Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Chasing Beauty

  She wrote little about what the museum meant or her reasons for creating it; she preferred to let her visitors form their own impressions. Yet she knew very well how much she had accomplished. She said to a friend at the end of her life: “Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our country was art. We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things . . . So I determined to make it my life’s work if I could.” She also ensured that future visitors to her museum would see the art in much the same way as those first visitors in 1903, stipulating in her will not only that the museum would be known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum after her death but also that her arrangement of the rooms could never be changed. She hired the best architectural photographers, Thomas E. Marr and his son, Arthur Marr, to document every gallery in order to safeguard her vision. *** IN HER OWN TIME AND NOW, ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER SEEMS LIKE A bright sun—we can look around her but not directly at her. She radiates but confuses. A relative remembered how she “filled the air.” Another thought her charisma was “like dynamite.” She carried herself with noted sureness, with a “gliding walk” like a “proud ship in full sail.” Young people particularly liked to be with her because of how she “annihilated the thought and possibility of failure.” She had a wonderful wit. Morris Carter, her friend, the first director of the museum, and later her first biographer, recalled in his private notes: “I said I wished I could find out what was the first thing she did that startled Boston. I said I used the word ‘startle’ to avoid the more terrible word ‘scandalize.’ She looked as roguish as possible and said that she ‘never did anything of the kind, that [she] had always led a very quiet uneventful life.’” She had had many advantages. The eldest daughter of a wealthy New York family, she was educated at a Paris finishing school, followed by an early and envied marriage into the prominent Gardner family of Boston. But all this did not protect her from the terrible pain of losing her only child. A friend noted her tendency to be self-protective, remarking that she “rarely expressed her feelings” directly. She was fiercely loyal. She donated large sums to a wide variety of causes, without expecting acknowledgment. When visiting women in hospital who were recovering from childbirth or illness, she dressed as inconspicuously as possible.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Now Sargent asked to paint his friend’s portrait again. He did so quickly—in the span of a morning’s visit. A debilitating stroke in 1919 had paralyzed Isabella’s right side, and though she managed to dress every day and was able to sit upright, her life had been much changed. She used the hydraulic elevator that she had installed decades before to travel from her fourth-floor apartment to spend time with her magnificent art collection on the lower floors of the palace. She liked to sit in her office, the Macknight Room on the first floor, surrounded by artwork made by her contemporaries, men and women both, with her books and travel mementos near at hand. She kept small treasures, including the tiny elephant figurines a friend sent from central Africa, in the drawers of an eighteenth-century Venetian desk placed against one window. Here in her office she received visitors and welcomed Sargent, who brought along his paints. SARGENT’S COMPOSITION, ENTITLED MRS. GARDNER IN WHITE, IS A HARMONY of color and pattern, suggested with light washes of color. Isabella is seated on a sofa against red-striped pillows, swathed head to foot in a shroudlike white fabric that frames her face and hides her crippled hand and right side. The painter’s genius for depicting draped fabric is on full display. The watercolor painting has “both clarity and mystery,” to borrow Colm Tóibín’s precise phrase for what characterizes Sargent’s best portraits. Sargent also catches a quality of Isabella’s observable since childhood: a powerful force of feeling. If her body and limbs are still, her eyes hum and buzz with life. She had seen much—searing loss but also accomplishment and great beauty. Margaret Chanler, a friend, thought it “a wonderful sketch of her in this last stage, pale and frail and dominating to the end,” noting how “her green eyes had lost none of their bright malice—seeing, appreciating, appraising.” Sargent pictures Isabella in the here and now, even as her garment references what is to come. But he also renders something of a surprise. In his masterpiece of old age and impending death, he does not forget youth, her youth. A woman’s bright lip and cascade of dark, curly hair is just visible in the shadow on the pillow behind the sitter’s left shoulder. The image in the shadow is as unmistakable as it is provocative. It’s as if Sargent is saying that even the ravages of age cannot dim the vitality of who Isabella once was, who she still is. This, then, is her story. Part IBecoming BelleI’m sure Belle will go some way or rather, for she has set her heart upon it. —HELEN WATERSTON, PARIS, 1857

