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 R
obinson, 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 th
e 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.