He had demonstrated uncommon talent in his extraordinary cameo carvings and freehand drawings. Before leaving for Paris he had modeled a remarkably strong, confident bust of his father. He considered a pencil portrait he drew of his mother to be his most prized possession. Yet he knew the question of how far his talent could take him, and how it would measure up against serious competition, had still to be resolved, and as for so many others, this was among the main reasons for his being in Paris.
He moved in at first with his Uncle François, his father’s brother, on the avenue de la Grande-Armée, and “at once” found a part-time job working for an Italian cameo cutter on Montmartre. Told his application to the École des Beaux-Arts could take months to process, he enrolled in both morning and evening classes in modeling at one of the so-called “petites écoles” held at the École de Médecine. From Montmartre to the École de Médecine in the Latin Quarter was a two-mile walk. On the days he was working he made the round trip.
Uncle François, who made his living as a demolition specialist, had been doing well as long as Georges Haussmann kept tearing Paris apart. But with the emperor’s plan for the city nearly completed, and the demolition about over, Uncle François was in “bad straits.” Forced to find somewhere else to live, Gus began moving from “cheaper to cheaper lodgings.” He was soon barely surviving, “miserably poor,” as he wrote years later, but he said nothing about it at the time, such was his refusal to “dwell on the ugly side of things.”
Classes at the petite école were a joy to him. Not even the conditions under which they were conducted could dampen his spirits.
We worked in a stuffy, overcrowded, absolutely unventilated theater, with two rows of students, perhaps twenty-five in each row, seated in a semicircle before the model who stood against the wall. Behind those who drew were about fifteen sculptors and I look back with admiration upon the powers of youth to live, work, and be joyful in an atmosphere that must have been almost asphyxiating.
II
As promised, the glittering Exposition Universelle of 1867 was bigger and more spectacular than anything the world had yet seen. One giant, oval-shaped, glass-and-cast-iron exhibition “palace” and more than one hundred smaller buildings filled most of the vast Champ de Mars on the Left Bank. More than 50,000 exhibitors took part. The theme was “objects for the improvement of the physical and moral condition of the masses.” By the time the fair closed, on the last day of October, 11 million people— more than twice the number who attended the Exposition of 1855—had poured across the Pont d’Iéna to the banner-festooned main entrance on the Quai d’Orsay.
They came from virtually every country. Emperor Napoleon III played host in lavish fashion to the czar of Russia, the kings of Prussia, Bavaria, and Portugal, the pasha of Egypt, and the sultan of Turkey in a red fez. There were soirées and dinners night after night, and grand balls at the luxuriously renovated Palais des Tuileries. Count Otto von Bismarck, chief minister to the king of Prussia, could be seen resplendent in his white uniform and invariably enjoying himself as much as anyone. At a ball at the Austrian Embassy, amid “mountains” of lights and flowers, grottoes, and cascades of real water, guests waltzed to music by Johann Strauss’s orchestra from Vienna. Strauss himself conducted the first performance of The Blue Danube in Paris, and the dancing went on until nearly daybreak.
To add to the pleasures of the city for visitors of all kinds, a new line of steam-powered sightseeing boats called Bateaux Mouches now plied the Seine.
Because of bad weather in March, the exposition had been embarrassingly slow getting under way. At the time of the official opening on April 2, nearly half of the exhibits were still unpacked. (People were calling it “The Universal Exhibition of International Boxes.”) But by May all was in full swing and Paris more dazzling than ever. No one had ever seen so many flags flying, so many lights blazing, so many people of all kinds.
“At the Grand Hôtel they were making up beds in the dining room,” reported the New York Times. With the start of summer the throngs grew greater still. “Even the Americans are coming at last. The registers are filling with their names from Boston to New Orleans, and so on to San Francisco.” Among the crowds of Americans was the author Mark Twain, who, taking time out from a tour of Europe and the Holy Land, checked into the Hôtel du Louvre.
“Paris is now the great center of the world,” wrote Samuel F. B. Morse, who, at age seventy-eight, had returned with his wife and four children. (So indispensable had the telegraph become to daily life at home in the United States by this time that 50,000 miles of Western Union wire carried more than 2 million news dispatches a year, including, in 1867, the latest from the exposition in Paris.)
The displays of novel manufactured items included an almost overwhelming array of things large and small, things almost unimaginable— magnificent locomotives, steam engines, a feather-weight metal called aluminum, a giant siege gun by the German cannon maker Krupp, and a new kind of brass horn, le saxophone, devised by Napoleon III’s official instrument maker, Adolphe Sax. The favorite American import, to judge by the crowds it drew, was a soda fountain. The Philadelphia art student Thomas Eakins wrote to his family of waiting in a line a block long for a drink from it.
