Cappuccino Thoughts 42: On Stendhal Syndrome with Sargent

A magnificent museum, exhibit, a mystical bedside read, and what's next with the bags

The Thinking Cup on Newbury St., Boston

This week, I traveled to Boston to cheer on my brother racing in the Head of the Charles. If my younger brother wrote a Substack (it would be surely be called something like “The Hegelian Dialectic of Oarsmanship,” so aren’t you happy you’re reading mine instead), he would have something meaningful to say about the team effort required in rowing to achieve victory and the feel of hard work coming to fruition. But I don’t have too much to say about rowing beyond there were a lot of men in unitards and the average height of Cambridge went up about twelve inches for the weekend. 

What did blow me away in Boston was the “Fashioning Sargent” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. My college roommate S. and I went to see the MFA’s impressive Sargent collection combined with borrowed Sargents from around the world, and assembled them with many of the outfits that the sitters actually wore. What a dream!

La Carmencita by John Singer Sargent.

The outfit pictured in the portrait. 

But it was the portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw that truly bowled me over.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent.

In the wall text, she was described as a high society woman who was frequently ill, and here she was apparently recovering from influenza. There was something so striking about that to me. She does seem a little frail, her seated posture a little languid. But she appears so in control at the same time. Perhaps it was that she looked to be around the same age as me (I later learned she was 27 when this was painted, so a bit older). I felt like I could picture her life. She presented as the kind of woman who could command a room without saying a word. Who knew exactly what society demanded of her and she gave them just enough to appease, while retaining her interiority. She gave the impression that she had mastered the rules of social hierarchy, but wouldn’t wield them against others. I pictured her quietly taking her cup of tea while getting ready for a social engagement. Call it kinship, call it aspiration. I felt her presence in the painting.

I had walked through the whole exhibit wide- eyed, incredibly impressed with the accuracy with which Sargent rendered his figures, combined with a slightly Impressionistic brushstroke and a luminosity I hadn’t been expecting. But Lady Agnew literally took my breath away. I felt a touch of Stendhal Syndrome, also known as an art attack or aesthetic sickness (but that sounds quite negative. This experience was more transportive). 

Stranger still, as I went on a late-night Lady of Agnew deep dive, I am not the first to feel this way. Phil Jupitus describes the first time he encountered her at her usual residence, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, as feeling “utterly overwhelmed.” Critics have described her variously as “quietly challenging,” having “something withheld and inviting in her quizzical half-smile,” a “languid elegance,” a “confident calm,” or even that “the work’s appeal has always owed equally to the subject’s enigmatically bemused expression—the raised eyebrow and ever-so-slight smirk in the lips—as well as to Sargent’s virtuosic treatment of her diaphanous tea gown.” I love the amount of opposition that is described at once. Inviting and withholding, languid and elegant, sickly and bemused. 

Maybe I knew her in a past life. Maybe I was her. Please write back and tell me if you have ever experienced this. 

So, next stop, Wigtownshire, Scotland?

Updates on the bag project

The Jasmine—Authentic black suede Gucci bag. Retrofitted with a blue silk lining in. A bamboo handle sets off the whole shebang. A classic turned contemporary.

The bag is actually symmetrical, my product photography is not.

So many people have asked me about the bag party in recent weeks. As much as I’ve tried to revel in that accomplishment, it’s making me think about what’s next. I think the all-black leather collection will be my last big effort for 2023. One of my big goals for 2024 is to find another retail partner who more squarely fits my demographic, corporate women in their late 30’s/early 40’s. If you know of a store that would fit my vibe, let me know! I am guessing it will be somewhere in Brooklyn, but I would consider going to another city.

Look of the week

I couldn’t not spotlight some of the amazing gowns in the Sargent exhibit. I loved learning about how Sargent took creative liberties with the clothes in his paintings. For example, in the portrait, the sitter’s dress has one bow set lower down the arm, but in real life, there were two bows placed closer to the shoulder. He would invent clothes wholesale, draping his figures in a sheet of fabric and imagining the dress around them. My favorite quote from the exhibit was in a letter to a friend, he wrote, “I am in the thick of dress making & painting.”

What’s on the bedside table

I picked up All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky because she is a college friend’s sister, and I had always heard about the sister who worked as a pharmacist during the day and wrote poetry at night. I saw Ruth speak at Books Are Magic and was excited to read this because of how magnetic and funny she was as a speaker. The story centers on an unnamed narrator (I am always fascinated by this choice) who explores her identity in relation to her sister, Judaism, mysticism, and sexuality. It wasn’t totally my genre, but the voice was very strong and the writing on a sentence level was admirable. You can definitely tell the author comes from a poetry background. I would recommend if you’re looking for a gritty story that takes you to unexpected places.

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This week I will be headed back upstate for a few autumnal themed days with my girlfriends.