The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (76 page)

One of the many new productions on display at the Palais des Machines was a small four-wheeled motor car powered by a new kind of petroleum engine—a two-cylinder internal-combustion engine—developed by a German engineer and inventor, Gottlieb Daimler. Most people thought it a toy only. As a writer in
Le Petit Journal
observed a short while later, “Off in this hidden corner … was germinating the seed of a technological revolution.”

The works of art on display at the Palais des Beaux-Arts totaled more than 6,000, making it the largest art exhibit ever assembled in one place except at the Louvre. American works numbered 572, second only to the volume of French paintings and sculpture.

Pictures by Thomas Eakins, Cecilia Beaux, Walter Gay, Edwin Abbey, Will Low, Theodore Robinson, Anna Klumpke, James Carroll Beckwith,
and Alden Weir were to be seen. William Merritt Chase showed eight pictures, the most of any American, and Kenyon Cox entered a portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens at work completing a clay relief of William Merritt Chase.

A portrait of Lord Lytton by George P. A. Healy was hung on the same wall with Sargent’s
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
.

Everybody had an opinion. “A remarkable portrait picture of little girls by John Sargent … takes the cake,” wrote Robert Henri in his diary.

One young American, John Douglas Patrick from Kansas, a student at the Académie Julian, caused a sensation with an enormous dark canvas called
Brutality
, portraying a Paris wagon driver savagely beating his horse with a club. It was a scene of a kind he and other Americans had witnessed and found appalling. Indeed, a U.S. government commission report on the exposition had only praise for nearly everything about Paris, except for “the unchecked brutality” of cab and wagon drivers and the sufferings of their horses.

Buffalo Bill Cody arrived with his Wild West Show, his troupe of cowboys, Indians, and horses, and star performer “Little Sure-Shot,” Annie Oakley, creating a sensation of a kind not felt in Paris since the days of Tom Thumb and George Catlin and his Indians. Performances were staged on show grounds in the Parc Neuilly, just beyond the Arc de Triomphe, and drew steady, enthusiastic crowds. Buffalo Bill even posed for a large portrait by Rosa Bonheur seated astride his favorite white horse.

Added to all this was the fascination of the constant human parade, at the fair and up and down the avenues, a show many visitors enjoyed as much as anything.

Still, nothing about the exposition so symbolized its glamour, its theme of modern achievement and progress, or attracted such throngs through the entire event as the Eiffel Tower. As colorful as anything at the highly colorful fair, it had been painted five shades of red, from a dark, bronze-like color at the base to a golden yellow at the top. Few would have disagreed with the Boston correspondent who wrote that it deserved to be ranked with “the wonders of the world.”

People stood for hours in long lines waiting their turns to go up. By the close of the fair, 1,968,287 tickets had been sold—at the equivalent of
40 cents to go to the first platform, 60 cents to the second—bringing in more than a million dollars, a sum equal to the entire cost of building the tower. Nor did this include profits from the popular restaurants on the first platform.

To the Americans who made the ascent it was a matter of no small import that the ride up to the first platform was made possible by the Otis Elevator Company of New York, by a device more like a steep mountain railway than an elevator.

While disdain for the tower did not disappear, it was greatly exceeded by resounding public approval, and nothing confirmed that quite so much as the blessing conferred by Edison. He had been up the tower several times before August 16 when he went still again to join a group of friends. During lunch at one of the restaurants, somebody at the table dismissed the tower as nothing more than the work of a builder. Edison at once objected. The tower was a “great idea,” he said. “The glory of Eiffel is in the magnitude of the conception and the nerve in execution.” He liked the French, he added. “They have big conceptions.”

Among the wealthy, prominent New Yorkers in Paris that summer were Henry O. Havemeyer and his wife, the former Louisine Elder, and their three children. They had come for the fair but also on a serious mission to buy art. Henry—Harry, as his friends called him—was considered one of the brilliant entrepreneurs of the day, having newly organized the first American sugar trust and thereby rapidly increased an already large family fortune. He had now set about collecting paintings. He and Louisine both took a serious interest in art and in their new mansion under construction on Fifth Avenue, there would be ample walls to fill.

For Louisine a great part of the excitement of being back in Paris was the prospect of seeing Mary Cassatt again and introducing her husband.

The meeting was “indelibly graven” on her mind, Louisine would later write. She and Harry called at 10 rue de Marignan, where Mary, with her parents, had been living for two years, and found Mary confined to bed with a broken leg. “Her horse had slipped upon the pavement of the
Champs-Élysées and she sustained a fracture,” Louisine wrote. Still, Mary was “very dear and cordial.”

It is difficult to express all that our companionship meant. It was at once friendly, intellectual, and artistic, and from the time we first met Miss Cassatt was our counselor and our guide.

Louisine announced that in the few days since arriving in Paris, she and Harry had already bought a landscape by Gustave Courbet. “What a man Courbet was!” Mary exclaimed in approval.

With Mary on the “lookout” for them, the Havemeyers were to buy the works of Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, and Degas, in addition to several by Cassatt herself.