Mark Twain and a few traveling companions spent only a few days in Paris before continuing on the tour he would describe in often hilarious fashion in Innocents Abroad, which was to remain his best-selling book throughout his lifetime. Neither he nor any of his group had been abroad before. Travel was a “wild novelty” to them, and Paris “flashed upon us a splendid meteor,” he wrote, but he thought considerably less of the Parisians, and what humor he evoked was chiefly at their expense. He was, as would be said, not so much an American Francophobe, but a Parisphobe. The Paris barbershops were hopeless. He detested Paris guides. They “deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the first time or sees the sights alone or in the company with others as little experienced as himself.”
With few exceptions the women of Paris struck him as downright homely. The grisettes were the biggest disappointment of all. “I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions … and I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than I formerly envied him.” Seeing the “renowned” can-can danced for the first time, he covered his face with his hands, he claimed, but “looked through my fingers.”
The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can. … Heavens!
Of the especially conspicuous presence of prostitutes in the city because of the exposition, he chose to say nothing. Yet when his brief stay was over, as he acknowledged, he gave “the beautiful city a regretful farewell.”
The number and importance of contemporary paintings and sculptures on exhibit surpassed anything seen before in one place. Though the American section of the Fine Arts Department was quite modest compared to that of the French, it was larger than it had been at the Exposition of 1855 and contained a number of works that, in time, would rank as American masterpieces. The most admiring crowds gathered about two enormous, dramatic landscapes—both befitting subjects for America, it was felt—Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains and Frederic Church’s Niagara Falls, the only American painting to be honored with a silver medal. Among several works evoking the Civil War from a Northern point of view were John Ferguson Weir’s The Gun Foundry, showing the munitions works near West Point, and Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front, in which three Confederate prisoners under guard stand before a Northern general.
James McNeill Whistler’s White Girl, a near-life-size, full-length portrait of his beautiful red-haired Irish model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, dressed in white against a white background, had been rejected from an earlier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and was considered, even in Paris, too suggestive by far, in that the young woman’s hair was undone and she stood on a wolf’s skin.
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Many visitors found the exhibitions of American art disappointing. “Infantile arrogance,” “childish ignorance,” were two of the harsher comments from French critics, though one thought “M. Homer ought not, in good justice, be passed over unnoticed” and another saw promise of better things to come.
Count on the fact that the Americans, once they begin the business of the fine arts, will go quickly, and will go looking toward the future. Go ahead! Forward!
Homer, who had arrived in Paris in December, stayed nearly all of 1867. “I am working hard and improving much,” he wrote a friend in August. But his correspondence was infrequent and provides little in the way of details. He shared a studio in Montmartre, studied for a while with a French artist, Frederick Rondel, and spent time painting landscapes in the artists’ colony at Cernay-la-Ville.
A painting by Homer called The Studio that appears to have been done in Paris had, in any event, as Henry James said, “a great deal of Paris in it.” Two painters sit playing chamber music on cello and violin, the score propped on their easels. They have the requisite beards and mustaches, and in a photograph taken in Paris that year, Homer has the tips of his large mustache waxed to sharp points in the Louis Napoleon mode. Presumably, like other American artists and students, he spent time at the exposition, but how much is unknown.
Nor, regrettably, is there any account of how much of the exposition Augustus Saint-Gaudens saw. Probably he had not money enough to attend more than once or twice. But with his zest for getting “his money’s worth,” he doubtless covered a lot of ground, and he did see something of lifelong importance to him. It was a small bronze, a standing figure by the French sculptor Paul Dubois, of St. John the Baptist as a Child. It “seemed extraordinary to me,” he would write years afterward, and Dubois’s work and Dubois himself were to have “profound” influence.
Americans filled Paris in such numbers as to please themselves and annoy some of those from other countries, and the British in particular. Hotel managers, shopkeepers, clerks, and floor managers at the sumptuous new department stores—les grands magasins such as Le Printemps and La Samaritaine—welcomed Americans as no others. “They spend money profusely, are not much given to bargaining, and put on no airs,” wrote the New York Times correspondent.
In addition to the huge influx of American tourists, the size of the American colony in Paris had been growing steadily to the point where there were now more than 4,000 Americans living in the city. This was far fewer than the number of resident English or Germans, but still four times what it had been a generation earlier.
The bad feelings that had developed among many of the French toward Americans on the side of the North during the Civil War had subsided rapidly. Further, on July 2, word reached Paris that Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had been executed by a firing squad on orders from the rebel leader, Benito Juárez. Napoleon III first learned of the calamity when handed a note as he was presenting awards before a crowd of 20,000 at the exposition.
Clearly his misadventures in Mexico were finished, and this, too, had a notable effect on how Parisians felt about the throngs of American visitors that summer.
The great majority of thinking minds are … heartily glad that an end has been put to the Emperor’s projects in that direction [the Times correspondent wrote], and they seem desirous to make up by their present cordiality to Northerners for the dislike and hostility which was evinced toward them during the rebellion. For the prompt revival of the old feeling of friendship, we have no doubt in a great measure to thank the Exhibition.
