CHAPTER ELEVEN

PARIS AGAIN

I began to live.

—MARY CASSATT

I

“I have never seen Paris so charming as on this last Christmas day,” wrote Henry James, Jr., in the fourth of his “letters” to the New York Tribune. “The sky was radiant and the air was soft and pure. … It was a day to spend in the streets and all the world did so.”

He had first seen Paris as a boy of twelve while touring Europe with his family. He had returned now, twenty years later, to work on a novel. To help meet expenses, he was doing two letters a month for the Tribune, for which he received the sizable sum of ten gold dollars a week.

In the first of his letters, dated November 22, 1875, he stressed that any American who had been to Paris before found on return that his “sense of Parisian things becomes supremely acute.” He wrote of Charles Garnier’s new opera house, finished at last and “the most obvious architectural phenomenon in Paris,” and a new play by the son of Alexandre Dumas in rehearsal at the Théâtre Français.

In the fourth letter he extolled the “amazing elasticity” of France:

Beaten and humiliated on a scale without precedent, despoiled, dishonored, bled to death financially—all this but yesterday—Paris is today in outward aspect as radiant, as prosperous, as instinct with her own peculiar genius as if her sky had never known a cloud.

Highly knowledgeable about art, no less than music and theater, James wrote admiringly of several paintings hanging in the Théâtre Français, and particularly a portrait of a lady pulling off her glove by Carolus-Duran, who, of all the modern emulators of the seventeenth-century Spanish master Diego Velázquez, James declared “decidedly the most suc cessful.”

At age twelve, James had spent hours in the Louvre with his older brother, William, where they “looked and looked again” at paintings, all the time wondering what he would make of his life. But now, at thirty-two, his career was well established. He had published dozens of reviews, travel sketches, and more than twenty-four short stories. A first novel, Roderick Hudson, was about to be published. The second was his reason for being back in Paris. Called The American, it began in the Louvre, with its protagonist, Christopher Newman, reclined on a “commodious” divan in the Salon Carré, contemplating Murillo’s Immaculate Conception.

That James was in Europe to stay seems not yet to have entered his mind. After an uneventful crossing of the Atlantic and a brief stopover in London to freshen his wardrobe, he had had little trouble finding a suitable apartment—two bedrooms, parlor, and kitchen—on the rue de Luxembourg (now the rue Cambon), a block from the Place Vendôme. The street was relatively quiet and his windows, facing south, caught the full sunlight. “If you were to see me, I think you would pronounce me well off,” he wrote to his father, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had inherited his wealth and took great interest in how the family money was spent. “Considering how nice it is, it isn’t dear,” Henry assured him.

He wrote faithfully week after week—to father, mother, sister Alice, brother William—in an effort to portray the new life he had embarked upon and especially his excitement over the French writers he had already met, including Edmond de Goncourt, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russian Ivan Turgenev, whom he liked best. He had also, he reported to his mother, knowing how it would please her, “taken a desperate plunge” into the American circle by attending two balls and a dinner party. But he had no relish for such company.

He missed his family dreadfully. “I am waiting anxiously for the letter from William who was to write to me on the Sunday after yours,” he wrote to his father. “But make mother write too. I have heard from her but once since I left home. It seems an age.” “Love to all in superabundance,” he would end a long letter to his mother.

He was in Paris to work, and Paris was “an excellent place to work,” he assured his editor at the Atlantic, William Dean Howells, who would be publishing the new novel in installments.

Quite unlike James himself, the novel’s main character, Newman, who was new to Paris, had come solely to be amused: “I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything.” James portrayed him as tall, lean, and muscular, a veteran of the Civil War, a success in business with money aplenty and ready to spend, awkward still in French but decidedly interested in the company of attractive women—none of which applied to the author himself. A graduate of Harvard Law School, James had been exempted from military service because of a physical infirmity. He had never worked in business, not even a day, and was neither tall nor muscular, nor, it seemed, much interested in women beyond spirited conversation, at which he excelled. But as it was with his main character, the longer he stayed in the great French capital, the greater its appeal.

“What shall I tell you?” he began a letter to Howells one April morning. “My windows are open, the spring is becoming serious, and the soft hum of good old Paris comes into my sunny rooms. …”

“The spring is now quite settled and very lovely,” he told brother William a few weeks later. “It makes me feel extremely fond of Paris and confirms my feeling of being at home here. … I scribble along with a good deal of regularity. …” And that, as he knew William understood, was the point.

