CHAPTER THIRTEEN

GENIUS IN ABUNDANCE

Paris! We are here! …
We feel our speechlessness keenly …

—ROBERT HENRI

I

When Mary Cassatt made her debut as an Impressionist at the opening of the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1879, she was thirty-four years old. John Sargent, then at the start of his career, was her junior by eleven years. Cassatt’s family was still with her in Paris and to a large degree her life remained centered around them. Sargent’s family, on the other hand, had resumed their nomadic ways, departing Paris late in 1878 for Savoy, then Nice, leaving John to fend for himself.

The Impressionist Exhibition opened on April 10 at a gallery on the avenue de l’Opéra. Cassatt had eleven paintings and pastels on display, including her portrait of her sister Lydia, Woman Reading. A few weeks later Sargent’s first major portrait, of his teacher Carolus-Duran, could be seen at the Paris Salon.

The work of both Americans received warm acclaim. “The Woman Reading … is a miracle of simplicity and elegance,” said one review. Mademoiselle Cassatt and Monsieur Degas were “perhaps the only artists who distinguished themselves in this group,” said another critic who in general looked askance on Impressionists.

Sargent’s Carolus-Duran received an honorable mention at the Salon, and much approval from the public and critics. “There was always a little crowd around it, and I overheard constantly remarks of its excellence,” wrote his father, who had made a return visit to Paris for the occasion.

“No American had ever painted with such quiet mastery … equaling the French on their own ground,” declared an American review. “There is no feebleness, no strain, no shortcoming in the art … it is alive.”

May Alcott of Boston, who was studying art in Paris and had made a conscientious effort to see nearly everything by Americans shown at the galleries and the Salon, concluded that, were one to leave out the work of Sargent, women clearly ranked first among American painters, with Mary Cassatt at the forefront. Miss Alcott, who was the sister of Louisa May Alcott, would write:

If Mr. John Sargent be excepted, whose portrait of Carolus-Duran alone undoubtedly places him in the first rank of painters, there is no other male student from the United States in Paris today exhibiting in his pictures the splendid coloring always found in the work of Miss Cassatt of Philadelphia. …

With their upper-class demeanor, fluency in French, general sophistication, and extraordinary talent, Cassatt and Sargent had a great deal in common, despite the differences in gender and age. They lived and worked in the same city—of their own choice and for many of the same reasons— and Sargent, with some of his fellow students, had met Cassatt sometime in the 1870s. But they had no more than a passing acquaintance and their lives remained worlds apart.

Where Cassatt’s days were confined almost entirely to her studio and the fifth-floor family residence on the avenue Trudaine, life for young Sargent was as free as it had ever been. He had a number of companionable friends and was frequently off and about, at times traveling more even than his parents, with the difference that he kept working wherever he was.

Most of the summer of 1877 he spent at the small Breton port of Cancale. The next summer he traveled to Naples, then sailed to Capri before returning to Nice to be with his family. In the summer of 1879 he went overland to Madrid to copy masterworks at the Prado Museum, as urged by Carolus-Duran. From Madrid he moved on to Granada, then Morocco and Tunis.

The steady production of work resulting from these expeditions was phenomenal. He found interest in everything. At Cancale he sketched and painted studies of oyster gatherers on the beach—women with large baskets and the children who accompanied them—and produced three major canvases on the subject. He did ships and boats, boatmen and wharf scenes in both oil and watercolor. He painted portraits and studies of women in Capri, children bathing on the shore, olive groves, and more than a few of an especially beautiful model named Rosina in silhouette dancing on the white rooftops.

At the Prado he devoted weeks to painting a copy of the Velázquez masterpiece Las Meninas. He did pencil, ink, and oil sketches of Spanish dancers and musicians in Madrid, and at Granada, luminous watercolors of the architectural details of the Alhambra. In Morocco he painted street scenes, mosques, and Berber women wearing their haiks.

No subject seemed to daunt him. Once back in Paris, he undertook scenes out in the city itself, something very few American painters had yet attempted. Two brilliant black and white oil paintings of the Pasdeloup Orchestra in rehearsal at the Cirque d’Hiver amphitheater on the rue Amelot left no doubt of his amazing virtuosity. A scene of a couple strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens at twilight, which he painted twice, evoked the romantic spell of Paris as few works ever had. And he was only getting started.

He and Carroll Beckwith continued to share the studio apartment at 73 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and counted French as well as American painters among their “circle,” including Paul Helleu from Brittany, who introduced Sargent to Claude Monet.

Unlike Mary Cassatt, Sargent had no impulse to embrace the Impressionist mode, nor would he allow himself to be so classified, as much as he admired the work of Monet, Manet, and others. It was to portraits above all that he devoted the most time and effort and that were rapidly bringing him attention and increasing income.

