Romaine Brooks

The childhood, and what it does not explain

Romaine Brooks was born Beatrice Romaine Goddard in Rome on 1 May 1874, the youngest of three children of Ella Waterman Goddard, an American heiress, and Major Henry Goddard, who left the family. Her mother moved the household around Europe and America without settling anywhere, and reserved what care she had for Romaine's older brother St. Mar, who was ill and unstable. When Romaine was seven her mother left her in New York with an Irish washerwoman, without money and without an address to send her on to.

She wrote all of this down in the 1930s in an autobiographical manuscript called No Pleasant Memories, which was never published and which her biographers use with care. Meryle Secrest, who wrote the first life of her in 1974, and Cassandra Langer, who wrote the second in 2015, both note how hard it is to separate what happened from what Brooks made of it afterwards. Secrest raised the possibility that Brooks bore a daughter in 1897 and placed the child in a convent, where she died. The reference accounts treat that as unconfirmed rather than established.

The paintings are not a diagram of any of this. She was a slow, deliberate portraitist with a settled technique and a fixed set of colours, and the temptation to read her greys as a symptom should be resisted. The childhood is worth stating because it is true, and because the money that came out of it is what let her paint whatever she liked for sixty years.

St. Mar died in 1901 and her mother a few months after him. What came to Romaine in 1902 was an apartment in Paris, eight more around France, the Château Grimaldi, and a fortune in gold coin. She was twenty-eight.

The marriage that gave her the name

On 13 June 1903, on Capri, she married John Ellingham Brooks, an English translator and unsuccessful pianist. Both of them were homosexual and neither pretended otherwise, and she later called the marriage a bourgeois convention. It broke down inside a year, chiefly over her clothes. She cut her hair short and ordered a man's walking suit, he objected, and she moved to London in 1904.

They never divorced. She paid him £300 a year to stay away, which he did, living comfortably on Capri until his death in 1929. She kept his surname for the rest of her life and signed her canvases with her first name alone.

How she found the grey

She had trained in Rome at the Scuola Nazionale, where she was the only woman in the life class, and then lived on Capri on almost nothing. In 1904 she went to St Ives in Cornwall dissatisfied with her own colour, and came back with the palette she used from then on: black, white and a long ladder of greys, touched here and there with ochre, umber, alizarin or a single red. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, which holds most of her work, names James McNeill Whistler as the influence she took it from.

Her first solo exhibition opened in 1910 at the Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris and held thirteen paintings, most of them of women. Two nudes did the work: Azalées Blanches, a reclining figure that reviewers set beside Goya and Manet, and The Red Jacket. Robert de Montesquiou, the aristocratic critic and poet, wrote about her and called her the thief of souls, a phrase that stuck for the rest of the century and became the title of her first retrospective. Accounts differ over whether he coined it for the 1910 show or in an article two years later.

In 1914 she painted La France Croisée, a Red Cross nurse standing against a burning Ypres. It was reproduced in fundraising booklets with a poem by Gabriele D'Annunzio printed beside it, and the French state gave her the cross of the Legion of Honour for the money it raised. The red ribbon on the lapel of her 1923 self-portrait is that decoration.

The sitters

From about 1920 nearly everyone she painted came out of Natalie Clifford Barney's circle. The run of portraits from those years amounts to a group photograph of a world nobody had painted before. The major ones, and where they now hang:

• Self-Portrait (1923), Smithsonian American Art Museum. Riding coat, gloves and top hat against grey ruins, the eyes shadowed by the hat brim and the Legion of Honour ribbon the only strong colour.
• Una, Lady Troubridge (1924), Smithsonian American Art Museum. Morning suit, cravat, monocle and two dachshunds. Troubridge was the translator who first gave Colette to English readers, and Radclyffe Hall's partner.
• Portrait de Natalie Clifford Barney, dit « L'Amazone » (1920), Musée Carnavalet. Barney in a fur coat at her desk with a small black ceramic horse in front of her; the museum reads the background as the courtyard of 20 rue Jacob.
• Jean Cocteau à l'époque de la grande roue (1912), Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou. Cocteau at twenty-three, with the Ferris wheel of the 1900 exposition behind him.
• Le Trajet (c. 1911), Smithsonian American Art Museum. A nude of Ida Rubinstein, the dancer Brooks was involved with, floating on a wing-shaped white form in a black void.
• Ida Rubinstein (1917) and La Baronne Emile D'Erlanger (c. 1924), both Smithsonian American Art Museum.

She did not flatter. The Troubridge portrait has been read as everything from a feminist statement to an outright cartoon, and Brooks settled the question herself in a letter: she meant it as a caricature of a headstrong, demanding woman, and thought it might amuse future feminists. When a sitter complained that she had not been made beautiful, Brooks is said to have answered that she had been ennobled instead.

Several of the portraits put women in men's tailoring, and by the mid-1920s that was fashion as much as signal. Magazines were recommending severe jackets and high collars to women who had no interest in anything the clothes might mean. What Brooks added was the face above the collar. Her sitters look back at the viewer with the flat confidence usually reserved in portraiture for men.

Fifty years with Natalie Clifford Barney

Brooks met Natalie Clifford Barney in 1915. Barney was an American writer who lived in Paris, wrote in French, and had been running a Friday salon at 20 rue Jacob since 1909. She had been with the writer Élisabeth de Gramont for several years and had no intention of giving her up. The three settled into an arrangement that lasted, and Brooks and Barney stayed together for more than fifty years.

