Strapless by Davis Deborah

Author:Davis, Deborah [Davis, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2004-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Dancing on a Volcano

At the end of March, Sargent traveled again to London, and again he saw Henry James. While there, he solidified some of the relationships he had established the previous month, spending time with Edwin Austin Abbey and other new friends. He visited artists’ studios and attended exhibitions, among them the Grosvenor Gallery show of paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of eighteenth-century notables Sargent admired for their strong lighting effects. Still nervous about his own portrait of Amélie Gautreau, Sargent was preoccupied with thoughts of the rapidly approaching Salon.

He returned to Paris on April 29, just as insiders would get their first look at the exhibition. Sargent went to his club that night, hoping to find a friend to ease his jitters. He ran into Ralph Curtis, his dashing distant cousin who, like him, led the expatriate life in Europe, traveling and studying art.

Sargent and Curtis dined together at Sargent’s studio. Even though the portrait of Amélie no longer dominated the room, she still directed their conversation, as Sargent imagined various scenarios for the following morning. The apprehensions he and others in his position might have felt were expressed perfectly in the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young Russian painter who was also exhibiting at the Salon. She spoke for all the nervous artists when she fretted: “To-morrow is varnishing day. . . . What will they say of me? Will it be good, will it be bad, or will they say nothing at all?” Some paintings would be dismissed as unimportant, or worse still, ignored completely.

In all the years Sargent had been exhibiting at the Salon, he had never had a bad experience. His entries had always been singled out for praise and awards. But the thousands of people who in the coming days would be passing judgment on his creation would be mostly Parisians, known for their unpredictable behavior. In 1884, they were especially contradictory.

After the Franco-Prussian War, the French had examined themselves under a magnifying glass and were horrified to find signs of weakness everywhere. The death rate in France was higher than the birth rate. The average height of Frenchmen was decreasing rather than increasing. Farms were underproducing. There were signs of social and cultural deterioration as well. Censorship of the printed word had relaxed, permitting writers such as Zola and Huysmans to profile the most depraved members of French society, including alcoholics, prostitutes, and hedonists. There was nudity onstage, a brisk market for pornography, and widespread alcoholism, all symptoms of a pervasive decadence. Great thinkers saw parallels between France and the Roman Empire on the eve of its decline, and predicted a similar fall for France.

Religious leaders, concerned about rampant immorality in Paris, conceived a church that would be visible from everywhere in the city. It would remind citizens that God was watching the capital and everyone in it, thus inspiring them to behave. In 1875 work began on Sacré-Coeur, an impressive white basilica located on the hill of Montmartre, overlooking the rest of Paris.

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