• From Chasing Beauty

  The American painter Thomas Sully highlights the strength and forward-looking mien of the elder Isabella in his 1837 oil portrait, even as she wears the deep-black dress of proper widowhood. She debated whether to purchase property on Canal Street or farmland in rural Jamaica, Long Island, with her husband’s very large bequest of $75,000. She chose the latter, buying first ten acres and then adding to her property with half a dozen parcels of land purchased over three decades. There she raised her three sons and managed a thriving agricultural enterprise, which included milk cows and large, lush gardens. Morris Carter’s account suggests some of her farm’s profitability may have come from enslaved labor before New York outlawed slavery in 1827. But census records show this was not the case. [image file=image_rsrc78B.jpg] Isabella Tod Stewart, Thomas Sully, 1837, oil on canvas. Belle, who would spend summer weeks at the Stewart farm to escape the city heat, would remember sitting by her grandmother’s side for worship at Jamaica’s Grace Church on the pew the older woman had purchased, as was done by wealthy members to support the congregation. Her essays published in agricultural journals describe the butter-making skills that won her first-place awards. One prize, a small silver pitcher with an engraved cow, is inscribed “Presented by the Agricultural Society of New York to Isabella Stewart, 2nd June 1821.” The pitcher would be passed down to her namesake granddaughter, along with numerous other items, including her 1792 music book, mahogany furniture, and several of her dresses. Belle also kept a small New Testament, with a moss-colored cover, inscribed in her grandmother’s hand: “Presented to Isabel Stewart from her affectionate Grandmother, 1847.” Belle’s father, David Stewart, expanded on his parents’ successes. While one of his older brothers went to work as a seaman and the other to farm on the Maryland shore, David, bookish and hardworking, left his mother’s farm for Manhattan before he turned seventeen to make his own way. He started as a sales clerk at the importers Russell and Company and after several years joined with Thomas Paton to establish the two men’s eponymous firm Stewart and Paton, at 65 Pine Street, which traded mostly in Irish and Scottish linen. By the time he and Adelia Smith (called Delia by the family) were married, at Saint John’s Church in Brooklyn on May 7, 1839, he had purchased their home on cobblestoned Greene Street. He was twenty-nine, and she was twenty-four. A portrait of David Stewart from the 1860s, a hand-colored albumen print, an early form of photography, shows his erect, self-assured posture and other features Belle would share—a high forehead, a round face with piercing eyes, and a confident, bemused expression. They held their shoulders in a similar way, and both had elegant hands with long fingers. They differed, however, in height—he stood at nearly six feet tall according to his passport, whereas she would grow to five foot four.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The literary set, Nesbit and his friends, while commending my nocturnal labors, frowned upon various other things I went in for, such as entomology, practical jokes, girls, and, especially, athletics. Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period. I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two lying full length where he fell, his goal still intact.

