LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

      On a cool February night in 1900, Pamela Tennant, wife of the industrialist Eddy Tennant, was dining at the London townhouse of her brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady Ribblesdale. The Season had not quite started, but there was already a smattering of balls. By early summer that smattering would become a deluge, as seemingly every house in Mayfair echoed to the strains of bands and England’s elite waltzed round and round camellia-filled ballrooms in what would prove to be the last year of Victoria’s reign. Thus far, London seemed to have escaped the disgusting yellow smog that had blanketed the city for months the year before, and added to the misery of the swathes affected by a bad strain of influenza that year.

      Pamela was not really looking forward to the Season that was to come: or to any Season, for that matter. In the five years since she had married, her refusal to play ball socially had provoked several spats with her sister-in-law. Charty Ribblesdale, one of the audacious Tennant sisters who had launched themselves on to London Society twenty years before, could not understand why Pamela should wilfully clam up when faced with new people. Pamela’s refusal to play by any rules but her own mystified Charty and her sisters Margot and Lucy. They thought it alien to the ethos of the Souls: their fascinating, chattering set who affected insouciant, swan-like ease, no matter how frantically their legs paddled beneath the serene surface.

      The delightfully haphazard Mary Elcho, Pamela’s eldest sister, was a leading light of the Souls. Pamela, beautiful, brilliant, a master of the pointed phrase, had it in her to joust with the best of them. But she chose not to. Instead, she professed disdain for ‘those murdered Summers’ of the Season, and openly expressed her preference for Wiltshire, where she caravanned across the Downs in the company of her children.¹ It was a very peculiar attitude.

      The burly American placed next to Pamela also seemed ill at ease among Society’s hubbub. John Singer Sargent, whose Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose had dazzled the Royal Academy over a decade before, was establishing himself as a society portraitist par excellence, but he had little time for his sitters’ chatter. He preferred quiet times in the Gloucestershire village of Broadway with his sisters and nieces – incidentally not far from where Mary Elcho lived at Stanway. ‘He was very nice & simple, & … very shy & not the least like an American,’ Mary’s friend Frances Horner reported to the artist Edward Burne-Jones after meeting Sargent (for Sargent, although an American by parentage, had been born and raised on the Continent), ‘& he wasn’t very like an artist either! … he hated discussing all his great friends … & talking about his pictures.’²

      Perhaps Charty took a certain pleasure in seating Pamela next to Sargent that evening. A taste of her own medicine – and Charty could justify the placement because Sargent was currently working on a portrait of Pamela and her sisters. It had been commissioned by their father, Percy Wyndham, who, with his wife Madeline, had built Clouds in Wiltshire, a house little over a decade old and already famous as a ‘palace of weekending’.³ Pamela, Mary and sweet-natured Madeline Adeane (who so unluckily after a whole brood of girls had finally succeeded in giving birth to a boy only for the premature infant to die the same day) had been sitting to Sargent ever since then.

      There was plenty to talk about. No mention was made of the Boer War’s disastrous progress, or Pamela’s elder brother George, Under-Secretary in the War Office, whose triumphant speech in the House of Commons a few weeks before had singlehandedly seemed to redeem the Government’s conduct of the war. All Sargent’s talk was of the portrait. The first sittings had taken place over a year before, in the drawing room of the Wyndhams’ London house, 44 Belgrave Square. Yet just recently, Pamela, in the thick of preparations for one of the tableaux of which she was so fond, received a letter from Percy suggesting that Sargent’s portrait might still not be finished in time for this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. What with the uncertain light at this time of year, and the fact that the Wyndhams would not be in London until after Easter, ‘perhaps this is better’, he concluded.⁴ To Pamela’s mind, this was not better. At this rate, she replied ominously, there was the danger that ‘we shall all be old and haggard before the public sees it’.⁵

      Pamela in the flesh made the shortcomings of Pamela in oils all too clear. Sargent told Pamela in his deep, curiously accentless voice (the legacy of his Continental upbringing) that he ‘felt sure’ that Mr Wyndham ‘would not mean it to be as it is’. ‘He is very anxious for some more sittings from me and enquired my plans most pertinaciously,’ Pamela told Percy the next day. Her very presence had seemed to prove an inspiration: ‘“and now I see you oh it must be worked on” – squirming & writhing in his evening suit – “no finish – no finish” – he got quite excited’.⁶

      As agreed, Pamela made her way to Sargent’s studio on Tite Street in Chelsea at half-past two the following Saturday. Three or four days was all that Sargent, a phenomenally fast worker, required before she could thankfully flee London once again. ‘He has not repainted the face … He worked on little corners of it and has much improved it I think,’ Pamela said. He had remodelled her nose, taken ‘a little of the colour out of my cheeks, this improves it’, and transformed her hair from ‘all fluffy and rather trivial looking before’ to swept back, which ‘has strengthened it, and made it more like my head really’.

      There was one loss. The front of Pamela’s dress, an eye-catching blue, had, Sargent said decisively, to go. It was, she explained to her parents, ‘disturbing to the scheme … And much as I regret my pretty blue front I quite see it was rather preclusive of other things in the picture as a whole. For instance both sisters seem to gain by its removal – one’s eye is not checked & held by it … My face also seems to gain significance by its removal.’⁷ Mary, who had always been suspicious of Pamela’s colour choice, must have been relieved: ‘blue can be so ugly don’t you think?’ she had complained to their mother when Pamela had first announced her sartorial intentions.⁸

      Uncharacteristically, Madeline was causing trouble. At the Ribblesdales’, Sargent had been adamant that ‘Mrs Adeane in particular’ needed to be changed, requiring a further week of sittings. The year before, Charlie Adeane’s patience with ‘that blessed

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