The Letter
Chapter 1 —
Sargent POV
The letter arrives on a Tuesday, which is the kind of detail Sargent notices and immediately distrusts.
He is working when his housekeeper brings it up — a canvas half-finished against the north wall, a woman’s hands rendered in three sessions of increasingly frustrated charcoal before the paint, the commission a minor thing from a minor household that is paying him enough to keep the studio through winter.
He does not look away from the hands when Mrs.
Holt sets the envelope on the table beside his turpentine. He looks away when she lingers.
She never lingers.
The envelope is good paper.
He knows quality without touching it — four years in Paris will do that to a man, teach him the weight of things before he has opened them.
The seal is plain.
No crest.
Someone who has a crest and has chosen not to use it, which is more interesting than someone who simply doesn’t have one.
He turns it over twice in his hands before he opens it, a habit from Paris where letters sometimes contained things that needed a moment of preparation before they became real.
He wipes his hands on the cloth at his belt and picks it up.
Mr. Sargent,
I am told you are the finest portrait painter currently working in London. I am told also that you are expensive, particular about your subjects, and disinclined toward commissions that bore you. I find I am not interested in a painter who can be bored by what he sees.
I should like you to paint me.
The terms are negotiable.
The sitting schedule will be mine to set. I expect you will have questions. I expect also that you will accept before you have finished reading this letter.
— L. Langtry
He reads it twice.
He sets it down.
He picks it up and reads it a third time, which is not something he does.
Outside the Tite Street window London is doing what London does in August — pressing itself against the glass, grey and particular, the smell of the river threading up through the heat even this far from the water.
A cart passes below. A woman shouts at someone he cannot see.
Two boys chase something across the street and disappear around the corner before he can identify what.
Somewhere to the east, though he cannot hear it from Chelsea, a city is beginning to understand that something has gone wrong in Whitechapel.
The papers this morning were careful about it. Careful in the way papers are when they know more than they are printing, when the editors have made decisions about what a city is ready to absorb before its breakfast.
He sets the letter on the table beside the turpentine and looks at the canvas.
The hands are wrong.
They have been wrong for three sessions and they will be wrong for three more because the woman who owns them is not interesting and he cannot paint uninteresting hands.
He has tried.
He spent the better part of yesterday afternoon trying, mixing colors that were technically correct and applying them with brushwork that was technically proficient and producing something that was technically a painting and nothing more than that.
Paris taught him many things and one of them is that the painter’s eye cannot be instructed to lie about what it finds dull.
The eye sees what it sees.
The brush reports faithfully. Dullness is permanent on canvas in a way it isn’t in conversation, where a person can at least surprise you.
He thinks about Madame X.
He does this less than he used to.
Progress, his friend Wilde would say, is simply the distance between one catastrophe and the next.
He had laughed at that over dinner six months ago and believed it completely and stopped believing it somewhere on the walk home through the February dark, when the cold came in through his coat and the laughter went with it and what remained was the particular quiet of a man who has rebuilt something and is not entirely certain of the foundations.
The Gautreau portrait had been the most honest thing he had ever painted.
Paris had not wanted honesty.
Paris had wanted a beautiful woman rendered beautiful and instead he had given them a woman rendered true and the distinction had cost him everything — the commissions, the studio on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the invitations, the particular way certain doors open when a city has decided it likes you and the particular way those same doors close when it decides otherwise.
He had learned in the space of one exhibition opening what four years of careful work had built and how quickly a single canvas could dismantle it.
London had opened different doors.
Smaller ones, mostly. The hands-of-minor-households kind of doors. The commissions that paid the studio rent and kept Mrs. Holt employed and gave him enough wall space to work on things that mattered between the things that paid.
He was not ungrateful.
He was not ungrateful and he was not satisfied and he had made a reasonable peace with the distance between those two positions.
He picks up the letter again.
I expect you will accept before you have finished reading this letter.
He had.
That is the thing he is sitting with now — not the name, though the name is enough on its own, not the terms or the sitting schedule or the careful absence of a crest.
He had accepted in the space between paint me and the signature, in the moment before he knew who was asking, which means something about him that he is not entirely comfortable examining in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon with Mrs. Holt somewhere below and the wrong hands drying on the canvas behind him.
Lillie Langtry.
He knows the name the way everyone in London knows the name — the way you know the name of something that the whole city has decided to have an opinion about before you have formed one of your own.
The Jersey Lily.
The most photographed woman in England, the most painted woman in England, which is a strange thing to be when you are writing to a painter asking to be painted again.
As if the existing portraits are insufficient.
As if something has not yet been captured that she requires captured, and she has decided he is the one to do it.
The Prince of Wales.
The husband somewhere — Edward, ruined, the specific details vague in the way details become vague when money runs out and a man stops being invited to places where details are exchanged over port and good lighting.
There are rumors about the East End.
There are always rumors about men like Edward Langtry once they have ceased to be interesting in the places that matter.
He knows what the name costs.
He knows what his own name costs, what it is currently worth in the particular economy of London reputation, what it has cost him to bring it back from Paris to something approaching respectable, what a second scandal would do to the slow careful architecture of the last four years.
He is not a fool.
He has never been a fool, which has occasionally been his problem — a fool would have painted Virginie Gautreau safely and kept his Paris studio and his Paris commissions and his Paris life and never known what he had traded for them.
He is not a fool and he is already reaching for paper.
He crosses to his desk and finds a clean sheet and uncaps his pen and writes without pausing because pausing would mean thinking and he has already done the thinking and the thinking has not changed anything and he would rather commit the decision cleanly than circle it until it loses its shape.
Mrs. Langtry,
I am available Thursday at two o’clock.
The studio is at 31 Tite Street, Chelsea. I ask that you come alone.
— J.S. Sargent
He reads it once.
He does not pick it up a second time.
He seals it and calls for Mrs. Holt and gives it to her with instructions for the afternoon post without meeting her eyes, because Mrs. Holt has been with him for three years and has the particular quality of long-serving housekeepers everywhere which is that she understands everything and says nothing and the understanding is somehow louder than the nothing.
He does not look at the letter again after she takes it because looking at it again would mean thinking about what he has just done and he already knows what he has just done.
He has accepted a commission from the most dangerous woman in London.
He has done it in under four minutes. He has done it without asking the terms or the purpose or what she wants from the finished canvas or who will see it or where it will hang.
He has done it because the letter was interesting and the hands on the canvas are wrong and London in August is the particular kind of grey that makes a man want to paint something that matters before the year runs out.
He picks up his brush.
The hands are still wrong.
He looks at them for a long moment — the careful technically-correct rendering of fingers that belong to a woman whose name he will not remember in ten years, in a house he has already half-forgotten, for a commission that will pay the rent and leave no mark on anything.
He sets the brush down.
He thinks about Thursday.
Historical Note —
John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to American expatriate parents and trained as a painter in Paris under the portrait artist Carolus-Duran. By his late twenties he had established himself as one of the most technically gifted painters working in Europe — brilliant, precise, capable of capturing psychological truth in a single sitting in ways that made his subjects simultaneously grateful and uneasy.
In 1884 he submitted a portrait of Parisian socialite Virginie Gautreau to the Paris Salon. The painting — which would eventually become known as Madame X — depicted her in a black evening gown with a strap fallen from her shoulder, her pose composed but her expression remote and knowing. Paris society was scandalized. The painting was considered an affront to the subject’s reputation and by extension to the standards of public decency the Salon was expected to uphold. Sargent was effectively driven out of Paris. He repainted the fallen strap to its proper position but the damage was irreparable.