He painted his American student friends Ralph Curtis, Francis Chadwick, and Gordon Greenough. Paul Helleu—lean, dark, and a lifelong friend—seemed never to tire of posing for him. FitzWilliam Sargent sat for his melancholy portrait, and the French playwright Édouard Pailleron became the first full-fledged patron, commissioning not only a portrait of himself but two more of his wife and children.

But it was the portrait of Carolus-Duran that launched Sargent’s career, just as he hoped it would, and intrinsic to its appeal was an unmistakable feeling for the theatrical that was to characterize his strongest, most arresting works to follow.

So relaxed, confident, almost flippant was the pose struck by Carolus-Duran, he might well have been seated downstage at the footlights about to deliver an entertaining soliloquy, or produce a rabbit out of a hat. He looks at the viewer straight on, as though his dark eyes never blinked. An actor assigned to play the part would have only to look at the painting to know what to do.

It was seeing the portrait of Carolus-Duran that led playwright Pail-leron to ask Sargent to paint him in a comparable pose. Sargent’s brush-work and use of a dark background to accentuate his subjects in both portraits were unmistakably in the manner taught by Carolus-Duran, yet still more an expression of Sargent’s own genius for catching the essence of the subject with only a few, seemingly effortless brush strokes.

A small, candid portrait done in London the next year, 1881, of an American novelist and essayist, Vernon Lee, was another virtuoso performance. It was a brilliant likeness that appeared to have been captured in a flash, without a moment’s hesitation.

Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget. She had been one of Sargent’s childhood playmates in Nice, where her parents, too, were living the expatriate life. Describing for her mother the day she sat for Sargent, she wrote, “I enjoyed it very much; John talking all the whole time and strumming the piano between times.” She thought the painting “extraordinarily clever,” if “mere dabs and blurs.” “He says I sit very well; the goodness of my sitting seems to consist in never staying quiet a single moment.”

She was as much a whirlwind talker as he, and the “dabs and blurs” caught the animation of her chattering face, the glints of light from her eyeglasses and uneven teeth. It was, she conceded, “more like me than I expected anything could [be]—rather fierce and cantankerous.”

Greatly as they enjoyed each other’s company, Sargent and Vernon Lee rarely talked about art. As a writer and critic, she had become interested in the “application to art of psychological research.” But like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Sargent wished only to be spared such talk. “In his eyes,” she later wrote, “all this was preposterous, and I suspect, vaguely sacrilegious.” And she went further:

Now, as I declined to yield to my dear old playfellow’s dictation on this subject, and failed to make him recognize that art could afford to other folk problems quite apart from those dealt with by the artist and the art critic; as, moreover, Sargent did not like opposition nor I dogmatism, a tacit understanding henceforth kept us off anything which might lead to either. So our conversation turned more and more to books, music and people, about all of which John Sargent was a delightful talker and an often delighted listener.

Word spread that he made sitting for a portrait highly pleasurable, and affluent women in increasing numbers wished to do so. Among them were Eleanor Jay Chapman and her sister Beatrix, the daughters of a New York stockbroker, and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, the wife of the Chilean consul in Paris, who later described going with her husband to Sargent’s studio and finding it, to their surprise, “very poor and bohemian while the artist himself seemed a very attractive gentleman,” though “very young.” Her sittings took place at the Subercaseaux apartment on the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. He had her pose at her piano, her right hand on the keyboard as if about to perform.

He concentrated on each detail and took great care of the effect of each object and color. He was a man of great skill who felt secure and at ease while working. He was very fond of music and had me play for him. He brought me several pieces from Louis Moreau Gottschalk … whom he admired very much, specially his interpretations of Spanish and South American dances.

Sargent’s love of music and the flamboyant were intrinsic to his work, and sometimes in small inventive ways. In a sparkling portrait of beautiful Madame Paul Escudier, in which she is dressed to go out, her coat and the background—virtually three-quarters of the canvas—are black, but the face radiates life and the white ribbon of her hat, in combination with her red hair, is a showpiece unto itself.

Little is known of Sargent’s interest in any of the women who sat for him, beyond the work at hand, with two exceptions and even then there was only hearsay. Fanny Watts, the subject of the first picture he sent to the Salon, was, like Vernon Lee, a friend from childhood in Italy. Their families moved in the same social circles and he was clearly fond of her. There was talk of a romance, even an engagement, but supposedly his mother put an end to it, saying marriage at such an early age would interfere with his career.

Later came even more talk of a romance with Louise Burkhardt, the subject of a full-length portrait by Sargent, Lady with the Rose, much admired by critics. He and Louise were together frequently in Paris and, with Carroll Beckwith and others, went off on summer excursions to Fontainebleau and Rouen. Her mother strongly encouraged the supposed romance, and again there was talk of an engagement that never happened.

