Tonight, Capri and Sargent pull me back. In my mind, Capri Girl remains — my idolized woman, my unreachable beloved. I return to her not as a painter, not even as a man — but as something more desperate, more tender: a star-crossed lover. She exists only in my mind. I think of her; she cannot think of me.
In her, I have poured a lifetime of unspent love — love that, like water spilled into the olive grove, may nourish the ancient trees but will never reach her lips, never cool her head, never rush laughing through her hair.
And so it is tonight, standing again in imagination under the olive trees of Capri, that I encounter her quieter sister — the girl of Dans les Oliviers à Capri. She does not dance. She leans, as if already carrying the sweet burden of all the loves and longings that will never reach her.
At the same time, my thoughts drift — not only to the grove, but to Paris. To Sargent himself, young, ambitious, already brilliant, trying to find his place among the salons and studios of the city. The Met’s Sargent and Paris exhibition reminds me: in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Sargent was restless with possibility. He studied under Carolus-Duran, learning to paint with boldness, fluidity, daring brushwork that defied the meticulous finish the academies expected. He painted his friends, his fellow artists, even his lovers, in a flurry of movement and light. There was always a seeking in him — a desire to capture not just likeness, but life itself. And then, of course, there was Madame X.
In 1884, he unveiled his portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau — beautiful, aloof, self-possessed. In her, Sargent tried to distill something both eternal and immediate: a goddess of Parisian modernity. But Paris was not ready. The portrait, with its scandalous strap slipping off her shoulder, was met not with admiration, but outrage. The city that had trained him, that had taught him to dare, now recoiled from the audacity of his vision.
Perhaps Sargent learned then what Rilke later wrote: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." To see clearly, to reveal too much, is often to be cast out. And so, wounded but undeterred, Sargent left Paris behind.
Yet he did not abandon beauty. He carried it with him — into the portraits of English aristocrats, into the watery light of Venice, into the quiet studies of readers and dancers and olive trees. He carried it like a pilgrim carries a relic: not for others’ acclaim, but to keep something sacred alive within himself.
There is something of that exile in Dans les Oliviers à Capri. The girl stands apart, neither glorified nor pitied. She is simply present — beautiful, unreachable, necessary. She belongs to the grove, not to the watcher.
Standing here, tonight, I feel a strange kinship with Sargent. We are both watchers. Both lovers of something that cannot be ours. Both pouring out our love into the roots of ancient trees, knowing it may never be returned, and loving anyway.
Maybe that is the true triumph. Not acclaim. Not belonging. Not even being remembered. As T.S. Eliot wrote: "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."