Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

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An Interior in Venice (the Curtis family), 1898 Oil on canvas, 660 × 835mm Inscribed, lower left: John S. Sargent 1899 Royal Academy of Arts, London N e w Yo r k o N lY

This vivid conversation piece epitomises the cultured expatriate world of Venetian society. In the foreground are the owners of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, the Boston-born David Sargent Curtis (1825–1908) and his formidable wife, Ariana Wormeley Curtis (1833–1922). Sargent, a distant cousin, always stayed with them in Venice; Henry James (no. 000) wrote The Wings of the Dove (1902) in the library; Claude Monet (no. 000) painted Venetian scenes while staying there; Robert Browning was an old friend; Isabella Stewart Gardner and Mary Hunter (nos. 000,000) rented the palace on occasions. Behind the older couple is the son of the house Ralph Wormeley Curtis (1854–1922), a fellow art-student with Sargent in Paris and a lifelong friend, and his beautiful wife Lisa de Wolfe Colt Curtis (1871–1933). Sargent’s friendship with the Curtis family is documented in more than seventy letters he sent them, spanning forty years from the early 1880s to the early 1920s.1 Sargent’s regular visits to the Palazzo Barbaro were reciprocated with annual trips to London by the elder Curtises. Sargent entertained them, introduced them to his friends, sent them tickets to the Royal Academy private views, and generally looked after them. Much of the correspondence is given over to books, for all three friends were avid readers with a taste for recherché and exotic items on which they exchanged notes and recommendations. Sargent’s correspondence with Ralph and Lisa was altogether

more free and easy, maintaining the humorous and bantering exchanges that had characterised them as students.2 The Curtises accumulated a fair number of paintings and watercolours by Sargent, the majority probably by gift. The picture of the Curtis family in the grand salon of the Palazzo Barbaro, decorated with baroque paintings and ornate stucco-works, is a testament to that friendship. What is brilliant about it is the way that streaks of afternoon light dramatically pick out the figures against the dim, encompassing space of the room, which fades into darkness. It is the people who are charged with life, the room that is ghostly and timeless. The elderly Daniel is immersed in a volume of prints; his ruddy-cheeked wife exudes authority; the debonair Ralph perched on the edge of a console table; his elegant wife in summer white, pouring herself a cup of tea. The picture was painted in the spring of 1898, and it was offered as a gift to Sargent’s hostess, Ariana Curtis. Offended by her own flushed complexion and her son’s casual pose, which upset her ideas of decorum, she turned it down. Even the eloquent Henry James (no. 000) could not persuade her to change her mind: ‘The Barbaro Saloon thing … I absolutely and unreservedly adored…. I’ve seen few things of S[argent]’s that I’ve ever craved more to possess! I hope you haven’t altogether let it go.’3

1 Sargent/Curtis papers, Boston Athenaeum. 2 For a full account of Sargent’s friendship with the Curtises, see the introduction to Complete Paintings, Vol. VI, pp.31–9. 3 Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (ed.), Henry James: Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro (Pushkin Press, London, 1998), pp.156–57.

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F i g . oo Description of photograph Lender F i g . oo Description of photograph Lender

Gardners were also patrons of violinist and composer Charles Loeffler, sharing his taste (and Sargent’s) for modern French works, a distinction of Boston’s musical scene (cat. XX, fig. 4). On his frequent visits Sargent enjoyed these events, both public performances and private ones, at least once as the only guest at a concert by Loeffler that Mrs Gardner arranged especially for him.12 Connections between the arts were nurtured in places like the Tavern Club, a jovial men’s dining club that counted amongst its many prominent members musicians, actors, playwrights, painters and patrons. Sargent, visiting Boston more often than any other American city, was nurtured by these interlocking friendships; they led to a variety of commissions and to an integral relationship with Boston’s artistic development. Many of the city’s painters became his friends, particularly Dennis Bunker, Frederic Vinton and Dwight Blaney, all of whom enjoyed Sargent’s company (see cats. XX, XX). While social and cultural circles were inextricably linked in Boston, New York’s art world was larger, more diverse and somewhat independent from the machinations of high society. ‘Nobody cares a snap about you in New York unless you are immensely rich’, explained Bunker, a New Yorker who had spent several successful years in Boston. ‘It’s not a bit like Boston where everyone knows you and you are a “personage”.’13 While Sargent’s New York portrait sitters included members of the city’s leading families (Marquand, Vanderbilt, Goelet, Phelps Stokes), he did not socialise with them in the same way he had been entertained by society in Boston. Instead, he was fêted by architect Stanford White, who hosted a welcoming dinner for him in 1887 with a dozen other artists. Thus Sargent’s New York world was comprised predominantly of painters, sculptors and architects, many of them old friends, some from his student days in Paris, like J. Carroll Beckwith and Augustus Saint Gaudens.14 Bunker described the scene in his New York letters from 1889–90, noting that his friend Sargent was ‘so busy all the time . . . at white heat always, rushing from one place to another.’ On another occasion Bunker articulated the

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F i g . oo Title of work Oil on canvas, 00 × oo cm Lender

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