• From Chasing Beauty

  ThirteenLove and Power1886–88In the stunned weeks after the news of Joe Jr.’s death reached Belle and Jack in Paris, in October 1886, they must have debated whether to keep to their plans or immediately return home. Perhaps because Joe’s death was not a complete surprise, they continued to London, where they spent two weeks, then left for home. They may also have been looking forward to meeting a young American portrait painter; they had heard remarkable reports about him. Jack made no mention of their deliberations in his diary. Instead, he wrote a simple factual entry for October 22: “left Paris; arrived in London, Albermarle Hotel.” Soon after, Belle received a friendly letter from John Singer Sargent. The artist, then just thirty, had moved to London from his Paris studio in the seventeenth arrondissement, partly on the advice of Henry James, who’d settled permanently in England a decade before. The younger man was in some ways James’s double: both were hard workers and roaming Americans, with carefully concealed private lives. They even looked alike, each with a sturdy build and in those years sporting a fashionable beard, though Sargent kept his head of dark hair far longer than his friend did. James loved to talk, whereas Sargent was almost shy, his large, watery, all-seeing eyes the dominant feature of his handsome face. James once said that the well-mannered Sargent was “civilized to his fingertips.” In an admiring 1887 essay in Harper’s Magazine, he summed up his view of the artist: “It is difficult to imagine a young painter less in the dark about his own ideal, more lucid and more responsible from the first about what he desires.” Sargent explained in a note to Belle that “Ralph Curtis and Henry James have both told me of your arrival [in London] and authorized me to call on you.” James had also told the artist of his plans to go with Belle to the London Academy of Art and to Grosvenor Gallery, with a stop afterward at Sargent’s studio. A visit “would be doing me a very great pleasure,” Sargent assured her.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Moore, author of Perfectly Confident OTHER WORKSThinking in Bets How to Decide [image "Book Title, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Author, Annie Duke, Imprint, Portfolio" file=Image00015.jpg] [image file=Image00016.jpg] Portfolio / Penguin An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com [image file=Image00017.jpg] Copyright © 2022 by Annie Duke Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “The Gambler.” Words and music by Don Schlitz. Copyright © 1977 Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duke, Annie, 1965- author. Title: Quit: the power of knowing when to walk away / Annie Duke. Description: New York: Portfolio/Penguin, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022018987 (print) | LCCN 2022018988 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593422991 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593423004 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Failure (Psychology) | Choice (Psychology) | Persistence. | Success. Classification: LCC BF575.F14 D85 2022 (print) | LCC BF575.F14 (ebook) | DDC 158.1—dc23/eng/20220729 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018987 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018988 ISBN 9780593544020 (international edition) Book design by Tanya Maiboroda, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen pid_prh_6.0_141693685_c0_r1 To my children, my ∞ CONTENTSPrologue The Gaffed Scale Grit vs. Quit Wrapped in Euphemism Science Says SECTION I The Case for Quitting Chapter 1. The Opposite of a Great Virtue Is Also a Great Virtue The Invisible Men at the Top of the World Quitting Is a Decision-Making Tool The Siren Song of Certainty The Super Bowl Is a Corporate Graveyard “Know When to Hold ’Em, Know When to Fold ’Em”: But Mostly, Fold ’Em Chapter 2. Quitting On Time Usually Feels Like Quitting Too Early Quit While You Still Have a Choice Thinking in Expected Value Quitting Decisions Are Expected-Value Decisions Time Travelers from the Past Flipping Coins Jumping the Shark The Quitting Bind Chapter 3. Should I Stay, or Should I Go? Paper Gains and Paper Losses Quit While You’re Ahead? Take the Money and Run How Smart Is the Smart Money? Getting Feedback on the Things You Don’t Do INTERLUDE I QUITTING WHEN THE WORLD IS WATCHING SECTION II In the Losses Chapter 4. Escalating Commitment Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy Waiting until It Hurts Chapter 5. Sunk Cost and the Fear of Waste The Sunk Cost Effect When “Public Works” Is an Oxymoron Katamari How Big Does the Katamari Grow?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  12:28–3428. And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? 29. And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: 30. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. 31. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. 32. And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth; for there is one God; and there is none other but he: 33. And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. 34. And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question. GLOSS. (non occ.) After that the Lord confuted the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, who tempted Him, it is here shewn how He satisfied the Scribe who questioned Him; wherefore it is said, And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? PSEUDO-JEROME. This question is only that which is a problem common to all skilled in the law, namely, that the commandments are differently set forth in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Wherefore He brought forward not one but two commandments, by which, as by two paps rising on the breast of the bride, our infancy is nourished. And therefore there is added, And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord thy God is one God. He mentions the first and greatest commandment of all; this is that to which each of us must give the first place in his heart, as the only foundation of piety, that is, the knowledge and confession of the Divine Unity, with the practice of good works, which is perfected in the love of God and our neighbour; wherefore there is added, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  strengthening of papal power. This was demonstrated by its first historian, the Venetian anti-papalist Fra Paolo Sarpi, whose three chief informants were all well- placed eye-witnesses. Even the reformist decrees were of limited scope, since they either applied only to Italy, or were not ‘received’ by the secular authorities in France, Spain and elsewhere. Reform of clerical standards was a very slow process indeed: in some respects it was not complete until the latter part of the nineteenth century. But there was a marked improvement of tone in the papacy itself during the decades after Trent. The Dominican Grand Inquisitor Michael Ghislieri, who became Pius V in 1565, created the new puritanical atmosphere, which involved the expulsion of prostitutes from Rome, the enforcement of strict clerical dress, and savage punishments for simony. The change was widely noted: ‘Men in Rome have become a great deal better,’ wrote Tiepolo, the Venetian ambassador, ‘or at least have put on the appearance of being so.’ Where Trent did introduce an important change was in instructing bishops to create seminaries for the training of clergy. Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan 1560–84, founded three in his diocese, and set about the creation of an educated and resident clergy by insisting on minimum standards before ordination and frequent visitations thereafter. This was something entirely new. Borromeo can be called the first modern Catholic bishop, as his predecessor Ambrose was the first medieval one. It is astonishing that no provision for training priests in their specific duties had ever existed before. This was the curse of the Church until Borromeo’s system was widely imitated. Moreover, the creation of seminaries served to open up the whole question of Christian education. The Church had never looked at it systematically. There had been no need. It had exercised a complete monopoly. That monopoly had been undermined in the fifteenth century, when wealthy townsmen began to endow schools outside the clerical system. The layman entered the field decisively, at all educational levels, and the Renaissance fuelled the Reformation by presenting clericalism as an obstacle to learning and truth. Thus in the period 1520–50, to cite a small but significant instance, an almost infallible test of a scholar’s religious views was the way he pronounced Greek: correct pronunciation was identified with reform. With each generation, there was an increasing tendency for the educated young people to turn against Rome. Then, too, Protestant societies devoted a far greater proportion of total resources to education, since a large slice of the endowments made available by the winding up of the monasteries had been allocated to grammar

• From Chasing Beauty

  In writing her 1965 biography, Louise Hall Tharp had the advantage of knowing personally many people who knew Gardner, and she packed every page with detail and incident. But she was also anxious about who Gardner was as a woman and often seemed to apologize to her readers for her subject. She used—maybe overused—newspaper reports and gossip columns without placing them into full context. Douglass Shand-Tucci’s The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner provided key evidence about Gardner’s religious faith, evidence I was able to pursue further at the archives of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Several other books, and their writers, taught me through their work how to write this book, including Rachel Cohen’s biography of Bernard Berenson—my copy is so battered, it has lost its original cover; Cynthia Saltzman’s Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures; and Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. Casey Riley’s groundbreaking scholarship on Gardner’s use of photography to realize and secure her vision for the museum has been influential. I am indebted to Colm Tóibín for his many insights about a wide range of things, but especially about Henry James and John Singer Sargent; also to Anne-Marie Eze’s scholarship on Gardner’s book collection as well as her astute essay on Anders Zorn; and to Erica E. Hirshler’s wide-ranging scholarship on American art. Sukie Amory’s deft interpretation of Gardner and horticulture in her two-part essay “Gardner in the Garden,” published in Hortus in 2013, also guided my path. Selected BibliographyAdler, Kathleen, Erica E. Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg. Americans in Paris, 1860–1900. London: National Gallery, 2006. Amory, Suki. “Gardner in the Garden,” 2 parts. Hortus, no. 107 (Autumn 2013): 51–72, and no. 108 (Winter 2013), 47–66. Baer, Ronni. The Poetry of Everyday Life: Dutch Painting in Boston. Boston: MFA Publications, 2002. Baxter, Sylvester. “An American Palace of Art: Fenway Court, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway.” Century LXVII, vol. 3 (January 1904): 362–82. Benfey, Christopher. Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Berenson, Bernard. Aesthetics and History. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1954. ———. The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1897. Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Breslow, Rebecca. “Humanity in a Tea-cup: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Okakura Kakuzo,” Chanoyu Quarterly, no. 85 (1996): 47–48. Brooks, Benjamin. “A New England Garden Home,” Country Life in America, no. 1 (1902). Brooks, Gladys. Boston & Return. New York: Athenaeum, 1962. Brown, Jonathan, and Carmen Garrido. Velázquez: The Technique of Genius. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Burns, Sarah. Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Coolidge had purchased El Jaleo almost thirty years before, the first week it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1882. He proudly called the massive painting “the best picture Sargent ever painted . . .” Isabella knew Coolidge well, and they were near relations through Julia Gardner Coolidge. His name appears frequently in her guest books. A successful textile merchant and banker, Coolidge was an inveterate traveler who spoke fluent French and was later appointed minister to France. He had dressed memorably as a lady for the fancy ball in 1889. These two old friends enjoyed a lively correspondence already by the 1880s, when Isabella sent him countless letters on her travels through Asia, letters he thought good enough to publish, though he honored her request to throw them in the fire. [image file=image_rsrc7AR.jpg] Section Through Court and Tapestry Room Looking Towards Rear, Willard Thomas Sears, about 1914, ink on linen. Though Coolidge was careful that El Jaleo not be shown outside Boston, he loaned it several times, first to Sargent for the gallery show in 1888 at the St. Botolph Club, where it hung alongside the painter’s iconic portrait of Isabella. Coolidge loaned it twice to the Museum of Fine Arts—first in 1897 and then again in 1912. The museum staff may have hoped that Coolidge would eventually donate the painting to its collection, which had, at that point, few of Sargent’s works. But that was not to be. The architect’s drawing for the reconstruction of Fenway Court indicates that Isabella planned to place El Jaleo at the end of the Spanish Cloister before she possessed it, a fact confirmed by a delivery receipt for the painting, indicating its transfer from Coolidge’s Back Bay home to Fenway Court on December 11, 1914. What happened between Isabella’s plan for the painting and its delivery is a little hard to decipher, but the story she liked to tell is recorded by Morris Carter in his small, privately published volume Reminiscences. At some point, Coolidge had promised to give her the painting in his will, but “wills can be changed, or even contested, and Mrs. Gardner was not taking chances.” After the Spanish Cloister had been completed in the fall of 1914, she asked Coolidge if he would like to see El Jaleo in the alcove she had created especially for it, something he’d not be able to do if she had to wait to inherit it. He agreed but blanched a little when she asked: “May I send for it this afternoon?” He agreed to this too, and sometime after installing the painting, she invited him over to see it for himself. “He expressed great admiration for the installation, said the picture had never looked so well, and so forth, whereupon Mrs. Gardner said, ‘If you really think it looks so much better here, would it be right for you to take it away?’” According to Isabella, “then and there Mr. Coolidge gave it to her.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  “It is difficult”: The 1887 Harper’s profile was subsequently republished in Picture and Text in 1893, and that amended version is collected by John L. Sweeney in Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, first published in 1956 (republished by Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1989), 217. that “Ralph Curtis”: JSS to ISG, October 1886, ISG Papers, ISGM. the “radical strangeness”: Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X,’” American Art 15, no. 3 (2001): 10. See also Trevor J. Fairbrother, “The Shock of John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame Gautreau,’” Arts Magazine 55 (January 1981): 93. the hostile reviews: Jean Strouse, “Sargent & His People,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015. Sargent made occasional trips to the United States until his death in 1925. he “only half liked”: HJ to Elizabeth Boott, June 4, 1884, as quoted by Fairbrother, “The Shock,” 94. leaving painting altogether: Tóibín, “Secrets,” 117–18. “I am rejoiced”: GAG to JLG Jr., December 20, 1886, GFP. niece by marriage: Selah Strong Smith and Ann Carpenter had nine children, including Adelia Smith Stewart (Belle’s mother) and Mary Ann Smith (Hicks), who married John Mott Hicks, the parents of Mary Smith Hicks Peck. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Research Report Case: C20190206A (Dykstra), May 2019. This second Stewart marriage is characterized in ISGAL as an “uncomfortable overlap,” linking it to the absence of David Stewart in the museum collection. See ISGAL, 26–27. conveyed the title: Financial Records, ISG Papers, ISGM. Venice and Florence: Jack listed all purchases in the last pages of his travel diaries, noting the place, date, and price of each item. JLG Jr. 1886 Diary, JLGJr-P. Paris and London: Both Carter and Tharp claim it was on this 1886 trip that Whistler gave Belle his sketches for his famed 1877 Peacock Room (later reinstalled at the Freer Gallery of Art), so-called because of the artist’s use of the peacock as both a figure in various scenes throughout the room and as a design motif. This was not the case. Whistler gave them to the American painter Harper Pennington in roughly 1885; Pennington then gave them to Belle in 1904. She would include them in the Sargent/Whistler Case in the Long Gallery. Belle had a particular fondness for peacocks and would acquire more representations of the flamboyant bird. For more about the drawings, see Rollin van N. Hadley, ed., Drawings: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1968), 37–41. a “whirl of hurry”: Whistler to ISG (likely October 1886), ISG Papers, ISGM. “a more brilliant proof”: Whistler to ISG (likely later October 1886), ISG Papers, ISGM.

• From Chasing Beauty

  spilling over its rim: Belle bought a third Whistler pastel, Lapis Lazuli, executed the same year as the first two, in 1895 from the artist. It pictured a nude woman lounging on a blue couch, her robe open, with an outstretched hand holding an open fan. She put all three pastels, together with the small oil, lined up in a vertical row in the Veronese Room of Fenway Court. See ISGM Guide 17, 147. “looked very handsome”: JLG Jr. to GPG, February 8, 1887, GFP. found Belle “not easy”: As quoted in Nancy Whipple Grinnell, Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 60–61. Grinnell later mentions the rift between the friends but does not speculate as to the reasons. Carrying, 111–12. Belle inscribed the inside: Annie Fields, A Week Away from Time (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887). A copy can be found in ISG Personal Library, ISGM. She had met: This meeting can be dated from several sources, including a letter from Berenson to Belle from Munich, dated July 28, 1897, in which he writes: “It fully confirmed my first impression of you, eleven years ago, and since then I have lived and seen much.” ISG/BB Letters, 91–92. “Berenson has more”: Cohen, 46. thoroughgoing anti-Semitism: Cohen traces this prejudice at Harvard and within the field of art history. She also notes that Berenson converted to Christianity at Trinity Church, inspired by the preaching of its rector, Phillips Brooks, but also his desire to escape his origins. Cohen, 46–49. on the lower left: For a close reading of this display case, see Riley, “To Make a Case,” 166–68. his attentions on canvas: See especially Richard Ormond’s introductory essay, “Sargent and the Arts,” in Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2015), 9–21; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Sargent’s Other Portraits,” Raritan 36, no. 1 (2016): 114–37. course of his commission: Tharp, 131. The chronology in Sargent’s catalogue raisonné does not say Sargent stayed with the Gardners, only that he took a studio on nearby Exeter Street and that he began her portrait at the end of December 1887. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurry, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits, Complete Paintings, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), xvi. See also Erica E. Hirshler, “Sargent in Boston and New York, 1888–1912: Venn Diagrams,” in Ormond, Sargent: Portraits, 173–77; and Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting (Boston: MFA Publications, 2009), 132. “the gymnasium door”: Ellery Sedgwick, The Happy Profession (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), 60–61. in this heated scene: Sargent’s sexual life was kept hidden, out of preference or necessity, most probably both. For a full and nuanced discussion, see Paul Fisher, A Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022). Ned Boit didn’t make: Boit Papers, Diaries for 1887–88, Archives of American Art, roll 83, as cited in Subject Files, ISGM.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. (in Matt. 35.) For they were grieved at the waste of the ointment, which might be sold for a large sum and given to the poor. This however ought not to have been, for it was right that it should be poured over the head of Christ, with a holy and fitting stream; wherefore it goes on, She hath wrought a good work on me. And so effectual is the praise of this good work, that it ought to excite all of us to fill the head of the Lord with sweet smelling and rich offerings, that of us it may be said that we have done a good work over the head of the Lord. For we always have with us, as long as we remain in this life, the poor who have need of the care of those who have made progress in the word, and are enriched in the wisdom of God; they are not however able always day and night to have with them the Son of God, that is, the Word and Wisdom of God. For it goes on: For ye have the poor always with you, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good; but me ye have not always. BEDE. (ubi sup.) To me, indeed, He seems to speak of His bodily presence, that He should by no means be with them after His resurrection, as He then was living with them in all familiarity. PSEUDO-JEROME. He says also, She hath wrought a good work on me, for whosoever believes on the Lord, it is counted unto Him for righteousness. For it is one thing to believe Him, and to believe on Him, that is, to cast ourselves entirely upon Him. It goes on: She hath done what she could, she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. BEDE. (ubi sup.) As if the Lord said, What ye think is a waste of ointment is the service of my burial. THEOPHYLACT. For she is come aforehand as though led by God to anoint my body, as a sign of my approaching burial; by which He confounds the traitor, as if He said, With what conscience canst thou confound the woman, who anoints my body to the burial, and dost not confound thyself, who wilt deliver me to death? But the Lord makes a double prophecy; one that the Gospel shall be preached over the whole world, another that the deed of the woman shall be praised. Wherefore it goes on: Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.

• From The City of God

  But, of the two great Romans of that time, Cato was he whose virtue was by far the nearest to the true idea of virtue. Wherefore, let us refer to the opinion of Cato himself, to discover what was the judgment he had formed concerning the condition of the state both then and in former times. "I do not think," he says, "that it was by arms that our ancestors made the republic great from being small. Had that been the case, the republic of our day would have been by far more flourishing than that of their times, for the number of our allies and citizens is far greater; and, besides, we possess a far greater abundance of armour and of horses than they did. But it was other things than these that made them great, and we have none of them: industry at home, just government without, a mind free in deliberation, addicted neither to crime nor to lust. Instead of these, we have luxury and avarice, poverty in the state, opulence among citizens; we laud riches, we follow laziness; there is no difference made between the good and the bad; all the rewards of virtue are got possession of by intrigue. And no wonder, when every individual consults only for his own good, when ye are the slaves of pleasure at home, and, in public affairs, of money and favour, no wonder that an onslaught is made upon the unprotected republic."[202]

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  108 In the Mek. and Sifre Deut. as cited in the preceding two notes, and in Berakoth 5a, near end. 109 Mek. Bel;iodesh 10 (24of.; II, 280-2). Most of the story was omitted in the early printed editions. And see the parallels in Sifre Deut. 32 (57f.; to 6.5); Sanhedrin 101a. 110 On this and other stories concerning R. Eliezer's illness, see Neusner, Eliezer I, pp. 404-6; II, pp. 411f., 415. 111 Buchler, Sin and Atonement, pp. 337-74. 170 Tannaitic Literature [I effect: it leads to repentance. The point is made very clearly by an Amora: 'Raba (some say, R. l:Iisda) says: If a man sees that painful sufferings visit him, let him examine his conduct.'112 Understanding the relation which the Rabbis found between suffering and atonement on the one hand and suffering and punishment for trans gression on the other leads us to see the second motive behind calling suffering a means of atonement: the justice of God. If God is just and if man sins, it is not possible that no payment will be exacted for transgression. Sacrifices may atone, or even a ransom paid in money, 113 but suffering is more effective and atones for more serious sins, because it is costlier. Thus the righteous are punished on earth for their sins in order to enjoy uninter rupted bliss hereafter. Although we cannot give here a general history of the concept of the suffering of the righteous in Judaism, it is clear that the two answers to the question of why the righteous suffer had long been (1) that God cleanses those whom he loves by suffering and (2) that God is just and punishes even the righteous for their sins. Both can be seen in the Psalms of Solomon: Happy is the man whom the Lord remembereth with reproving, And whom he restraineth from the way of evil with strokes, That he may be cleansed from sin, that it may not be multiplied. He that maketh ready his back for strokes shall be cleansed, For the Lord is good to them that endure chastening. 114 Behold, now, 0 God, thou hast shown us thy judgment in thy righteousness; Our eyes have seen thy judgments, 0 God. We have justified thy name that is honoured for ever; For thou art the God of righteousness, judging Israel with chastening. 11 5 In the Psalms of Solomon, the wicked suffered along with the righteous; in fact, the righteous, although they suffered, suffered less severely, since their sin was less. 116 A development in the concept of suffering took place during the next two hundred years, apparently caused by the intense suffering of the Jews in the two revolts against Rome and the increased emphasis on a life after death. The question of why the righteous suffer became more acute, since the wicked, instead of suffering, prospered. Marmorstein has argued that R. Akiba

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  But as human beings became more secure, achieved greater control over their environment, and began to build towns and cities, some had the leisure to explore the interior life and find ways of controlling their destructive impulses. From about 900 to 200 BCE, during what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” there occurred a religious revolution that proved pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. In four distinct regions, sages, prophets, and mystics began to develop traditions that have continued to nourish men and women: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian subcontinent; Confucianism and Daoism in China; monotheism in the Middle East; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.5 This was the period of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, Socrates, and Aeschylus. We have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. In times of spiritual and social crisis, people have repeatedly turned back to it for guidance. They may have interpreted the Axial discoveries differently, but they never succeeded in going beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all latter-day flowerings of this original vision, which they translated marvelously into an idiom that spoke directly to the troubled circumstances of a later period. Compassion would be a key element in each of these movements. The Aryan peoples of India would always be in the vanguard of this spiritual and psychological transformation and would develop a particularly sophisticated understanding of the workings of the mind. Aggressive, passionate warriors addicted to raiding and rustling the cattle of neighboring groups, the Aryan tribes, who had settled in what is now the Punjab, had sacralized their violence. Their religious rituals included the sacrificial slaughter of animals, fierce competitions, and mock raids and battles in which participants were often injured or even killed. But in the ninth century BCE, priests began systematically to extract this aggression from the liturgy, transforming these dangerous rites into more anodyne ceremonies. Eventually they managed to persuade the warriors to give up their sacred war games. As these ritual specialists began to investigate the causes of violence in the psyche, they initiated a spiritual awakening.6 From a very early date, therefore, they had espoused the ideal of ahimsa (“nonviolence”) that would become central to Indian spirituality.

• From Chasing Beauty

  her palace each autumn: Mrs. Bronson would later say about Browning that “surely no woman ever had so pure and holy a love given to her.” Tharp, 145. school for poor children: See also Robert G. Collmer, “Three Women of Asolo: Caterina Cornaro, Katharine de Kay Bronson, and Eleonora Duse,” Mediterranean Studies 12 (2003), 160. “If you are happy”: As quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881 (New York: Avon Books, 1978; first published in 1962), 442. “absurdly easy to know”: HJ to ISG, May 2, 1884. He wrote to Mrs. Bronson the same day. The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883–1884: Volume 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 102–4. Belle’s “octagon character”: Bronson to ISG, January 4 (possibly 1892), ISG Papers, ISGM. “You love all things”: Bronson to ISG, January 4 (possibly 1892), ISG Papers, ISGM. an obscure scuffle: MC Papers. Carter’s notes read: “Sept. 7, 1923, Mr. Henry Swift told me that Daniel Curtis had a row with Judge Churchill over a seat in a railroad train, and pulled the Judge’s nose. The judge had Curtis arrested and he was tried. He was defended by Louis [Lewis] Stackpole, who was inclined to treat the matter lightly, but he lost his case, and Curtis was sent to jail. This so infuriated him that after his release he left the country and never returned. He settled in Venice, bought the Palazzo Barbaro, and made it a treasure house of beauty.” a large wellhead: For a beautiful description of the Barbaro, see Anne Hawley, Gondola Days, vii. how “old ghosts seemed”: Henry James, Italian Hours, 39. “leaving one’s gondola: Laura Ragg, “Venice When the Century Began,” Cornhill Magazine 153 (1936), 3. Ragg also writes: “The patriarchal existence of large patrician families (the Venetians were always prolific) living in great palazzi called by names illustrious in the history of the Republic, coloured their social fabric and lent a peculiar cachet to their hospitality. It clothed their formal receptions with a curious, but pleasing, atmosphere of unreality.” “a whirlwind of suggestion”: Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008; originally published 1902), 367. “O Venezia benedetta”: Travel Album: Italy, 1884. elevate a woman: According to Aileen Ribeiro, Worth felt his skills were equal to those of a great artist.” His taste during this period was understated, with plain fabrics, sashes, ribbons, and bows. Ribeiro, Clothing Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion, 1600–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 333–34. James had died in 1881: “The Light of India” and “The Rajah” (one 25 ½ carats; one 12 3/8); the first cost $35,000 and the other $11,700. These could be worn as a necklace or hairpin. Subject Files, ISGM. a token of love: For the powerful symbolism of pearls, see Molly Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), esp. 7–8, 13–19.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  The one instance of aphoran is in Heb. 12.2, where we are enjoined to run ‘looking unto Jesus’. Moffatt translates it, ‘our eyes fixed upon Jesus’; the American RSV translates it, ‘looking to Jesus’. Moffatt, in his commentary on Hebrews, suggests the translation, ‘with no eyes for anyone but Jesus’. The idea is that we are to withdraw our gaze from everyone else to gaze at Jesus. But to get the full flavour of these words, let us look at their usage in Greek. First, let us look at apoblepein. Suidas, the Greek lexicon, tells us that apoblepein is used by Aeschines as a synonym of thaumazein, which means ‘to wonder’. Philostratus tells us that when Apollonius, the famous sophist, landed in Egypt, as he advanced from the ship the people ‘gazed at him’ (apoblepein) as a god. When Xenophon is telling of a man whose services the country was needing, he says, Your fatherland is ‘looking’ (apoblepein) to you. Philo describes the builder, as building and all the while ‘looking’ (apoblepein) into the pattern of the architect. Xenophon speaks of a person as being so vain that she kept ‘gazing’ (apoblepein) at her own reflection. Plato says that it is the aim of the lover to make the loved one so dependent on him that the lover in all things ‘will look’ (apoblepein) to him in utter love and complete dependence. An Ephesian inscription tells of one who ‘looked’ (apoblepein) to the reverence of the gods and to the honour of the most illustrious city of the Ephesians. Theophrastus in his Characters uses apoblepein to describe the look of the flatterer who gazes with rapt attention at the person he wishes to impress. Now let us look at aphoran. Lucian uses it for one man looking intently at another as they pursued an argument. Twice Epictetus uses it. He uses it in a description of his aims with his pupils. ‘And so now I am your teacher, and you are being taught in my school. And my purpose is this —to make of you a perfect work, secure against restraint, compulsion and hindrance, free, prosperous, happy, looking to (aphoran) God in everything both great and small.’ He describes the great hero and benefactor Hercules as ‘looking to’ (aphoran) Zeus is everything he did. Josephus, describing the death of Aaron, tells how, as he died, the crowd ‘looked wonderingly’ (aphoran) upon him.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Robert Crossfield had an ancestor named William Onias Crossfield, born in Quebec in 1879. Return to text. * Benson, who served as secretary of agriculture under President Eisenhower, eventually became president and prophet of the entire LDS Church, holding that position from 1985 until his death in 1994. Return to text. * Joseph was not the only person to draw parallels between the founding prophets of Mormonism and Islam. Most such comparisons were made by Gentile critics intending to denigrate the Saints and their faith, but certain undeniable similarities were also noted by those sympathetic to Joseph’s church. Among these admirers was Sir Richard F. Burton, the famous nineteenth-century libertine and adventurer who had extensive firsthand knowledge of Islamic cultures. Upon visiting Salt Lake City soon after the Mormons arrived there, Burton observed that Mormonism, “like El Islam,” claimed to be “a restoration by revelation of the pure and primaeval religion of the world.” In 1904 the esteemed German scholar Eduard Meyer spent a year in Utah studying the Saints, which moved him to predict, “As Arabia was to be the inheritance of the Muslims, so was America to become the inheritance of the Mormons.” And in 1932, after acknowledging in a book called Revelation in Mormonism that “similarities between Islam and Mormonism have been misunderstood and exaggerated,” George Arbaugh nevertheless went on to assert, “Mormonism is one of the most boldly innovating developments in the history of religions. Its aggressive theocratic claims, political aspirations, and use of force, make it akin to Islam.” Return to text. * Joseph’s opponents were the Whig candidate Henry Clay, Democrat James K. Polk, and James G. Birney of the Liberty party. In an extremely close election, Polk emerged as the winner with a 48.1 percent plurality, defeating Clay by a scant 38,367 votes. Return to text. * “Religious genius” is a wonderfully apt characterization that originated with William James, who introduced it, generically, in the first of the lectures collected in Varieties of Religious Experience . It was borrowed by Harold Bloom some ninety years later, in his book The American Religion, as the perfect way to describe Joseph Smith. Return to text. * Lee would become infamous in 1857, after the Saints had emigrated to Utah, for his role in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Return to text. * “Celestial marriage,” “spiritual wifery,” and “plural marriage” are among the terms Joseph Smith coined as euphemisms for polygamy. Return to text. * William Clayton, Joseph’s loyal personal secretary, declared in a letter twenty-eight years later, “I did write the revelation on Celestial marriage given through the Prophet Joseph Smith on the 12th day of July 1843. When the revelation was written there was no one present except the prophet Joseph, his brother Hyrum and myself.

• From Chasing Beauty

  the German soul: This elevation of Germanic character took on a sinister aspect when Wagner’s music became, in the words of Alex Ross, the soundtrack to the rise of Nazism. For more discussion of this complex phenomenon, see Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2020). had “nearly enough”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 2, 1886, GFP. At the gravesite: Carter, 101. into her travel album: Travel Album: Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, Volume I, 1886. declared his wife “happy”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 2, 1886, GFP. thought Vienna “delightful”: JLG Jr. to GPG, September 4, 1886, GFP. become “much depressed”: JLG Jr. to GPG, September 16, 1886, GFP. with a young man: This was supposedly Logan Pearsall Smith, according to Douglass Shand-Tucci in his book The Art of Scandal, 83–84, 91. Smith was the brother of Bernard Berenson’s wife, Mary. “would also give you”: JLG Jr. to GPG, September 27, 1886, GFP. an occasional quotation: Travel Album: Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, Volume I, 1886; and Travel Album: Italy, France, and Great Britain, Volume II, 1886. There was more to do: JLG Jr. to GPG, October 3, 1886, GFP. Lee “most astounding”: As quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (New York: Avon Books, 1978; first published in 1962), 115. a letter to Belle: JLG Jr. mentions Belle and Vernon Lee in his diary, October 8, 1886, JLGJr-P; the scene is more fully described in Gondola, 13. “He was a dear”: JLG Jr. to GPG, October 18, 1886, GFP. “particularly charmed”: Ralph Curtis to ISG, October/November 1886, ISG Papers, ISGM. the “wittiest man”: John Jay Chapman, as quoted in Tharp, 120. curate and furnish: See ISGM Guide 17, 114. THIRTEEN: LOVE AND POWER, 1886–88 his Paris studio: John Singer Sargent’s studio had been at 41, boulevard Berthier. concealed private lives: What is hard to capture now, in the twenty-first century, is the danger of homosexual desire, which, if found out, was often ruinous, unacceptable in polite society. I am indebted to Colm Tóibín for his many insights about Henry James and John Singer Sargent. Tóibín observes that Henry James likely “used the shadowy shape of his own uneasy and ambiguous homosexuality to nourish his work.” “Henry James: Shadow and Substance,” in Henry James and American Painting (New York: The Morgan Library and Museum, published by Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 36–40. The same may be said of Sargent, as Tóibín argues in “Secrets and Sensuality: The Private Lives of John Singer Sargent and Henry James,” in Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent (Boston: ISGM; distributed by Yale University Press, 2020), 117–31. See also Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). “civilized to his fingertips”: HJ to Grace Norton, February 23, 1884, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 32.