How strongly attracted Sargent was to the opposite sex, or to his own, was and would remain difficult to determine. It would be said that no man indifferent to the physical appeal of stunning women could possibly have painted them as he did. But it would also be said that some of his drawings and paintings of his male friends argued the opposite, and that his rendering of women was his way of concealing his homosexuality. But no one ever knew or said so if they did. He kept that side of his life entirely private.

Vernon Lee, who knew him as well as anybody, later wrote, “More and more it has seemed to me that Sargent’s life was absorbed in his painting, and that the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think, be: he painted.”

That the same could have been said of Mary Cassatt remained as evident as ever. Except for occasional spells of poor health and the interruptions required to attend to her family’s needs, her devotion to her work was no less ardent than ever. Her life, too, was her art.

Her father complained of dyspepsia and lumbago. Her mother suffered from a hacking cough and insomnia. Sister Lydia, her health steadily declining, remained a constant worry. Her sufferings from intermittent headaches and stomach pains had become more severe, at times alarming, though she seldom complained—“she has wonderful spirits considering all things,” her mother reported to her son Alexander—and with Lydia still willing to sit for Mary when the pains subsided, Mary kept painting her.

In 1880, primarily for Lydia’s benefit, the family began spending summers in the country at Marly-le-Roi. Alexander, his wife, Lois, and their four children made a long-promised visit to France to join them at Marly, and the atmosphere seemed to agree with everyone. Mary painted several of her finest pictures—Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, Lydia Seated in the Garden with a Dog in Her Lap, Katherine Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren.

Again it was the safely sequestered, quiet, unstrained, unthreatened feminine world of family and privilege that she portrayed and that, by all evidence, she had no desire to venture away from. Nor do any of her subjects ever look directly at the viewer. They are all quietly seated, preoccupied with some private, genteel interest of the moment. Even Alexander, who at home in the United States played an active part in the often rough-and-tumble world of giant railroads, is seen in an oil sketch with a book in hand, quietly gazing off as if lost in some philosophical thought.

Unlike Sargent’s subjects, Cassatt’s were never in the least flamboyant or theatrical. There is no drama to her settings, no suggestion of noise or merriment or mystery, only peace and quiet, and nearly always with an edge of sadness. Not only is there no dancing, no one is even seen standing. Apparently she, too, like her subjects, sat at her easel to work at eye level.

The nearest she came to portraying the Paris world of music and drama were paintings of women at the opera and theater, but there as well her ladylike subjects sit safely sequestered in a loge or box seat.

She received abundant praise—she was a “veritable phenomenon”— and her paintings were selling. “Mame’s success is certainly more marked this year than at any time previous,” her father was glad to report to Alexander in the spring of 1881.

The thing that pleases her most in this success is not the newspaper publicity, for that she despises as a rule—but the fact that artists of talent and reputation and other persons prominent in art matters asked to be introduced to her and complimented her on her work. She has sold all her pictures or can sell them if she chooses—

Alexander, who had spent his whole career with the Pennsylvania Railroad and had recently been made a vice president of the company, had now, under Mary’s guidance, begun his own collection of Impressionist works. But early in 1882, when the Impressionists began quarreling among themselves, Mary withdrew from the group. Worse still, that summer at Marly, Lydia became “very ill” and Mary became extremely sad and unproductive. “Mary being the worst kind of alarmist does not help when things look gloomy … and is not doing much in the way of art,” her father wrote. After a private meeting with Lydia’s doctor, who said there was no hope for a cure, Mary went home so depressed she had to take to her bed.

“Poor dear!” her father wrote of Lydia in mid-September. “This is the first time she has spoken plainly and directly of her death. …” Mary, Lydia had told him, had developed into a “most excellent nurse.”

Lydia Cassatt died in Paris of Bright’s disease at age forty-five on a dismal, rain-soaked November 7, 1882.

Mary had never known the death of someone close to her. When Alexander, Lois, and the children arrived in Paris three weeks later, Mary told Lois how desperately lonely she felt. Perhaps she would have been better off to have married, she said, than face being “left alone in the world.”

II

In 1882, the year of Lydia Cassatt’s death, John Sargent’s genius took hold as never before. In that one year, at age twenty-six, he painted not only his Lady with the Rose and the stunning small portrait of Madame Escudier, but a second portrait of her standing in her sumptuous parlor, as well as eight other portraits and two of the largest, most arresting works of his career, El Jaleo and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, in neither of which was there any holding back on his sense of theater and love of dramatic light and shadow.

