The Gilded Age (of white Americans), from the 1870s to about 1900, is a joy to research and write about. Crazy rich people doing, building and saying mad, impulsive, sometimes beautiful and often ridiculous things: traveling cross-country for séances; wearing leather pajamas while breakfasting next to a corpse; creating fantastical gardens and grand interpretive dance or poetry entertainments at lavish or ramshackle country homes. Mark Twain and his co-author Charles Dudley Warner are thought to have come up with the phrase for their novel of the same name, taking it from Shakespeare’s “King John”: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
This period of rampant industrialization produced an enormously wealthy, largely oblivious 1 percent, of which Donna M. Lucey is a most sympathetic and intelligent chronicler. In “Archie and Amélie,” her 2006 book about a Gilded Age couple’s childhoods, disastrous marriage and lives post-divorce, she introduced us to Amélie Rives, goddaughter of Robert E. Lee and author of the once-sizzling “The Quick or the Dead?,” a novel about the erotic yearnings of a widow for her late husband’s brother, something Rives then repeated in real life with a similar passion for her eccentric-verging-on-floridly-psychotic husband’s younger brother. In that book, Lucey also took us through the life and poshly hard times of Archie Chanler, who was dashing, wealthy and crazy as a coot, with no modern psychotropic drugs to contain his florid delusions (I am Napoleon). They were a glamorous, absurd, doomed couple, and Lucey did her lucid, thoughtful best by them.
In “Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas,” she does even more of what she does best, creating a rollicking snow globe version of an almost unimaginable world of wealth, crackpot notions of self-improvement and high-flying self-indulgence (like now; you know who you are, Goop) woven around an often passionate commitment to, deep admiration for and wide-ranging pursuit of the fine and literary arts (less like now). Lucey is a persistent detective and a bemused, sometimes amused, storyteller, attentive to interesting, hilarious, disturbing detail: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s enormous diamonds, some of which had names and which she “wore atop her head on gold spiral wires so that they’d bob and sparkle as she talked”; the teenage Elizabeth Chanler, strapped to a “long machinelike” board for two years to “cure” her limp; Sally Fairchild, after a lifetime of serving as her mother’s nurse and bodyguard, hitting her stride at 80 by seducing a 30-year-old married man. “If that young woman can’t hold her husband,” she sneered, “that’s her lookout.”Continue reading the main story
“Sargent’s Women” presents biographies of four American ladies whose lives intersected with John Singer Sargent’s. The detail is deep, sometimes unnecessarily so, and the theme, that Sargent’s portraits “hinted at the mysteries, passions and tragedies that unfolded in his subjects’ lives,” is pursued in every chapter.Photo
Elsie Palmer, who starts things off in “The Pilgrim,” sat for Sargent when she was 17. It was a difficult commission and she was 18 by the time it was finished. Although Sargent’s early sketches show her as innocent, childlike and charming, Lucey tells us that the finished portrait “dispenses with charm.” In the final painting, Elsie looks like a grim little ghost, with her blunt bangs, pop eyes and pale little face. She’s clad in a pleated linen dress that resembles a shroud.
Although I associate the Gilded Age with Newport “cottages” and Mrs. Astor’s 400, Elsie Palmer’s life was centered on Colorado, then famous for its curative mountain climate, and the home of her father, known as the General, who made his fortune in railroads and built a great estate, Glen Eyrie, at what would become the town of Colorado Springs. After her mother, called Queen (not an uncommon nickname, it seems, among wealthy Americans of the time), suffered a heart attack and was told to avoid the thin Colorado air, she brought her daughters to England and embarked on a life of socializing with “lovers of art and music and literature.” When she died, Elsie returned to Colorado to run the household for her demanding father, a task made even more difficult after he was thrown by his horse and paralyzed. She escaped by marrying a nice, odd, rich younger man, with whom she’d been secretly engaged. For the ceremony at Glen Eyrie, she wore “a long brown wrap, covered with huge metal buckles.” Strung across it like the pieces of a coat of mail were “cords holding tiny bronze figures of animals of all kinds — a thousand of them.” Although Elsie’s husband, Leo Myers, had a great, unexpected success in the 1930s with a trilogy of novels set in 16th-century India, he remained a troubled soul and killed himself in 1944. We last see Elsie, at 82, with an old family retainer, taking long walks through the English countryside. For me, the fascination of this often passive, largely talentless woman lies in the trappings of her life. Although I did love the story of her oddball romance.
Lucia Fairchild, the focus of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” was the sister of the actual sitter, Sally Fairchild, the 21-year-old beauty Sargent painted under a thick blue veil on the beach at Nahant. Lucey must have felt that gorgeous, imperious, sharp-tongued Sally, who shunned suitors for many years to care for her mother — and never regretted it — wasn’t sufficiently engaging. (I disagree.) Instead we are given her little sister, not a great beauty but a successful, grievously hard-working artist who married a feckless, lazy leech, devoted herself to supporting him and their children, lost her eyesight and mobility before she was 50 and died soon thereafter, happy in her belief that the world would know and appreciate how good and loving her children were to her.
Elizabeth Chanler, one of the “Astor orphans,” was painted by Sargent in London when she was 27. Her story is dominated by an account of her passionate love affair with her best friend’s volatile husband, Jack Chapman, a leading intellectual light of East Coast society. Their ups and downs and intrigues, as well as their eventual marriage, are fully chronicled, but although this chapter, which Lucey calls “The Madonna,” provides an ample sense of the times it doesn’t relay very much of the woman who, as Lucey puts it, “remained the glue that kept her unstable husband intact.”
Last, never least, is Isabella Stewart Gardner, the only sitter who breaks out of the box of Gilded Age prototypes to emerge as a tigerish individual. She comes across as hardheaded and visionary, a riotous mix of Bette Midler and Dame Maggie Smith’s upper-crust characters. Gardner became Sargent’s patron and, Lucey adds, “one of his dearest friends.” After he’d “grown to detest portraiture,” that of the 82-year-old Gardner was the only one he asked to paint.
Sargent and Henry James are often paired as comrades, as closeted gay men, as great portraitists and as each other’s subjects. In 1893, in “Picture and Text,” James introduced Sargent to an American audience, arguing that the ideal artist “sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, elevates and humanizes the technical.” James makes it clear that Sargent is as close to this ideal as he can imagine in real life.
Lucey faces one significant difficulty as she slides these four clearly illuminated and carefully examined pearls onto a fascinating and filigreed chain, even as so many of the details are memorable and revealing. The problem with creating portraits of women from John Singer Sargent’s world is that so many of those portraits have already been brilliantly, unforgettably created and immortalized, from sketch to canvas, by Sargent himself.
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