Since the brutal catastrophes of 1870–71, the numbers of Americans coming to Paris had been growing steadily. In a single week in September 1872, the Grand Hôtel, always popular with Americans (including James’s fictional Christopher Newman), had to refuse accommodations to two hundred people. Many, like James, were back for a second or third time. Among them was Senator Charles Sumner, who, at sixty-two, had returned once more in need, his physicians said, of rest and relaxation. And as before in Paris, he was “the recipient of much attention from all quarters.”

In a city focused on swift revival, Americans were welcome as never before. The economic effect of their presence was phenomenal, as confirmed by Galignani’s Messenger:

It is generally acknowledged that the trade of Paris is now mainly sustained by American visitors who spend more money among the shopkeepers than all the rest put together. … we only wish there were more of them, for this is about the best and most effective way in which Uncle Sam can aid the new French Republic.

But an appreciable number of the French looked to America for more than monetary sustenance only. For those whose faith in the ideal of a republican form of government held firm, America remained the shining example. Indeed, one group of the faithful had conceived the idea of creating an unprecedented gift from France to the United States, to coincide with the approaching centennial of American independence in 1876.

It was to be a colossal monument called Liberty Lighting the World. A French sculptor chosen for the design, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, had already been to America to see something of the country and meet with numerous Americans who shared an appreciation for the bonds between their country and France. He had returned with a plan to build an immense statue at the entrance to New York Harbor. The new Franco-American Union, established in Paris to promote the project, included several prominent Americans among its honorary members, one of whom was Minister Elihu Washburne.

As in times past, the great majority of the talented and aspiring Americans coming to the city to study were young and altogether unfamiliar with France, its language and ways. Many would one day rank among the eminent American artists and architects of their time. James Carroll Beckwith, J. Alden Weir, Theodore Robinson, Thomas Dewing, George de Forest Brush, Abbot Thayer, Will Low, and architect Louis Sullivan were among those who arrived in Paris in the 1870s and, like so many before, their excitement was such as they would never forget. Will Low, an art student, expressed perfectly how it felt “to wake up in Paris” for the first time. “I was not yet twenty. I was quite alone. I did not speak a word of French … but I was in Paris and the world was before me.”

Those not new to the city felt much the same. Like Henry James, they had returned because for them Paris was the best of all places to get on with their work. Of particular note were painters George P. A. Healy, returning again at age fifty-nine, nearly forty years after his first arrival, Mary Cassatt of Philadelphia, and John Singer Sargent, who was young enough to have been Healy’s grandson and an American prodigy such as had not been seen in Paris since the days of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who, as it happened, was one of the young man’s favorite composers.

Unlike all but a few of their American counterparts, each of these four spoke fluent French, and, with the exception of James, they were there in Paris with their families.

George Healy, with his wife, Louisa, several daughters and a son, took up residence in 1872 in an ample eighteenth-century “hôtel” on the heights near Montmartre, in what was known as the painters’ quarter, at 64 rue de la Rochefoucauld, which had an enormous studio next door. Healy was an American success story of a kind the French greatly respected, and both the house and the workspace befitted a figure of renown. There were numerous spacious rooms with numerous French windows, tall mirrors, white-and-gold woodwork, as well as a small conservatory and lovely walled garden with a rococo grotto. “We can give garden parties here!” exclaimed the youngest daughter, Kathleen, who was fourteen.

The Healys had been among the thousands dealt a devastating blow by the catastrophic Chicago Fire of 1871. None of the family was injured—all were away at the time—but their home on Wabash Avenue had been completely destroyed and everything in it, including much of Healy’s work, correspondence, journals, account books, and other papers of record.

Healy had thought at first of relocating in Italy. They must think carefully and choose “exactly the right place,” he told the family, “for this is really and truly our last move.” The choice was Paris, “the only logical conclusion.”

Commissions came steadily. “Healy is strong in portraits,” reported Thomas Gold Appleton to Henry Longfellow, Appleton having by then resumed his annual visits to Paris. As once Healy had painted the protagonists of the Civil War—Lincoln, Beauregard, Sherman, Grant—so now, in relatively little time, he would paint those of the Franco-Prussian War—Adolphe Thiers, Léon Gambetta, Otto von Bismarck, all three at the request of Elihu Washburne.

As a kind of postscript to his Civil War portraits, he produced a posthumous Robert E. Lee, for which Lee’s son Custis, the president of Washington and Lee College, posed in the studio on the rue de la Rochefoucauld.