The French critic Henry Houssaye called El Jaleo “the most striking picture of the year.” Eight feet high and nearly twelve feet long—so huge no one could fail to take notice—it was Sargent’s passionate, bravura tribute to Spanish dance and music. In a scene lit by footlights, a dark-haired flamenco dancer in a flowing silver-white skirt flings herself into her performance, as behind her, against a wall, a line of musicians and singers, all in black, play and sing, and other seated dancers clap hands.

Painted far from Madrid on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, with a French model posed as the dancer, it was the exuberant culmination of innumerable pencil, ink, and oil sketches from Sargent’s time in Spain three years earlier and in Paris as part of his preparation. The Spanish word jaleo denotes the burst of clapping and shouts of olé that are part of flamenco dancing. Once Sargent had the immense canvas under way, such was the vigor and clarity of the brushwork in the highlights of the dancer’s skirt that it was as if he, too, were shouting “olé! ” to the loud stamp of her high heels. The darkly shadowed back wall, the dramatic lighting, the singer who throws back his head in a kind of ecstasy, are all pure, unabashed theater.

Nor was there much less theater in the second masterpiece, painted only months later, with the difference this time that the curtain had opened on an altogether silent tableau in which four very proper figures stand perfectly still, all but one looking directly at the audience—a scene made especially arresting in that they are children.

Edward Darley Boit and Mary Louisa Cushing Boit were the rich American expatriates and friends of Sargent’s who commissioned him to paint their four daughters. Boit had given up being a Boston lawyer to paint, specializing in watercolor, at which he was highly proficient. His wife, whose inherited wealth exceeded even his, was described by Henry James as “brilliantly friendly.”

Apparently they had no specific requests or requirements of Sargent, leaving the setting, individual poses—everything about the picture—to him. And what resulted, the whole arrangement and mood of the painting, could hardly have been more unorthodox. That the canvas was a huge square, seven by seven feet, was in itself a departure, and the composition, the placement of the subjects, was a clear echo of Las Meninas, the Velázquez masterpiece of children in the Spanish court that Sargent had copied at the Prado.

The two oldest Boit daughters, Florence, who was fourteen, and Jane, twelve, stand together at the side of a high, wide doorway. Jane is positioned at the exact center of the canvas, Florence with her face in profile is so shadowed she is barely recognizable.

Further forward on the left, seven-year-old Mary Louisa stands alone, hands behind her back, her face fully lit, while “the baby,” three-year-old Julia, also fully lighted, sits on a Persian rug in the right foreground.

A pair of giant Japanese vases several heads taller than the two tallest girls also stand on either side of the doorway. With the Persian rug, they constitute the only props suggesting the luxurious Boit way of life. (Such was family pride in the vases that they were shipped back and forth between Boston and Paris every time the Boits crossed the Atlantic, year after year.)

The three older sisters wear the starched white pinafores considered proper play attire, and the three-year-old holds her doll. But the play attire notwithstanding, none is at play, and each seems oddly alone.

Other artists of the day painted children at play in the sunlight of public gardens in Paris, often accompanied by stylish, chattering mothers or white-capped nursemaids. Sargent placed these four young Americans not only indoors, but in a sunless interior with a dark void of a background made to seem darker still by a gleam of light reflected in a mirror to the rear. To add further drama and mystery, part of a red screen makes a bright, dagger-shaped slash down the right side of the doorway.

The children surely have a story to tell, and one waits for them, like actors onstage, to begin speaking, perhaps in turns, to unfold the story.

Contrasting with the rigid geometric composition of the tableau and the motionless pose of its protagonists is Sargent’s characteristic vitality in the brushwork—in his rendering of the white pinafores, most conspicuously, and the decorative pattern of the Japanese vases. He is like a virtuoso pianist who, playing rapidly, strikes every key perfectly. Moreover, along with the air of mystery there is great warmth in the wall and the parquet floor, but especially in the pretty faces of the two younger girls in the foreground.

Vernon Lee would later write, “I am persuaded that the individual temperament of every artist expresses itself with unconscious imperative far more in how he paints than in what he chooses to be painting. …” It was, she felt, in such “perfectly pure and contrasted colors” and “the unerring speed of his hand and eye” in such paintings as El Jaleo and the portrait of the Boit daughters that the true temperament of John Sargent was to be found.

Finished in late 1882, the picture of the Boit daughters was intended for the Paris Salon the next spring. But Sargent could not wait, and so put it on exhibit under the title Portraits d’Enfants at Georges Petit’s gallery on the rue de Sèze in December.

