The Greater Journey, David McCullough

What makes Paris the city of enlightenment and creative inspiration?  McCullough has a large history of Americans in Paris to draw from and he investigates the city phenomenon through the peoples who went there from the 1830’s to the end of the century. 

John Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson began this connection, but the book begins with the next group – Samuel Morse (Morse code and telegraph), Wendell Holmes (Father of Oliver), and James Fennimore Cooper who came by sail and endeavored to absorb the arts.  There were others who learned medicine and came back to eventually head the medical schools in the US and other artists who gained depth in the French capital.

After the steamboat, the stories shift to P T Barnum and Tom Thumb, Catlin and the Iowan Indians who brought a short-lived curiosity to the theater of Paris and Paris was all theater – written, spoken, painted, sculpted. 

I learned a lot of American history from this book (and of course Parisian/French).  As the next wave of people came in at the time of the last Emperor Napoleon and the defeat in the Prussian war we had Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Elihu Washburne, brother of Cadwallader who was one of the founders of General Mills.  Elihu was ambassador to Paris appointed by his close friend Ulysses Grant.  Three Washburne brothers served in the House of Representatives at the same time from three states!  Washburne was a hero in France for his efforts during the war and seems to have been a tireless worker who was the perfect appointee despite terrible reviews when he got the appointment. 

Then there is the sculptor – Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  Like some of the others in the book, they are prominent people, but I did not know them.  It turns out that he was our first preeminent US sculptor and his home and works are a National Historic Site.  In many ways he carried the second half of the book along with John Singer Sargent and their careers and artistic development are the glue for the additional people and tales.

Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Mary Cassatt, Henry James… there is a large cast of characters and in the middle there is the 1870 – 1872 war with Prussia (another of a long history of defeats) in which the Prussians take the city after months of siege which resulted in starvation and deprivation, but very little destruction of the city itself. But in the aftermath, the commune, takes over Paris and during its reign the city suffers the terror of arrests and murders, and eventually when France reasserts its claim, the short lived war sees French killing French and destroying the town in a way that no invading foreign army ever did.

But somehow this interlude of violence and chaos like the revolution itself seen passed and the cafes and the gardens and the society of poets reestablishes itself. 

The strength of the poetic Paris is never really established, but never-the-less I find myself wanting to spend a month living in Paris because of the strength of the book and the feelings of the people who went there. 

Unlike America there was a freedom that was not repressed by religion and there was less racial bigotry and more openness.  The church was there in architecture and design more than in repression as it is found in so many places in the world.  Of course this openness was somewhat inconsistent as are all cultures.

The figure to the right was a portrait of one of societies belles and is considered one of the great portrait paintings of all time for many reasons I cannot elucidate, but the controversy is something I do appreciate.

In Paris, unlike the US, nudity was acceptable and caused no bans and outcries by the righteous, but for some reason this painted created an emotional stir by the French who found the low neckline and the posture to be too suggestive and the painting initially got terrible responses for its low moral standard!

Oliver Wendell Holmes upon his return to Paris “found himself to tired to go to the theater or the Opera.

               “But there was joy still in seeing the beautiful bridges on the Seine.  ‘Nothing looked more nearly the same as of old than the bridges.’ he wrote.  The Pont Neuf looked not the least different to him and evoked all the good feelings of old.

               “Stopping at the Café Procope, once his favorite for breakfast, he thought it much improved in appearance.  He sat contentedly over a cup of coffee, daydreaming of Voltaire and the other luminaries of the far past who had gathered there.

               “’But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my early friends and companions that came before me in all the freshness of their young manhood?’ He need never chase off to Florida in search of Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth, Holmes decided.  It was here.  In Paris.”

Saint-Gaudens found that he was incurably sick with cancer and was sentenced to eventual death by the disease.  This bothered him immensely and he thought he should choose his own end.  To that cause he decided to jump off a bridge into the Seine (suicide), however, the following is from the notes of one of is sculpture assistants who wrote down what Gus said when he reached the studio.

“I ran – I was in so much of a hurry!  I reached the river and went up on the bridge and as I looked over the water, I saw the Louvre in the bright sunlight and suddenly everything was beautiful to me, the Louvre was wonderful-more remarkable than I had ever seen before.

               “Whether the running and the hurrying had changed my mental attitude, I can’t say – possibly it might have been the beauty of the Louvre’s architecture or the sparkling water of the Seine – whatever it was, suddenlyh the weight and blackness lifted from my mind and I was happy and found myself whistling.”

Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site Discover the beautiful home, studios and gardens of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of America’s greatest sculptors. Over 100 of his artworks can be seen in the galleries, from heroic public monuments to expressive portrait reliefs, and the gold coins which changed the look of American coinage. Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), created over 150 works of art, from exquisitely carved cameos to heroic-size public monuments. Works such as the "Standing Lincoln" monument and the Shaw Memorial, continue to inspire people today and his design for the 1907 Twenty Dollar Gold Piece, is considered America's most beautiful coin.

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American parents.

Sargent studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.

Sargent studied with Carolus-Duran, whose influence would be pivotal, from 1874-1878. Carolus-Duran's atelier was progressive, dispensing with the traditional academic approach which required careful drawing and underpainting, in favor of the alla prima method of working directly on the canvas with a loaded brush, derived from Diego Velázquez. It was an approach which relied on the proper placement of tones of paint.           http://www.johnsingersargent.org/