Yevno Azef was an Okhrana informer who went abroad to seek out Russian activists abroad, infiltrated the SR (Socialist Revolutionary Party), and became chief of its military arm, responsible for terrorist attacks inside Russia. It is said that his terrorist activities were especially successful, because — in a particularly Russian twist — he was assisted by the Okhrana. He was responsible for several high profile assassinations of highly placed Tsarist loyalists as well as well as for betraying 17 high level SR activists in Russia.

In another truly Russian twist, Azef was in turn ratted out to the SR leadership by a member of newly formed Russian masonic lodge, The Pole Star, who had learned of his role from yet another masonic brother. No one in SR wanted to believe the story; a special court of veteran leaders continued to refuse to believe it until they were finally faced with an incontrovertible witness. Azef escaped the planned SR retribution, and settled in Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life, secretly, as a corset seller.

Only one person ever cottoned on to his true nature, a young woman revolutionary who declared him to be an Okhrana agent on sight, on no evidence other than his face.

Just look. It is a terrifying face.

Mikhail Zygar, The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900 – 1917

The Boits were one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of well off New England and New York families who have permanently removed to Europe and lived a peripatetic, cosmopolitan, multilingual life, taking advantage of the favorable exchange rate, the freedom afforded by European lax moral customs and by the status of (non-belonging) guests.

“Everything smacks of the pilgrim,” wrote Earl Shinn of one such expatriate household. “The  furniture and decorations are collected from half-a-dozen capitals … the servants fill the halls with  echoes of a varied and courier-like assortment of  languages; and the ladies of the house direct them in  German, or in Brussels French, – conversing with  each other, meanwhile, in the purest French of the  Théâtre Français.

It was a much envied life.

Of one meal at the famous Maison Dorée, a restaurant popular with a bourgeois and artistic clientele (and the location of  the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886), Bob [Bob Boit, brother of Ned] exclaimed, “Who would have supposed that the simple, vulgar turnip contained hidden from all but these blessed Frenchmen such a delicate aromatic flavor! What is the telegraph to such a discovery as that! … thine be the palm, Oh, paper-capped chef, for taking a miserable common thing that has been  served to swine for thousands of years + extracting there[from] a god-like essence to be treated with respect for ever + never to be forgotten. Place the  turnip on top of the heap!”

Though not without its burdens:

Their baggage, both physical and emotional, was later illustrated in a letter from John Boit, Ned’s youngest brother, who detailed the family’s departure from Paris to the resort town of  Pau, in southwestern France:  Isa left for Pau last Tuesday with the big girls and  the big luggage and Ned Thursday with the  smaller specimens of each. The Boit household  transported to Pau themselves – 6 in number, 9 servants, forty trunks, about 30 boxes and bags,  two or three bird cages, two carriages, several  cases of silver, linen etc, 1 harp, 1 violoncello – The rench RR’s allow about 60 lbs of luggage per  ticket. You can form some mild idea of what it  costs these curious people to move. Ned tells me  Isa is extravagant + Isa says Ned is. I don’t believe  there is much to choose. As far as “we Boits” are  concerned, I am quite convinced we are all  extravagant.”

For years, the Boits seem to have relocated every 3 0r 4 months between Paris, London, various resorts in France, Italy and Switzerland. And they usually took the two gigantic vases in the picture with them. (The vases are reckoned to have cross the Atlantic at least six times).

Erica E. Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters

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And there it is. D. Dodge Thompson, “John Singer Sargent’s Javanese Dancers”, Magazine Antiques 138, July 1990, pp 124-133.

Sargent saw them at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition, in the Dutch Pavilion, which featured a Javanese kampong, with 40 males and 20 females, of which 6 were dancers (5 women, 1 man). Sargent was so fascinated by the dancers that he postponed his visit to Giverny, writing Monet a letter of apology, which survives. Sargent not only drew the dancers, but also sketched them in watercolor, and also painted three full-length portraits, of which 2 are here.

It is not clear how he gained access backstage. The dancers were young girls, between 12 and 16, and they would have been sacred virgins. At home, “they dwelt under strict supervision in a palace appropriated to their residence by Prince Mangka Negaia.”

But then, South East Asian dance drama does not draw the divide between back-stage and front-stage the way we do in Europe.

Later, Marie-Louise described 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.

Erica E. Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters

I know her, of course. I have met her in Florence, in 2005. She was 12 then, and as unruly and rebellious as she has always been. Her name is Sekhmet. Her breath formed the desert.

• 

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These come from Sargent’s Javanese Dancer Sketchbook, dated 1899, and, after his death, dispersed. It is a mystery which I will now set out to resolve. Who were these dancers? Where did Sargent see them? What made him make so many drawings and how did he make them? (They include pictures of dancers resting or applying make up, meaning presumably that he gained access backstage?).

From all I can gather, Sargent was in London in 1899. It was the year of the final English victory in the Mahdist War, the year in which the Boer War broke out, and young Churchill rushed to it for glory, the first Marconi radio broadcast was made and received across the Channel, Elgar’s Enigma Variations were given their world premiere, the year the octogenarian queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the Victoria and Albert Museum in what was to be her last public appearance; it was the fourth hottest summer on record since 1659. And somewhere in there, Javanese dancers danced in London.

*

Whatever the facts, Sargent’s eye is unerring. And what a contrast between them and the awful and wrong Rodin drawings of Cambodian dancers of 1906.

It is maybe 8 AM but you feel the heat already on the exposed skin of your hand.

Psst…

Psst… softly… softly… look… breathe not… only look

(The work is set in an English garden at Farnham House in Broadway in the Cotswolds, where Sargent spent the summer of 1885 with Millet shortly after moving to England from Paris to escape the scandal caused by his 1884 painting Portrait of Madame X. The author Robert Louis Stevenson was also staying there while writing A Child’s Garden of Verses and his verses inspired Sargent. Sargent also took inspiration from the lanterns that he saw hanging among trees and lilies while boating on the River Thames at Pangbourne with American artist Edwin Austin Abbey in September 1885. Sargent wanted to capture the exact level of light at dusk so he painted the picture en plein air – outdoors and in the Impressionist manner. Every day from September to November 1885, he painted in the few minutes when the light was perfect, giving the picture an overall purple tint of evening. The flowers in the garden died as summer turned to autumn, and they were replaced with artificial flowers. Sargent resumed painting the following summer at Millet’s new home nearby in Broadway and finally finished the painting by the end of October 1886. In the course of working, Sargent cut down the rectangular canvas, removing approximately 2 feet (61 cm) from the left side, to leave an approximately square shape).

John Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885 

Alice, oh, Alice, where have you been all my life? How fortunate to find you while I am still among the living, while I still have the time to devote my entire day — tomorrow — to listening to this recording of you playing this music; this music which I know so well, with which I have lived these 20 years, but never till now the way you play it. You have opened a new door in my soul: a new window over a territory I have not even suspected was there.

This is 114 minutes long, nearly 2 hours — so, i can probably hear this five times: after all, tomorrow is a day off, there will be no calls, no trades, nothing to transact. It will be quiet, cold, drizzling and dark. Perfect for staying at home with a small glass of something, sitting by the window, gazing through the fog outside, and listening to Scarlatti. And nothing else. Six times? That may be too hard: I may well become drowsy midday, as I usually do, only to rise an hour later and listen to you with a refreshed mind. But my mind will have rebuilt itself in my sleep, and when I return to listening, I will hear you with new ears. So those five listenings will be far better than any six straight-in-the-row.

How I am looking forward to spending a day with you. Thank you for this recording. Thank you.

Since I have written these words, I have listened to this recording one more time. And I want you to know, I have decided to spend the whole night listening to it over and over. I will put in on repeat and listen to it all night. I will fall asleep, but whenever I wake, I will hear you again.

” There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. (…) lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. “

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 35, The Masthead