Reaction to it then and later when shown at the Salon was uneven. Some viewers were troubled by its mood. One French critic described the children as “en pénitence,” being punished. Henry James, writing in Harper’s Weekly, would declare without hesitation that Sargent had never painted anything “more felicitous and interesting.” The picture was “astonishing,” James said, and praised “the complete effect, the light, the free security of execution, the sense it gives of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge. …”

In London, a critic for the Art Journal reported that Sargent now found himself “the most talked-about painter in France, with every opportunity to have his head turned by the admiration he had received.” Another English reviewer wrote that El Jaleo not only put Sargent at the head of the American school in Paris, but “on equal ground with the most prominent French painters.”

A visiting Boston merchant named T. Jefferson Coolidge had wasted no time buying El Jaleo, paying 1,500 francs, or about $300, for it. And while some expatriate Americans chattered about the feeling of loneliness and mystery in the Portraits d’Enfants, speculating over what it might be saying about Sargent’s own childhood, people at Georges Petit’s gallery and later at the Salon kept coming back for a second or third look.

Sargent paid little or no attention to all this. He was too excited about a new project, a portrait of a famous Paris beauty, Madame Gautreau.

Sargent was by nature, as Vernon Lee wrote, always “especially attracted by the bizarre and outlandish,” the very essence of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, who, contrary to the impression most people had, was an American.

Born in New Orleans, she had been brought to Paris as a child of eight by her widowed, socially ambitious mother. Her father, a major in the Confederate army, had been killed at the battle of Shiloh. She was, by 1883, twenty-four years old, two years younger than Sargent.

To her mother’s great approval, she had married a wealthy French banker, Pierre Gautreau, and became what was called a “professional beauty,” the perfect “parisienne,” someone known for her remarkable looks and social stage presence, and who, in her appearances in society, was expected to fill that role with all due attention to wardrobe and the artful use of cosmetics, no less than a great actress. In her particular case a heavy use of a chalky lavender powder on face and body gave her a pallor distinctive enough in itself to draw attention. To her critics she was all too plainly an arriviste.

Her beauty was distinctly different, almost eccentric, her nose too long by accepted standards, her forehead too high. Yet the total effect, and particularly given her hourglass figure and her way of moving, was striking in the extreme, her appeal unmistakably seductive, as she well knew.

An American art student named Edward Simmons wrote of being “thrilled by every movement of her body.”

She walked as Virgil speaks of a goddess—sliding—and seemed to take no steps. Her head and neck undulated like that of a young doe, and something about her gave you the impression of infinite proportion, infinite grace, and infinite balance. Every artist wanted to make her in marble or paint.

After meeting her socially, Sargent, some said, had become obsessed by her. He let it be known that he wanted to do “homage to her beauty” in a portrait to be shown at the Salon, the implication being it could bring each of them notoriety in the way Manet’s sensational Olympia had, albeit she need not pose in the nude.

Do you object to people who are fardées [made up] to the extent of being uniform lavender or blotting paper color all over [he wrote to Vernon Lee]. If so you would not care for my sitter. But she has the most beautiful lines and if the lavender or chlorate-of-potash lozenge color be pretty in itself I shall be more than pleased.

He did one line drawing after another of her head in profile, made studies in pencil and watercolor of her relaxing on a settee in a low-cut evening dress, painted her in oil drinking a toast, and here again in profile. In the summer of 1883, from the Gautreaus’ country estate in Brittany, he wrote to tell Vernon Lee he was “still struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness” of his subject.

That he and Amélie Gautreau were both Americans was by no means immaterial to their ambitions. The same year they met, a society journal noted that “Yankees” in Paris were gaining ever-greater prominence. “They have painters who carry off our medals, like Mr. Sargent, beautiful women who eclipse ours, Mme. Gautreau. …” If they were to be known always as Americans, then all the more reason to be at the forefront.

Finished with his preliminary studies, Sargent left Brittany for Nice to pay his annual visit to his parents, before moving on for an autumn stay in Florence.

“His life is a pleasant life,” FitzWilliam Sargent wrote to a brother in Philadelphia.

He seems to be respected, even admired and beloved (according to all accounts) for his talent and success as an artist, for his conduct and character as a man. His work is a pleasurable occupation to him and brings him a very handsome income. He travels about in countries which provide him with materials for his pictures as well as with bread and butter and elements of health and enjoyment. He is well received everywhere for his manners are good and agreeable. He is good looking, plays the piano well and dances well, converses well, etc., etc. In short, he has given us, his parents great satisfaction so far. …

In the winter of 1883–84, Sargent moved from the Left Bank to a new studio across the Seine at 41 boulevard Berthier, in the then fashionable neighborhood near the Parc Monceau. It was there in a workplace elegantly furnished with comfortably upholstered chairs, Persian rugs, and drapery befitting his new professional standing, and an upright piano against one wall, that he painted his full-length portrait of Madame Gautreau, the whole time suffering what he called “a horrid state of anxiety.”

