Sargent's Daughters. Erica E. Hirshler

      The battle lines between the artist and Marie-Louise Pailleron had perhaps been drawn a year or two before. During the summer of 1879, when Sargent was with the family at their country home in Savoy, he often played with the children. It was a season not only of painting but also of butterfly hunting, and Marie-Louise later recalled Sargent searching out desirable specimens for his collection. After capturing the colorful insects, he acted “like an assassin,” she wrote, “asphyxiating his victims” under a glass with the smoke of his cigar. That Marie-Louise summoned up the event with such fascination and horror almost seventy years after the fact might demonstrate the lingering effect it had upon her, and it may explain some of her reluctance as a model, pinned, as it were, to the canvas. Frequent appointments with a young girl who had been characterized by her own grandmother as “spoiled too much by her father and ... too forward” cannot have been easy, nor were the two siblings the best of friends. Marie-Louise defined her sittings for Sargent as “a veritable state of war” and herself as a “rebel” who posed badly, fidgeted and chattered constantly, and refused to obey the painter’s requests. Her arguments with Sargent, which began with the details of her costume and her hairstyle and escalated over his desire to have her sit for extended periods, continued for some time. She was only convinced to settle down to pose by a visit from the dashing painter Carolus-Duran, who appeared in his protégé’s studio, explained that her father would be unhappy if Marie-Louise’s portrait was not a success, and disappeared again “like Jupiter in his storm cloud.”⁵⁸

      Uncooperative as she was, Marie-Louise’s descriptions of her sittings offer one of the few early records of Sargent’s studio on the rue Notre Dame des Champs and of his portrait practice in the early 1880s. The artist had, she said, “a large studio, very bright, but very untidy, in which the principal attraction, aside from the studies that hung on the wall, drifted over the furniture and even onto the floor (I remember a head of a Capri girl, a marvelous profile ...), was for me a grubby harmonium, whose keyboard I undertook to clean on my arrival.” As if she were trying to distance herself from her own misbehavior, Marie-Louise’s account shifts between the first and third person as she relates her own recalcitrance and the difficulties Sargent faced when trying to paint her. She was well aware of the tension in the studio and Sargent’s attempts to relieve it:

       Of course ... my painter was unable to get his model to resume her pose, thence ensued a lively chase, leaping over obstacles, etc. From this harmonium, gray with dust, J. S. Sargent could, when he so desired, produce agreeable sounds; he was a good musician, and he also sang and played the guitar; when he was happy with his work he sang minstrel songs that amused me a great deal. To sing, he perched himself on the harmonium or on one of the ladders, long legs dangling - but that only happened in peaceful moments, and generally war reigned on the rue Notre Dame des Champs.

      Vacillating between admitting her guilt and justifying her discomfort, she talked about the portrait: