents Christmas Day, 1888, Henri wrote that the praise he received and seeing his work displayed on the studio wall were certainly encouraging, but they must not expect too much. He had a good way to go.

Since I have been here my eyes have opened and the immense mountain I am to climb, to win my success, appears before me with all its formidable aspect. … I am nevertheless more determined to make the attempt and I shall stick to the struggle as long as I live.

Another day he wrote, “Who would not be an art student in Paris?”

On the night of May 5, 1889, like just about everyone else, Henri and his friends were swept up in the spectacle of brilliant illuminations across the city, music and dancing in the streets. It was the eve of the grand opening of the exposition.

Flags everywhere [he wrote the next day]. Great crowds along the river, bridges … boats all wonderfully illuminated. Trees full of … Chinese lanterns …

Despite all the criticism of the Eiffel Tower, despite the late opening of many exhibits, despite the dreadful shock earlier in the year from the financial collapse of the Ferdinand de Lesseps Panama Canal Company— the bursting of the giant “Panama Bubble” that affected hundreds of thousands of French investors—and despite innumerable tiresome forecasts that the exposition could never possibly come up to those of other years, the great Exposition Universelle of 1889 was the biggest, best, most profitable, and enjoyable world’s fair ever until then.

From its opening on May 6 to closing day six months later on November 6, the crowds far exceeded expectations and the attendance at all previous fairs. The first day, half a million people poured through the twenty-two entrances. The total number by November was 32 million. Some 150,000 Americans came to the fair, and in the words of the
American Register
, they, with thousands more foreigners and millions of French, “shed over Paris a shower of gold” like nothing before.

Never had the city looked so scrubbed and appealing. The ruins of the
Palace of the Tuileries were gone at last. Thousands of electric bulbs lit up the Eiffel Tower. Every night featured a show of fountains illuminated by electricity.

So much that had been created was so unimaginably colossal, quite apart from the tower. The Palais des Machines, built of iron and glass, was the largest space ever constructed under a single roof. It measured more in length than the tower in height, and the weight of its iron was greater even than that of the tower.

American machinery and products on display included giant steam engines and steam pumps, most of them in motion, lawnmowers and typewriters, which were still a novelty to Parisians. A New York confectioner provided a full-size replica of the Venus de Milo in chocolate.

The Thomas Edison display alone filled a third of the American exhibit space in the Palais des Machines, the inventory of Edison’s inventions and devices totaling no less than 493, and of all those creative Americans whose work was shown, none had such celebrity as Edison. “What Eiffel is to the externals of this exposition,” said the
New York Times
, “Edison is to the interior. He towers head and shoulders in individual importance over any other man. …” So great was the crush of admirers around him whenever he appeared anywhere that he felt forced to hide for days at a time, out of sight in the studio of an American artist friend, Abraham Anderson, who used the opportunity to paint his portrait.