She was dressed in a long black satin skirt and low-cut black velvet bodice, her shoulders bare except for two slim jeweled straps. She held both shoulders back and her head cocked sharply to the left, giving full cameo emphasis to the remarkable profile.

Her left arm on her hip, she held her skirt with the left hand, while the right arm was oddly turned back on itself, her right hand gripping the top of the side table. She wore her hair up, with a tiny diamond tiara on top.

It was a flagrantly stagy pose, which could only have been difficult to hold for any length of time, even for one who was a poser by nature. Against the deep black of the dress, the deathly blue-white of her powdered skin was even more strange and striking. When, during one sitting, her right shoulder strap dropped suggestively over her arm, Sargent requested she leave it that way.

In contrast to his usual approach, he worked and reworked the canvas, simplifying and redefining edges.

One day I was dissatisfied with it and dashed a tone of light rose over the former gloomy background [he reported to a friend]. I turned the picture upside down, retired to another end of the studio and looked at it under my arm. Vast improvement. The élancée figure of the model shows to much greater advantage.

No doubt Madame Gautreau saw how the portrait was emerging under his brush from one sitting to another. Possibly her mother, too, may have been present occasionally. If they found anything about it disturbing at the time, there is no evidence that a word was said.

When Carolus-Duran came by for a look, he told Sargent he could submit the painting to the Salon with perfect confidence. Sargent was not so sure.

Another who dropped in was Henry James. In Paris briefly, James had met and quite liked the young artist, calling him “the only Franco-American product of importance” in France. But, as James confided to a friend, he only “half-liked” the portrait of Madame Gautreau.

The 1884 Paris Salon, an exhibition filling thirty-one of the grandes salles in the Palais de l’Industrie, opened on a beautiful May morning with much excitement among the customary well-dressed crowds in attendance. So great had the number of American painters in Paris become, and so important to their careers was representation at the Salon, that they were now second only to the number of French artists included. For Sargent it marked the sixth consecutive year he had exhibited at the Salon, and each time with increasing acclaim.

Paintings filled every wall. The portrait of Amélie Gautreau, ideally placed at eye level, was hung in Salle 31, and the doors had been open scarcely an hour when it became the talk of the exhibition.

For all that would be written and said, no eyewitness account of the event and of its effect on Sargent compared to what his friend Ralph Curtis wrote to his parents the next day. Whether the opening marked Sargent’s birthday as an artist or his funeral, Curtis could not say.

Walked up the Champs-Élysées, chestnuts in full flower and a dense mob of “tout Paris” in pretty clothes, gesticulating and laughing, slowly going into the Ark of Art. In 15 minutes I saw no end of acquaintances and strangers and heard everybody say, “Où est le portrait Gautreau?” “Oh, allez voir ça.”

Curtis had seen Sargent the night before. “He was very nervous about what he feared,” he wrote, “but his fears were far exceeded by the facts of yesterday. There was a grand tapage [great fuss] before it [the portrait] all day.”

In a few minutes I found him dodging behind doors to avoid friends who looked grave. By the corridors he took me to see it. I was disappointed by the color. She looks decomposed. All the men jeer. “Ah voilà ‘la belle!’ ” “Oh, quelle horreur!” Etc. Then a painter exclaims, “superbe de style, magnifique d’audace!” [Magnificent audacity!] “Quel dessin!” [What drawing!]

In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic.

But what was unacceptable to “tout Paris” was the blatant, self-centered impropriety of it all—the heavy powder, the odd, arrogant pose, the décolletage. Such vulgar flaunting was simply not done by women of social standing.

“All the A.M. it was one series of bons mots, mauvaises plaisanteries and fierce discussions,” Curtis continued in his letter. “John, poor boy, was navré [full of sorrow]. The tumult of talk lasted through the day, but by evening the tone of opinion about the picture had changed. It was discovered to be the knowing thing to say ‘étrangement épatant.’ [Shocking, amazing!]

“I went home with him,” Curtis continued, “and remained there while he went to see the Boits.” Madame Gautreau and her mother came to the studio “bathed in tears.” Curtis “stayed them off,” but Madame Avegno came back again, after Sargent had returned, and made “a fearful scene.” “All Paris mocks my daughter,” she said. If the painting were to stay on exhibit, she would “die of chagrin.”

Sargent, obviously put out, told her there was nothing he could do, that it was against the rules of the Salon to retire a picture and that he had painted Amélie exactly as she was dressed.

“Defending his cause made Sargent feel much better,” wrote Curtis. “Still we talked it over until 1 o’clock here last night and I fear he has never had such a blow.”