Since the death of her sister Lydia in 1882, Mary’s work had fallen off, her life become even more secluded. The move to a smaller apartment had been made because of her father’s increasing lameness and her mother’s sufferings from rheumatism and other ailments, and though Mary had kept her former studio, she often found herself in no mood to work.

There were financial worries besides. In an effort to help, Mary’s brother Alexander sent occasional checks. Still, sales of her work became of increasing importance. “Mame has got to work again in her studio, but is not in good spirits at all. One of her gloomy spells,” her father wrote at one point. “All artists, I believe, are subject to them.”

He found her “lamentably deficient in good sense” about many things, and “unfortunately the more deficient she is the more her mother backs her up,” he complained to Alexander. “It is the nature of women to make common cause against the males and to be especially stubborn in maintaining their opinions. … They try my patience to the last point of endurance sometimes. …”

Mary insisted they make a trip to London, to which he objected on the grounds that she was subject to dreadful seasickness. Besides, he had no wish to go anywhere. As he reported to Alexander afterward, Mary was so sick from crossing the Channel she had to be carried off the boat. “She is dreadfully headstrong. …”

For her part Mary told Alexander she was so worried about her mother and her headaches that she had no time for painting or anything, “and the constant anxiety takes the heart out of me.” A long stay at Biarritz was tried for her mother’s benefit, but to little effect.

The paintings Mary produced were, as before, almost exclusively of genteel women—
Lady at the Tea Table, Girl Arranging Her Hair
. An exception was a portrait of Alexander and his son Robert, painted in 1885 while they were visiting in France.

In 1886, when the French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel arranged a first-ever Impressionist show in New York, some of her paintings were included with those by Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Morisot, and Renoir.

Nothing of hers was to be seen at the exposition, however, and with all that was being written and said about art at the time, her name rarely received mention.

But it was then, in 1889, the year of the exposition and her reunion with the Havemeyers, that Mary Cassatt took up the theme of mother-and-child,
maternité
, the subject that would occupy her for years and result in many of her finest, most-celebrated works.

Berthe Morisot had been painting mothers with children for ten years or more, since the birth of her own daughter. But Cassatt, who never had a child, embraced the theme heart-and-soul as few painters ever had. Much as when she first discovered Impressionism, she began to live again.

Of the six paintings John Sargent exhibited at the exposition, all portraits, that of the Boit daughters attracted by far the most attention. Groups of people continually clustered about it, and often returned to look again, drawn by its air of mystery, but also by its warmth and vitality.

Sargent was “easily the most distinguished and original of American artists abroad,” wrote a critic for the
New York Times
reporting on the fair. “He does not know how to be commonplace or conventional.”

For his works on display, Sargent, at age thirty-three, received one of the exhibition’s gold medals and was made chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. The fuss over
Madame X
seemed, like the uproar over the Eiffel Tower, to have largely disappeared.

For Sargent such tributes just then meant more than was generally understood. Earlier in the year, at Bournemouth, England, his father had died. As Vernon Lee wrote, FitzWilliam Sargent “had become a silent and broken old one, and the end had come slowly.” John, who was seldom ever ill and not known to have much patience with those who were, stayed faithfully with him, looked after him the whole while. “I can never forget,” she wrote, “the loving tenderness with which, the day’s work over, John would lead his father from the dinner table and sit alone with him till it was time to be put to bed.”

Meanwhile, happily, the work he was engaged in, another ambitious portrait, offered a perfect chance to paint as freely and as much from the heart as he ever had.

He had been to see the opening night of
Macbeth
in London, with the great English actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in the leading roles. At the moment when Ellen Terry first appeared on stage, Sargent was heard to exclaim quietly, “I say!”

She wore a long flowing robe of dazzling green, blue, and gold and it was thus that Sargent painted her, at her crowning moment in the tragedy, literally lifting a gold diadem over her head. He felt deeply the infinite power of music, books, and great theater, and at his best, in his most serious work, he strove to express his own deepest emotions about life.

He chose a large canvas—interestingly it was almost exactly the same dimensions as his
Madame X
—and he rendered Ellen Terry’s powdered face in shades nearly as deathly pale. But here there was no labored reworking of the paint. He put it on with his natural flair, in swift, sure strokes and dashes, and with greatest pleasure obviously in her sense of show. There was no holding back. She had been on the stage since age nine and was at the height of her career, as the gold crown suggested. And he and she both wanted that to be apparent.

The painting, his only literally theatrical work, left no doubt of Sargent’s love of her artistry in that powerful moment in the play—her moment—in addition to his own power.

The brilliance of the work was recognized at once. It went on exhibit in London in May of 1889, at the New Gallery. The critic for the London
Times
said that to stand before it was “to enter a new world altogether.”

The painter has deliberately chosen a costume which taxes his power to the uttermost … and a moment when the intensity of the emotions displayed might well daunt the boldest attempt in art to realize them. … The face is pallid as death and on it the artist has striven to express the meeting point and clash of two supreme emotions of ambition and of the sense of crime accomplished and moral law thrown down.