St. Louis Art Museum buys John Singer Sargent portrait of girl for $2.2 million
December 12, 2017 | In the PressFrom St. Louis Dispatch (http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/st-louis-art-museum-buys-john-singer-sargent-portrait-of/article_bd64dbbd-93db-5cfa-8ac7-620b799a1adb.html)
Seven-year-old Charlotte Cram leans back in the oversized chair, her fingers splayed and gripping its wooden arm.
Her smile is barely restrained, her head tilts forward, and she wears a yellow bow in her hair and a white dress with a yellow sash.
All of it may be itchy.
“She was told to sit still for this painting,” Brent Benjamin, director of the St. Louis Art Museum, said Tuesday. “That was going to work for five minutes — maybe four.
“You aren’t sure what she’s going to do next.”
Monday night, the museum’s board of commissioners made official the $2.2 million purchase of the John Singer Sargent painting, which fills a big gap in its American art collection. “Portrait of Charlotte Cram” was painted in 1900, one of many of Sargent’s paintings of children.
The piece has been on view in the museum's Gallery 335 for about a month and will continue to be displayed there among other American art created between 1870 and 1920.
Benjamin said that, for a long time, the museum had been looking for a painting from one of the American ex-pat artists who crossed the Atlantic during the Gilded Age.
“An opportunity like this is unique and singular, and we’re very, very excited about it,” he said.
Melissa Wolfe, the museum’s curator of American art, said the museum has two minor paintings by Sargent that have never been on display. This one was bought from a private collection.
As for Charlotte Cram, she was from a wealthy Massachusetts family. Her mother died a few weeks after childbirth, and her father died of tuberculosis when she was a toddler, Wolfe said. She was raised by her grandparents and married landscape architect Robert Ludlow Fowler Jr. They lived in an estate in Bedford, N.Y., called Oatlands (the estate was later owned by designer Ralph Lauren), and she died in 1971.
Museum officials hope the painting becomes a visitor favorite. Wolfe said she thinks some of Sargent’s best paintings are those of children.
“I think Sargent’s so avant-garde, and you wouldn’t think of him that way, at capturing (children) as they are,” she said. “Everyone can relate to a 7-year-old trying her best to sit still.”