The reviews were essentially of three kinds, those that objected to Madame Gautreau’s décolletage, those repulsed by the color of her skin, and those that, seeing “modernity” in the approach, applauded Sargent’s courage.

The New York Times dismissed the painting out of hand as a “caricature,” far below Sargent’s usual standard. “The pose of the figure is absurd, and the bluish coloring atrocious.” The Times of London conceded only that the portrait was “most interesting.” But the French critic Louis de Fourcaud, writing in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, called it a masterpiece of characterization. It should be kept in mind, he wrote, that “in a person of this type everything relates to the cult of self and the increasing concern to captivate those around her.

Her sole purpose in life is to demonstrate by her skills in contriving incredible outfits which shape her and exhibit her and which she can carry off with bravado. …

Sargent had been living and working in Paris for a full decade and in that time had received only expressions of admiration and praise. He had never known an adverse review or even mild criticism, let alone public mockery. His portrait of Madame Gautreau was in fact a masterpiece and in time would be so recognized. He hung on to it, renaming it Madame X. He also repainted the fallen shoulder strap, restoring it to its proper place. Years later, when he sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for $1,000, he would remark that it was perhaps the best thing he had done.

He and Amélie Gautreau seem to have had no further contact, though she, too, eventually changed her opinion about the painting and expressed pride in it.

Yet hard hit as he was and angry over what had happened, Sargent appears to have had no doubts about his ability or his ambition to keep painting. Feeling an immediate need for a change of scene, he followed up on an earlier plan to go to London. He left Paris in late May 1884, not to return until December.

III

All the while that Sargent was painting his Spanish dancer, the Boit daughters, and Madame X, work had been proceeding in Paris on another very different rendition of the female form on a scale never before seen.

Lady Liberty, France’s colossal gift to America, had been rising steadily within her scaffolding upward from the courtyard of the Gaget, Gauthier & Cie. workshop on the rue de Chazelles, until she loomed high over the rooftops. Sculptor Auguste Bartholdi’s unprecedented creation was now on display for all to see.

The first rivet of her skin of copper sheets had been driven in 1881. And with the support of an inner skeleton—pylon and ingenious trusswork— designed by France’s master-builder in iron, Gustave Eiffel, the gigantic goddess had been growing steadily higher until the spring of 1884, when she was complete all the way to the tip of her upheld torch, 151 feet above street level.

She was a startling spectacle even to Parisians accustomed to spectacles, and her presence was to be brief, as everyone knew. The whole gigantic structure would soon be taken down piece-by-piece to be shipped to New York.

Photographers set up tripods and cameras to record the phenomenon of her towering over her Paris neighborhood. A French artist, Victor Dargaud, painted a scene of people in the street below craning their necks to see the uppermost reaches of the arm and torch, where men still at work looked like mere specks against the sky.

The disassembly began in December. Every piece was labeled, packed in more than two hundred wooden chests, and shipped off by rail to Rouen to be put aboard a French war vessel, the Isère, which sailed on May 21, 1885.

The pedestal on which Liberty was to stand on little Bedloe’s Island had been designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to have been trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. Hunt’s pedestal stood eighty-nine feet tall, and thus Liberty and her torch would reach more than 240 feet above New York Harbor.

Even before the statue was on its way over the Atlantic, word began circulating in Paris that the civil engineer Eiffel had a still more audacious project in mind, a wrought-iron tower nearly 1,000 feet tall to be completed in time for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. The towers of Notre-Dame were by comparison a mere 226 feet high. The Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone structure, was, at 555 feet, little more than half the height of Eiffel’s proposed centerpiece for the exposition.

It was to stand on the Champ de Mars, the old military parade ground where every exposition had been held since 1867. Eiffel’s estimated cost for the project was 5 million francs, approximately $1 million.

Though the great majority of Parisians seemed taken with the idea, protests erupted at once. The tower was denounced as much too large, too dangerous, unacceptably ugly—“a project,” it was said, “more in character with America (where taste is not very developed).”

In the past twenty years, since the end of the Civil War, feats of American engineering and construction had been attracting the attention of the world. The Mississippi River had been spanned for the first time, at St. Louis, with an unprecedented steel-and-masonry railroad bridge designed by James Buchanan Eads. The newly completed Brooklyn Bridge, the largest suspension bridge in the world, demonstrated dramatically the first use of steel cables.

Further, American inventions were the talk everywhere and rapidly becoming part of European life, as Samuel Morse’s telegraph had. Paris was particularly affected. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, invented in 1876, and Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb, introduced in 1879, as well as his system to generate electricity, took hold rapidly. In 1880 there were nearly 500 telephone “subscribers” in Paris. By 1883 there were more than 2,000. The Paris Opera and the Saint-Lazare railway station had converted from gas to electric lights.