Working as industriously as ever, Healy painted a full-length portrait of Emma Thursby, an American concert singer acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, standing with a musical score in hand and wearing a magnificent blue silk and lace gown. In 1879, Nathan Appleton, half-brother of Thomas Gold Appleton and one of the American backers of a French plan to build a Panama canal, brought the celebrated leader of the project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, “The Hero of Suez,” to Healy’s studio for a portrait. “This will be an historical picture,” Healy wrote in his diary the day he completed a first sketch showing de Lesseps pointing to the place on the map where the canal was to go.

Between commissions he painted his own portrait and one of Louisa, then another of Louisa and daughter Edith sitting in the garden, Edith knitting while Louisa read aloud to her. Healy, too, loved to listen to Louisa read from Dickens, Balzac, or George Sand while he worked. If she were away or for some other reason unable to read, he would turn gloomy. “I go every morning and read … to Papa, but … that is not what Mama’s reading is, so he looks rather glum,” Edith wrote in her diary.

Healy could not have felt better about his work and the whole change in the life of the family. One daughter, Mary, would marry a French writer and professor, Charles Bigot. Another, Emily, chose to become a nun and took her vows in the great house at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Son George decided to study architecture in Paris rather than return to college in the United States. For the genial Healy himself much of the pleasure of Paris came from providing generous hospitality to young American artists who had come to “study hard,” as once he had, and to give them encouragement.

Mary Cassatt, too, had been hard hit by the Chicago Fire, and her loss, though nothing like what happened to the Healy family, had also led to her return to Paris.

Like Henry James, she had spent a good part of her childhood in Paris in the company of a well-traveled, well-to-do family and was said to have shown her earliest interest in art there at age seven. In 1866, at twenty-one, traveling with another young Philadelphia painter, Eliza Haldeman, she had returned to Europe to study and paint, much of the time in Paris, where she entered the studio of a distinguished portrait painter, Charles Chaplin, one of the few French masters who held classes especially for women. She made copies of masterworks at the Louvre, painted in the nearby countryside, worked hard and steadily.

I think she has a great deal of talent and industry [Eliza Haldeman wrote in a letter to her mother]. One requires that latter living in France, the people study so hard and the results are wonderful. … The difference between Americans and French is that the former work for money and the latter for fame, and then the public appreciate things so much here.

In an atelier at Villiers-le-Bel, Mary studied with George Healy’s old friend Thomas Couture. Later, in 1868, she was in Paris when one of her paintings, A Mandolin Player, which showed clearly the influence of Couture’s spirited, unacademic style, was accepted and hung in the Salon. She exhibited the work under her middle name, Mary Stevenson. “It is much pleasanter,” Eliza Haldeman explained, “when one is a girl as it avoids publicity.”

For Mary her time in France had determined she would be a professional, not merely “a woman who paints,” as was the expression. Commenting in a letter on just such an acquaintance, she was scathing: “She is only an amateur and you must know we professionals despise amateurs. …”

With the outbreak of the Prussian war during the summer of 1870, she had headed home to Philadelphia, where she kept painting but felt so deprived of the presence of great art at hand, so downhearted, that she was nearly ready to give up. Thinking Chicago might be a better market for her work, she went west to investigate, traveling with two of her cousins. And thus she was there when the city burned. Neither she nor any of her party suffered any injury, but two of her paintings on display at a jewelry store were destroyed.

Returning to Philadelphia, she resolved to change her life. “Oh how wild I am to get to work, my fingers fairly itch and my eyes water to see fine paintings again,” she wrote to another Philadelphia friend and fellow painter, Emily Sartain. By December the two were on their way to Europe.

They found Paris bitterly cold and smothered in fog. It had been less than a year since the final agonies of the siege, only six months since the Bloody Week. “The Hôtel de Ville seems like a Roman ruin. … the fog was so thick everything was lost at fifty feet off,” wrote Emily. “I could scarcely see the pictures in the Louvre, it was so dark.”

She and Mary soon moved on, this time to Parma, in Italy, to work with a teacher, Carlo Raimondi, who told Mary, “Don’t be disheartened— remember you can do anything you want to.”

The following spring Emily left Mary at Parma to join her family in Paris. On one excursion out of the city, they passed the site where one of the great battles had been fought between the French and the Germans and where the dead, they were told, were buried in eight enormous pits. A putrid smell still hung in the air.

At Parma, Mary worked on, concentrating especially on paintings by Correggio, and making such progress that she began to draw attention. In Paris in the spring of 1872, Galignani’s Messenger carried an article from the Gazzetta di Parma in which a distinguished Italian art critic, Parmetto Bettoli, wrote of seeing a copy of the Correggio masterpiece L’Incoronata, done by a young American:

I must candidly confess that when I am called to criticize feminine essays in the Fine Arts or Belles-Lettres, my eulogisms are generally qualified by the restriction embraced in the phrase, “It is not bad for a woman.” But as regards this picture I find myself in a very different position. The copy of this great work, executed by Miss Cassatt, betrays such a surprising knowledge of art that a male artist, no matter how great his experience, might feel honored at having the authorship of this work attributed to him.

