Expatriates in Chicago

CHICAGO, business capital of the Midwest, is each year becoming more of a cultural center as well. Next week the Chicago Art Institute will stage a show unrivaled among the new year's exhibitions for size and sophistication: 120 pictures by three extraordinary American expatriates--John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler. All three made their fame in the Victorian and Edwardian eras; after their deaths, the reputations of all three declined. Perhaps because they were restless folk, who elected to live abroad, none of the three ever quite matched the greatness of their deep-rooted contemporaries, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. But Chicago's show should do much to restore them to their proper places in the ranks of American artists.

James McNeill Whistler's monogram was a butterfly, which appears in medallion form in his portrait of Thomas Carlyle (see spread). In his landscapes, Whistler was a butterfly, gently sipping the sweetness of nature and making it the subject of canvases so subtle and thinly brushed as to seem evanescent. He lived in London, made his mission "revealing the Thames to the people who lived on it but had previously only seen it as a stretch of water."

In his life, Whistler was part scorpion (and sometimes attached a scorpion's tail to the butterfly in his monogram), a terror of the drawing rooms. He had a bit of a beard beneath his lower lip, which he used to tug at for inspiration when cornered. Then he would open his mouth and paralyze the opposition with a quip. When Critic John Ruskin dared criticize Whistler's paintings too harshly, the devilish dandy sued him for libel. Among the evidence presented at the trial was Whistler's Batter sea Bridge (opposite). Looking at it. the judge made the mistake of using sarcasm--Whistler's favorite weapon. The following dialogue took place:

His Honor: "Are those figures on the top of the bridge intended for people?"

Whistler: "They are just what you like."

His Honor: "That is a barge beneath?"

Whistler: "Yes. I am very much flattered at your seeing that . . ."

In the end, Whistler won his case, but the judge awarded him damages of just one farthing and, by making him pay the court costs, helped force the painter into bankruptcy.

John Singer Sargent, standing at the easel in his studio on London's Tite Street, used to mutter, "Gainsborough would have done it!" But in his heart he knew he was no Gainsborough. What Sargent had in abundance was a capacity for flattering his sitters in paint, and naturally they flocked to him. He complained that "portrait painting is a pimp's profession," and late in life he swore off it. "No more paughtraits," he wrote triumphantly to a friend. "I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another, especially of the Upper Classes."

Of the three expatriates on show, Sargent rose highest in his lifetime and fell farthest afterwards. Some of his paintings at Chicago, such as the vibrant portrait of Mile. Suzanne Poirson and the elegantly sexy Egyptian Girl (see spread), will surprise those who have come to regard him as a mere Cecil Beaton of the paintbrush. He had more dash than genius, yet in his best moments the portly, full-bearded conservative stood among the immortals.

Mary Cassatt's closest male friend was also her master, Edgar Degas. If she never equaled that dour misogynist as an artist, she came close enough to earn a place as the best woman painter America has produced. A rich, aristocratic Pennsylvanian, she spent almost all her adult life laboring at her profession in Paris. Though she hobnobbed with the impressionists, the tall spinster never painted a landscape. People offered more of a challenge, she felt. Cassatt was an austere sort alto gether; she once turned John Singer Sargent from her door because he had done such a "dreadful portrait" of her brother Alex.

A Cup of Tea (see spread) demonstrates Cassatt's genius for imbuing the most ordinary sights with a magic timelessness. Her compositions look as casual as candid camera shots; actually they are composed as sensitively as the Japanese prints she admired and collected. La Loge (opposite) is a surprisingly festive picture for Cassatt. Curator Frederick Sweet, who assembled Chicago's exhibition, considers it her most beautiful canvas.

Says Curator Sweet of the three expatriates: "Whistler developed a style almost entirely his own--a kind of impressionism quite different from the French. Sargent followed European portrait traditions, but he did it better than the Europeans; he had an American enthusiasm and directness. Mary Cassatt was very vigorous and stimulating, and I think the French artists of the time were aware of it." All in all, Sweet concludes, the three brought more to European art than they gained from it.

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