That France, too, was well advanced in science and technology, pioneering with numerous inventions like the use of caissons for underwater construction, a system adopted by the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, seemed wholly beside the point to those opposed to Monsieur Eiffel and his tower. So greatly did they fear the takeover of art by industry and technology that the very thought of such a monstrous intrusion on the beauty of Paris was completely abhorrent.

The general understanding was that the tower would not be permanent, but would be taken down at some point in the future. In the fall of 1886 a government committee voted to proceed. When, at the start of 1887, the first stages of construction got under way on the Champ de Mars and it could be seen, by the placement of their foundations, that the four great angled legs upon which the tower would stand encompassed an area of fully two and a half acres, those against it became even more incensed. They saw the whole centuries-long preeminence of art and architecture, the entire human scale of the Paris they loved, direly threatened. The glorious evidence of their country’s past and culture would be hideously overshadowed by an iron monstrosity. And what possible use would it serve, they asked.

Le Temps carried a petition signed by fifty highly prominent, highly irate figures in French arts and letters, including Charles Garnier, architect of the Opera, painter Ernest Meissonier, composer Charles Gounod, writers Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant.

We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and devoted lovers of the beauty of Paris, to date intact, do protest with all our strength and with all our indignation, in the name of unappreciated French taste, in the name of French art and French history, now under attack, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower, which public spitefulness, often characterized by common sense and the spirit of justice, has already baptized, “the Tower of Babel.”

Not even “the commercial nation of America” would want such a structure, the petition insisted.

In his response Eiffel asked whether it was because of their artistic value that the pyramids had so captured the imagination of the world. “The tower will be the highest edifice which men have ever built. So why should what is admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris?” Addressing the question of artistic value, he said the tower would have its own beauty.

He also correctly sensed that the majority of the people of France favored the project as a stunning symbol of the amazing rejuvenation of their country since the “Débâcle” of 1870. In less than twenty years, under the Third Republic, the national income had nearly doubled, industrial production tripled. The whole idea of the forthcoming 1889 exposition was to celebrate such modern progress, as well as the centennial of the French Revolution.

The steady advance of French accomplishment would have seemed without limit were it not for recent unsettling reports from Panama that Ferdinand de Lesseps’s attempt to dig a canal there at sea level like his prior triumph at Suez, was proving far more difficult and costly than promised.

But if anyone of the day embodied the French genius for success, it was Gustave Eiffel. Indeed, faith in the Panama canal had revived almost from the moment it was announced that Eiffel—who had warned against attempting a sea-level canal at Panama—would now be designing locks for the project. No other civil engineer in France inspired such confidence. To a large degree the decision to go ahead with the tower rested on his reputation.

Born and raised in Dijon, and trained in Paris at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Eiffel had, by 1887, become France’s master builder. Without question, he was one of the engineering geniuses of the Industrial Age, known especially for such unprecedented iron structures as the Garabit Viaduct, with its arches four hundred feet above the Truyère River. For nearly thirty years he had built railroads, train stations, and bridges all over France, Europe, even in Russia and China. Nothing he had built had ever failed.

The chief problem to contend with in constructing the tower, he knew, was wind, and it was in answer to that reality that the design emerged. As the great French architect and earlier builder in iron, Henri Labrouste, had preached, “in architecture form must always be appropriate to the function for which it is intended.” (Or as the Paris-trained American architect Louis Sullivan would later say more succinctly and famously, “Form follows function.”)

The tower would rise in three stages. Once under way, it proceeded upward in amazingly rapid time. Its critics were even more taken aback by the spectacle. It was called “a metal spiderweb,” “a work of disconcerting ugliness” and utter “coarseness.” A professor of mathematics predicted from his calculations that at a height of 748 feet the tower would collapse. Others stressed that in any event it would never be finished in time for the exposition.

By April it had reached its first platform level, where a visitor’s promenade and four restaurants were to be located at an elevation of 189 feet. By September, it was up to the second platform at 379 feet. From there the ironwork of the enormous spire began its long tapering ascent to the top, the men on the job working in all weather.

By March 1889, the tower was finished, not only ahead of schedule but ahead of every other building under construction for the exposition. On Sunday, March 31, Eiffel and a delegation of ten willing to brave a climb of 1,170 steps unfurled a huge Tricolor from on top.

“You will remember always,” Eiffel told them against a stiff March wind, “the great effort we have made in common to show all that, thanks to her engineers and her workers, France still holds an important place in the world. …”

From such a height, wrote a reporter from Le Figaro who had made the climb, Paris appeared like a tiny stage set.

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 …

IV

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.

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.

It was, said The Times, certain to be the most discussed painting of the year, and “without exception the most ambitious picture of our time.”