Later, from Madrid, Mary wrote to tell Emily that she had discovered Velázquez. “Velázquez oh! my but you knew how to paint!”

She worked without letup, in Madrid and Seville, then Antwerp for a summer, then Rome for seven months, with intermittent stops in Paris, which, she claimed, she had come to dislike.

In 1873, after a series of rejections of her work by the Paris Salon, she learned that one of her Spanish paintings, a large canvas of a bullfighter and his lady, had been accepted.

The pull of Paris proved too strong. Back in the city in 1874, after years of roving over half of Europe, she said she had come to stay. “She astonished me by telling me she is looking for an atelier here,” wrote Emily Sartain. “She has always detested Paris so much that I could scarcely believe it possible … but she says it is necessary to be here. …”

Mary Cassatt had been born in 1844 in western Pennsylvania, in what was then known as Allegheny City on the opposite side of the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. Her mother, to whom she was devoted, was Katherine Kelso Johnston, the daughter of a Pittsburgh banker of Scotch-Irish descent. Her father, Robert Simpson Cassatt, whose forebears were French (the name was originally Cossart), became the first mayor of Allegheny City and succeeded so rapidly in finance and mercantile enterprises that by the time he reached his early forties he felt ready for retirement, whereupon he moved the family east, settling first in Lancaster County.

Mary was the fourth of five children. The oldest, Lydia, was followed by two brothers, Alexander and Robert. The youngest, Joseph, arrived when Mary was five. Childhood was set in perfect comfort, amid books and fine furniture, and in as handsome a country home as could be found in Lancaster County. But the mother and father had desired city life and so moved to Philadelphia. Then followed four years in Europe—two in Paris, two in Germany—at the end of which the family returned to Pennsylvania, first to West Chester, outside Philadelphia, then Philadelphia again.

They were not people of immense wealth, rather, as they would have said, they were respectably “comfortable.” Refined in their tastes, they frowned on ostentation. The children attended the best private schools. Good grammar and proper manners were insisted upon. Everyone dressed well, and father Robert Cassatt continued to see no necessity for a return to gainful employment.

At sixteen Mary, “Mame,” as she was called in the family, enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Chestnut Street. When, at twenty, she announced her wish to continue her studies abroad, her father exploded, declaring he would almost rather see her dead than become an artist. But Mary persisted. She always persisted. He gave his consent and was not known to have ever regretted it.

The summer of 1874 she spent back at Villiers-le-Bel working with Thomas Couture. That fall she rented a studio in Paris and, with sister Lydia, moved into a small nearby apartment on the rue de Laval (now Victor Massé) at the foot of Montmartre.

The course of her life was set. If becoming a professional artist—never a “woman who paints”—meant giving up marriage and a family of her own, so be it. She was adamant, at times even abrasive, on the matter.

Her appearance remained consistently, entirely ladylike. She stood not quite five feet six, considered tall for a woman. Her hair was light brown, her chin a bit sharp for her to have been considered pretty. Hers was a strong, intelligent face. The grey eyes were large and alert. And she had the slender figure and perfect carriage for her well-tailored ensembles.

“Miss Cassatt’s tall figure, which she inherited from her father, had distinction and elegance, and there was no trace of artistic négligé, or carelessness, which some painters affect,” wrote Louisine Elder of New York, who was struck even more by how much Miss Cassatt knew and how animated she became.

Once having seen her, you could never forget her—from her remarkable small foot to the plumed hat with its inevitable tip upon her head and the Brussels lace veil without which she was never seen. She spoke with energy, and you would as soon forget her remarks when she conversed as to forget the motion of her hands.

Louisine Elder and Mary Cassatt met in Paris in 1874, at a time when Mary’s work was going well, her name becoming known in art circles in both Paris and New York. (She listed herself now as Mary Cassatt.) A portrait of hers, Madame Cortier, had been hung in the Salon.

In Paris with her mother and two sisters, nineteen-year-old Louisine was eager to see and learn as much as possible. She was enthralled by all that the vibrant Miss Cassatt had seen and accomplished, the places she had been, and wondered how she had ever summoned the courage to go off to Italy and Spain.

Mary took her to the opera and theater, talked long and fast about Correggio and Velázquez. “I felt that Miss Cassatt was the most intelligent woman I had ever met and I cherished every word she uttered. …” It was the threshold of a fifty-year-long friendship of far-reaching consequences.

At the same time, another friendship went on the rocks. For Emily Sartain, Mary’s strong-willed, occasionally dictatorial ways became too much. There was a dispute over some unknown matter and bitter feelings resulted. “Miss C. is a tremendous talker and very touchy and selfish, so if you hear her talking of me at home, as she has done lately in Paris, you will know the origin of it all,” Emily confided to her father. “I shall never become intimate with her again. …” Emily went home to Philadelphia to teach at the School of Design for Women, where she would have a long, distinguished career.

Not long afterward, in 1875, Mary discovered the work of a new group of artists who called themselves La Société Anonyme des Artistes—the Impressionists, as they were to be known, among whom were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas. In much the way the American painter William Morris Hunt had the direction of his career changed by seeing a portrait by Thomas Couture in a Paris art store window, so Mary Cassatt reacted to seeing for the first time pastels by Degas in a window on the boulevard Haussmann.

“I would go there and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art,” she would remember. When she said later, “It changed my life,” she was by no means exaggerating. It changed her life because it changed her work. An entirely new way of seeing and painting, for which she was to become famous, began then.

She took Louisine to see a Degas pastel titled Répétition de Ballet(Ballet Rehearsal) and urged her to buy it. “It was so new and strange to me!” Louisine wrote. “I scarcely knew how to appreciate it, or whether I liked it or not … [but] she left me no doubt as to the desirability of the purchase and I bought it upon her advice.”

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.

II

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.

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.

III

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.

The family kept almost entirely to themselves. Paris or not, their life together was little changed. They could as well have been in Philadelphia. They had no interest in Paris society or any society—Mary had no patience for it—and they rarely entertained. They lived “as usual,” Katherine said in a letter to her son Alexander. “We … make no acquaintances among the Americans who form the colony, for as a rule they are people one wouldn’t want to know at home. …” Of Mary’s French Impressionist friends, only Degas and Berthe Morisot, given their social class, were considered acceptable.

Just as in the Sargent family, where no one did much of anything but John, so the Cassatts did little else besides sit and read, or sit for Mary, or go off for a walk, while she worked away, intent, as she later said, “on fame and money.”

IV

After eight and a half years of unstinting service as the American minister to France, Elihu Washburne had concluded the time had come to step aside. He had served longer in the role than anyone else. A new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, had taken office. Adele’s health had become a concern, and the lease on the residence on the avenue de l’Impératrice was about to expire.

He submitted his resignation and on September 10 he and the family said goodbye to Paris. But not before he had George Healy paint his and Adele’s portraits, and commissioned Healy to do still another of Ulysses S. Grant. The former president, having embarked on a world tour, was expected in Paris two months later.

“After a reasonably good passage to New York,” Washburne would write simply in his Recollections, “we reached what was thereafter to be our home at Chicago. …”

As expected, the arrival of General Grant and his family caused considerable stir, though it hardly compared to the fuss once made over General Tom Thumb or George Catlin and his Indians. The former president, his wife, Julia, and their son Jesse, stayed at the Hôtel Bristol on the Place Vendôme. They were feted by President MacMahon at the Élysée Palace and at a dinner given by the new American minister, Edward Noyes. They attended the opera, shopped at the Palais Royal and Worth’s, strolled the boulevards and gardens. At the invitation of the Committee of the Franco-American Union, they went to the workshops of Gaget, Gauthier & Compagnie on the rue de Chazelles, to view the progress being made on Monsieur Bartholdi’s statue.

Grant agreed that Paris was beautiful, he wrote to friends at home, but could not imagine wanting to live there. “It has been a mystery to me how so many Americans can content themselves here, year after year, with nothing to do.”

The sitting for Healy went well. Grant had posed for the painter ten years before and enjoyed his company. As always, Healy talked the whole time he worked. When Grant learned that Healy had recently completed a portrait of Léon Gambetta and expressed an interest in meeting him, Healy arranged a family dinner at his home. “The contrast between the two was a very striking one,” he later wrote:

Grant with his characteristic square American head, full of will and determination, his reddish beard sprinkled with grey, his spare gestures, and taciturnity; and this Frenchman, with his southern exuberant manner, his gestures, his quick replies, the mobility of expression on his massive face. … They seemed typical representatives of the two nations.

Grant spoke no French, Gambetta no English, but they traded flattering comments sufficient to keep one of Healy’s daughters busy translating.

The Grants’ stay in Paris lasted five weeks. In early December they were on their way once more, moving from one national capital to another for another year and a half.

On Christmas Day in Paris the first snow of the winter fell.