It suited Barney better than it suited Brooks. Barney argued against monogamy in print and kept several attachments running at once. Brooks wanted one person and tolerated the rest, with one recorded ultimatum, over Dolly Wilde. She disliked Paris, disliked the salon, and kept her own flat in the rue Raynouard rather than live in Barney's house. On the Riviera the two of them built the Villa Trait d'Union, the hyphen villa: two separate wings joined by a shared dining room, so that Brooks could shut a door and Barney could still expect her at dinner.

The 1920 portrait is the record of it. Barney sits in fur at a writing table, wearing a sapphire necklace Brooks had given her, with a bolting ceramic horse in front of her. The horse is a joke on l'Amazone, the name Remy de Gourmont had fixed on her. Brooks gave the painting to the Musée Carnavalet in 1966.

The circle put her into fiction too. In Ladies Almanack, the comic roman à clef the American writer Djuna Barnes printed privately in Paris in 1928 about Barney's salon, Brooks appears as Cynic Sal, who dresses like a coachman and drives an empty cab. Barney and the journalist Janet Flanner annotated their own copies with the real names, which is how the identifications are known.

Italy, and what the record says about her politics

She met the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio in 1909, when he came to France to escape his creditors, and the friendship lasted until his death in 1938. He wrote about her painting in terms she valued, and she painted him. D'Annunzio seized the Adriatic city of Fiume with a private army in 1919 and governed it for over a year, and the style of that adventure, the balcony speeches and the black shirts and the salutes, was taken up wholesale by Italian Fascism afterwards.

Brooks kept a villa outside Florence and an apartment in Nice, and by the end of the 1930s Italy was where she mostly was. Barney joined her there in 1939 and the two women spent the Second World War in Italy, returning to Paris in 1946.

Her politics are part of the record and are usually stated badly, in both directions. Here is what the sources actually hold.

• Her long-standing reputation, as her publisher's own summary of Cassandra Langer's 2015 biography puts it, is of an aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s.
• Lambda Literary's review of that biography describes the personality Langer had to account for as pro-Fascist, admiring of Mussolini's government and of D'Annunzio's philosophy, and prejudiced against Jewish people.
• A specific documented incident: at a salon she referred to the playwright Henry Bernstein as "that dirty Jew" in front of a Jewish hostess, and was publicly rebuked for it.
• Langer's own reading, given in an interview in 2016, is that Brooks was an elitist whose prejudices were her class's, and she draws a line between holding them and acting on them. She records that Brooks and Barney saved at least three Jewish lives at risk to themselves during the war, and helped conceal the whereabouts of the art historian Bernard Berenson.

The two halves of that do not cancel. Nobody has produced evidence that Brooks joined anything or acted politically, and nobody disputes what she said. Her biographers disagree over how much weight the opinions should carry against the life, and a reader is entitled to the disagreement rather than to whichever half is more convenient.

The drawings, and the memoir

In 1930, laid up with a sprained leg, she began drawing in a single unbroken line without lifting the pencil, and did not stop for years. More than a hundred survive: figures, angels, animals, things that are none of the three. She said she did not know where a line was going when she started it and did not plan them, which is automatic drawing by another name, arrived at independently and years before the Surrealists made a programme of it. She signed them with a small winged spring.

No Pleasant Memories was written in the same years, with drawings of its own. It has still not been published. At eighty-five she gave an interviewer the sentence her first biographer took a title from: her dead mother, she said, got between her and life.

The long withdrawal

She held solo exhibitions in Paris, London and New York in 1925, showed drawings in New York in 1935 to a cool reception, and after that effectively stopped. The often-repeated claim that she gave up painting in 1925 is wrong. She painted Carl Van Vechten in 1936 and Muriel Draper in 1938, bought paints in Florence during the war, and finished a portrait of the Duke Uberto Strozzi in 1961, when she was eighty-seven. But the flow had stopped, and she never explained why.

By the mid-1950s she was barely seeing anyone. Barney, visiting, had to stay in a hotel and was given lunch. Brooks spent weeks in darkened rooms convinced she was losing her sight, and her suspicions widened until they took in her own household. Secrest describes this as paranoia. Langer's later research found that some of the fears had a basis.

The end of the friendship came over Janine Lahovary, whom Barney had met in Nice in 1958 and stayed with for the rest of her life. Brooks stopped answering. In her last year she left Barney's letters unopened and would not come to the door when Barney called. Barney's last letter to her was returned.

Romaine Brooks died in Nice on 7 December 1970, aged ninety-six.

Where the paintings are

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington holds close to half of everything she is known to have made, because she gave it to them in a series of donations in the last years of her life. Its 2016 exhibition, The Art of Romaine Brooks, was drawn entirely from that collection and put out eighteen paintings and thirty-two drawings, many of which had not been on a wall in decades.

Her first retrospective opened three months after her death. Romaine Brooks: Thief of Souls ran at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington from 24 February to 4 April 1971 and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, with a catalogue by Adelyn Breeskin. Outside Washington, the Musée Carnavalet has the Barney portrait and the Centre Pompidou the Cocteau.

She was written off for most of the twentieth century as a realist who had missed everything that mattered in modern painting. That reading has come apart since the 1980s, and the portraits are now looked at for what they were doing rather than for what they were not: a group of women, painted by one of them, at the exact moment such a group first became visible enough to paint.