Daniel Chester French: The Music Club

"La Carmencita" by J.S. Sargent

"In those early years in New York we were invited to join the Music Club. It was started, I believe, by Mrs. Gilder, Mrs. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. Henry Holt, George Vanderbilt and those two tall beautiful Minturn girls, who would have lent distinction to any assembly. It met in the great studio of William Merritt Chase on West Tenth Street. 

Chase was a real Bohemian with his soft tie, his narrow French silk hat, looking (as he, of course, wanted to look) as if he had just escaped from the Latin Quarter. He had no money to speak of, but he was long as to children - I believe there were eight - and as to studios. Room after room, as I remember them, full of all kinds of curios that he had picked up all over the world. We used to go there once a month in the winter to hear great artists play amid congenial surroundings and among friends. Among others I there heard Ysaye, Plançon, and Paderewski.

One evening Carmencita danced there, but it was not for the Music Club, and I did not see it and had to be content with that my husband told me of it. Sargent was painting her portrait. They said he sat and watched her as if almost in a trance, hypnotized by the motion, grace, abandon, which he put into every inch of one of his greatest of portraits."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)