The divine Sarah and the artist Louise

Late in her career, the painter Louise Abbéma recalled how at the age of twenty-one she first met the thirty-one-year-old legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt:

One day – at the Salon – when I was a very young girl – I saw Sarah Bernhardt standing next to me. She was looking at a painting. I was seduced by her admirable silhouette and was overcome with an immense desire to paint her portrait. I worked hard to earn the necessary permission. At the next year’s Salon [1874], I saw Sarah Bernhardt again, who had stopped in front of my first work: the portrait of my mother, which I was exhibiting at the time. I heard her ask, ‘Who is this by?’. She was told, ‘It’s by a young girl. Mlle Louise Abbéma’. ‘It’s very good,’ Sarah replied, ‘and if it’s a child who did it, it’s even better’. The following year I had a model who, by a very happy coincidence, also happened to be modelling for my illustrious admirer. I spoke to her about Sarah, and the model passed on to Sarah the desire I had expressed to meet her. I then went to see Sarah and that’s how I came to know her. In 1876, I began to paint her portrait. She was at that time rehearsing L’Etrangère [The Foreigner, a play by Alexandre Dumas fils] and came regularly to pose at my house. By a charming coincidence, this portrait was exhibited [in the Salon of 1876] in the same spot where my painting that she had been looking at a few years earlier had been placed.¹Maurice Hamel, ‘Les Souvenirs de théâtre d’une peintresse célèbre’, Comoedia, 12 Jan. 1924, p. 2.

Abbéma’s full-length portrait of Bernhardt in elegant street clothes, a work lost today and known only from a preparatory sketch, led to the actress being dubbed by one critic ‘the lioness of the Salon’ in 1876, and to Abbéma being declared ‘a young talent full of energy and verve, who can only grow with further study’.²Th. Véron, Dictionnaire Véron ou Mémorial de l’art et des artistes de mon temps. Le Salon de 1877. 3e Annuaire, Chez l’auteur, Poitiers, 1877, p. 5. An aspiring painter and sculptress herself, as well as a renowned actress, Bernhardt returned the favour, sculpting a very faithful representation of Abbéma in 1877–78. This statue of Abbéma sits on the mantlepiece in Achille Mélandri’s famous photograph of Bernhardt meditating in her coffin in 1879. The two women were to be friends from this moment on.

Born into a wealthy Parisian family, Abbéma studied painting with several noted academic masters: Charles Chaplin, Jean-Jacques Henner and Carolus-Duran. Largely, and unjustly, forgotten today, she was an ever-present figure in the art world of fin-de-siècle France, showing works in dozens of exhibitions throughout her career, and being feted as ‘a “Glory”. A glory of the studio, a glory of palette and light, a magician of floral painting, a happy, delicate and elegant artist’.³Maurice Hamel, ‘Peintresse et tragédienne’, Floréal, 31 Dec. 1921, p. 1320. In 1906 she became only the fourth woman to be decorated with the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest order of merit.

Protected by wealth and by her increasing artistic celebrity, Abbéma led an open life as a lesbian, cropping her hair short and dressing habitually in men’s waistcoats, jackets, shirts and ties. Although she was believed to have had a number of male amorous conquests, Bernhardt was also rumoured to have been involved romantically with Abbéma.⁴See Gerda Taranow, The Bernhardt Hamlet. Culture and Context, Peter Lang, New York, 1996, pp. 93–96; Sharon Marcus, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’s “Friend”’, Romanic Review, no. 110, 2019, pp. 223–46; Stéphanie Cantarutti, ‘Une artiste parmi les artistes’, Sarah Bernhardt. Et la femme créa la star, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, 2023, pp. 145–51. Whatever the truth of this, she was to be intimately associated with Abbéma for the rest of her life, the artist becoming virtually her official portraitist and diarising her theatrical life through costume and character sketches. The ‘bow-tied and waistcoated’ Abbéma has been described as ‘the masculine foil to Bernhardt’s carefully orchestrated femininity’.⁵Carol Ockman & Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt. The Art of High Drama, The Jewish Museum, New York and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, p. 47. She was known as ‘l’intime de Sarah Bernhardt’ in French art circles.⁶Louis Albin, Le Salon de Saint-Quentin. Exposition de la société des amis des arts. Études et critiques, Imprimerie de La Société anonyme du Glaneur, Saint-Quentin, 1880, p. 24.

In 1875, around the time the two met, Abbéma painted an exquisite portrait of Renée Delmas de Pont-Jest, which has been gifted to the NGV by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. Born in 1858, and thus around seventeen when depicted in the work, Delmas is shown seated at a desk in a shimmering satin gown, holding a sheet of black-bordered mourning stationery. Delmas was the daughter of the celebrated former naval officer, writer and journalist Louis-René Delmas de Pont-Jest. Renée’s son, in later years, described how his grandfather used to give masked balls four times a season in his house on the rue Condorcet. Everybody who was anybody in Paris crowded to them. In the course of the evening Christine Nilsson would sing, Sarah Bernhardt would enchant, [Gaston] Serpette would be at the piano, [Jean] Mounet-Sully would read verse, and Coquelin Cadet the younger would recite his first monologues.⁷Sacha Guitry, If Memory Serves, trans. Lewis Galantière, Doubleday, Doran & Co., New York, 1936, pp. 6–7.