Europeans marveled at the industrial might that had been marshaled by the North during the Civil War and America’s surging productivity since. In the words of the soon-to-be American minister to France, Elihu Washburne, a former congressman from Illinois, “The United States, having astonished all Europe by triumphantly crushing out the most stupendous rebellion the world had ever known, and after one of the most gigantic wars in history, had bounded forward to a position of first rank among the nations of the earth.”
Such an enormous increase in productivity also meant unprecedented prosperity for a great many Americans, and with money at hand as never before in their lives, what better place to spend it than Paris? Well-to-do American women were now making annual trips to Paris to enhance their wardrobes at Worth’s. The famous couturier Charles Frederick Worth, an English expatriate, had made his establishment at 7 rue de la Paix a Paris destination, his name the very emblem of good taste in New York and San Francisco, no less than Paris or London. And if Worth’s proved insufficient, there were other high-priced dressmakers like Bobergh or Felix.
Bringing one lady to Paris cost as much as two men, wrote a young American civil engineer, Washington Roebling, who, with his wife, Emily, was in Europe gathering technical information in preparation for what was to be America’s greatest bridge, connecting Brooklyn to New York. Their money had vanished so rapidly in Paris that they had to leave earlier than they wished.
Another American of note, Henry Adams of Boston, wanted only to get out of Paris as soon as possible, but to his annoyance he and his wife, Clover, were held over for days, “waiting for ladies’ dresses and the milliner’s bills.” Paris was “horribly” expensive and crowded, the fastidious Adams reported. He had never imagined the city could be so overrun with “hordes of low Germans, English, Italians, Spaniards, and Americans, who stare and gawk and smell, and crowd every shop and street. I did not detect a single refined-looking being among them. …”
Every month, on average, one hundred Americans sojourning in Paris applied to the United States minister for the chance to be presented at court, and nearly all felt obliged to turn out in the finest, latest thing. Dr. Thomas Evans regularly supplied the emperor with the names of “présentable” Americans to be invited to reviews or grand balls at the Palace of the Tuileries or gala days at the palace at Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, or Compiègne.
One resident American in Paris who, like Evans, figured frequently on the royal guest list was Lillie Greenough Moulton, the wife of an independently wealthy American named Charles Moulton. Still in her twenties, and known for her exquisite singing voice, as well as her beauty, she had become a favorite of the emperor and empress. In her diary, along with descriptions of the flowers and diamond tiaras, the dazzling uniforms and other extravagances of the court, she included this account of what was involved in just preparing for a week in the country at la Maison de l’Empereur at Compiègne.
I was obliged to have about twenty dresses, eight day costumes (counting my traveling suit), the green cloth dress for the hunt, which I was told was absolutely necessary, seven ball dresses, five gowns for tea. …
A professional packer came to pack our trunks, of which I had seven and C[harles] had two; the maid and the valet each had one, making, altogether, quite a formidable pile of luggage.
Transportation was provided by a special train marked IMPéRIAL.
There was increasing talk in Paris financial circles of the great railroad under construction across the North American continent and what it could mean to world trade, especially in combination with the new sea-level ship canal being dug at Suez with French financing and under the leadership of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. The future had never looked so large with possibilities.
“The American flag is freely displayed all over Paris, as if our countrymen were welcome,” wrote a Philadelphia physician, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, who for some years had been coming to Paris to study French medical practices, but was now, with his wife and children, living full-time in Europe.
“Lincoln’s portrait is often seen in shop windows with other notabilities. In short the United States are ‘looking up.’ …” Dr. Sargent’s twelve-year-old son, “Johnnie,” was also a source of much pride to him. “He sketches quite nicely and has a remarkably quick and correct eye.”
III
When a formal notification arrived at last, informing Augustus Saint-Gaudens he had b
een admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts after a wait of nine months, he enrolled immediately in the atelier of François Jouffroy. As students in painting at the École, like Thomas Eakins, aspired to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme, master of the classical mode, who put great stress on drawing the human figure, so for those who would be sculptors, Jouffroy’s atelier was, as Saint-Gaudens said, “the triumphant one.”
Jouffroy was sixty-two, the son of a baker, tall, dark, and spare, “with little, intelligent black eyes,” as Saint-Gaudens remembered. When making his critique of a student’s work, he spoke in a low, nasal voice and while customarily gazing off the whole time in some other direction from the model and the student’s efforts.
As he acknowledged, Saint-Gaudens had not yet shown himself to be a brilliant student. But Jouffroy’s compliments consoled him. He was not the least discouraged, nor did he suffer any doubts about himself, such was his youthful vanity, as he also acknowledged years afterward. The doubts came later.
At a student party soon after he joined the class, the others asked him to sing the “Marseillaise,” which, under the Second Empire, was forbidden in public places. He sang it in English, as he had with his friends at home in New York, and his performance brought a roar of approval. They urged him to sing it again. They praised his voice, told him how beautiful it was, and he believed them. In the days to follow he sang the song many times over, only to realize they were making fun of him.
“I was finally admitted to full membership and teased no more, becoming in my turn one of the most boisterous of the students.”