On a fateful day in February 1881, Mounet-Sully invited a fellow actor, the handsome young Lucien Guitry, to perform at one of these grand soirées and, when Guitry laid eyes on Renée, what ensued was ‘un double coup de foudre’ (double love at first sight).⁸Henri Gidel, Les Deux Guitry, Flammarion, Paris, 1995, p. 39. Guitry also dazzled Renée’s parents with his charms and was soon a regular invitee to the Pont-Jest home.

Guitry was still finishing his military service, so could only see Renée on periods of furlough leave. When this was refused on one occasion, he went AWOL from the army barracks to see his beloved. The punishment for this was a prison sentence; however, all sorts of favours were called in on his behalf: ‘René de Pont-Jest intervened in person… Louise Abbéma knew Guitry’s commanding officer. Sarah Bernhardt knew the minister of war. The thing was arranged’.⁹Guitry, p. 7. So both Bernhardt and Abbéma, along with Reneé’s father, were involved in exonerating Guitry from serious prosecution for his flouting of military rules.

Between January and April 1882, Guitry asked Delmas de Pont-Jest three times for Renée’s hand in marriage but was three times refused, Delmas de Pont-Jest insisting that his daughter was never marrying an actor, of all things. In June 1882 Guitry and Bernhardt were performing together on the stage in London when Renée, unable to be parted from her new beau, fled the family home one night and crossed the Channel. On 10 June she married Guitry without her parents’ consent, in the church of Saint Martin’s in the Fields near Trafalgar Square. Bernhardt was their marriage witness. Back in Paris, Delmas de Pont-Jest was left to splutter: ‘My daughter with that dandy! They will never set foot in this house again!’¹⁰Gidel, p. 44

Meanwhile, in December 1882, back in Paris, Bernhardt appeared in a new play by Victorien Sardou, starring as the Russian Princess Fédora Romazoff, and sporting the soft felt man’s hat that was to be known thereafter as the fedora. A play about murder, betrayal and tragedy, Sardou’s Fédora was a smash hit in Paris in the winter of 1882–83. Bernhardt had for some time been taking painting lessons with Alfred Stevens, an artist originally from Belgium, who achieved acclaim in Paris for his elegant portraits. To commemorate the actress’s new role, Stevens portrayed Bernhardt swathed in expensive fabrics and jewellery, and in character as the complex Fédora. This painting was reproduced in an article devoted to the play, which featured on the front page of Le Gaulois, Supplément littéraire on 11 December 1882, where Bernhardt described the Princess Fédora as ‘a fallen angel with white wings’.¹¹‘Foedora racontée par Sarah Bernhardt’, Le Gaulois, Supplément littéraire, no. 8, 11 Dec. 1882, p. 1. Fédora (Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt), 1882, by Alfred Stevens, has been generously gifted to the NGV by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family.

The three friends, Abbéma, Bernhardt and Delmas de Pont-Jest (later Mme de Pontry) were bound together by art and theatre for the rest of their lives. Renée and Lucien’s son, Sacha Guitry, recalled how he was regularly taken by his mother to visit Bernhardt throughout the 1890s; the actress was to be a witness at his second marriage to the singer Yvonne Printemps in 1919.

Abbéma was ever-present in Bernhardt’s daily life and at her death in 1923. Some fifteen years earlier, around 1908, Bernhardt and Abbéma had their hands, clasped together in friendship, copied in plaster and then cast as a bronze sculpture commemorating their many decades together. As Abbéma recalled in 1921:

Just think, it has been more than forty years since the closest and most unfailing friendship united us. And for forty years, there has been not the slightest disagreement, not the slightest veil between the two of us.¹²Hamel, p. 1320.

Embracing hands of Sarah Bernhardt and Louise Abbéma seems to have been cast by the French foundry Valsuani in an edition of just two bronzes, one for each of the friends, which both women have signed. Abbéma’s copy was last known to be in a Paris collection in 1999, from where it was stolen, and its whereabouts remain unknown. Bernhardt’s copy of this moving and powerful artistic statement of lifelong friendship has just been acquired for the NGV with funds donated by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, and the M.G. Chapman Bequest, 2024. The Gallery is immensely fortunate to be able to tell the story of the network of friendship and support that united these three remarkable women, through three equally extraordinary and captivating artworks.

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art. The NGV warmly thanks Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family and the M.G. Chapman Bequest for their generous support of these works.

Notes