The Mystery of the Sara

When he returned to New York from Punta Arenas, Chile in 1923 the painter, Rockwell Kent, brought back 20 incomplete canvases and scores of drawings from seven months spent in Tierra del Fuego.

Once completed, the paintings were quickly acknowledged to be among the most striking landscapes ever produced by an American artist. (One of my favorites, "Admiralty Sound, Tierra del Fuego", now at the Hermitage Museum, is reproduced here.) The drawings, powerfully evocative black and white line images, illustrate Kent’s book, Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan, an account of his travels that became a best-seller and remains a popular work with collectors today (see image, below right).

One painting Kent produced while in the region, however, did not come back to New York with him. That work was not a landscape—although the Fuegian Andes do appear in the background—but instead a portrait, a portrait not of a person but of a beloved vessel, the three-masted schooner, Sara. Kent’s portrait of the Sara was the only one of his paintings, to my knowledge, he left in Tierra del Fuego. It may well also be the only one he fully completed there. The painting was done in exchange for repairs to Kent’s own boat, the Kathleen, which almost sank his first day out from Punta Arenas.

Kent’s half-baked plan when he departed New York in June 1922 was to travel to Punta Arenas and there somehow—he was not yet famous and had no money—procure a boat and sail it westward through the Strait of Magellan, around Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, and then back to Punta Arenas. Upon arrival he managed to get hold of a lifeboat from one of the many abandoned hulks rotting in the harbor at Punta Arenas. One of the vessels there at that time, dismasted and forgotten, was the South Street Seaport Museum’s own ship Wavertree. She had been towed to Punta Arenas in 1911 after being dismasted in a storm off Cape Horn. Alas, it was from another vessel that Kent swiped the lifeboat.

The lifeboat was quickly decked over, a keel added, mast and rigging raised and turned into a 26’ sloop he christened the Kathleen, after the wife he left behind in New York. It was a masterful conversion but done too hastily, apparently. Several hours after casting off, the boat started taking on so much water Kent feared she would sink. Kent decided to put into Port Harris on Dawson Island, where he knew there was a sawmill and shipyard. It was quickly determined Kathleen would need extensive repairs if she was to make it to the Horn and back. Kent had no money for repairs but in exchange he offered to paint a portrait for the mill manager of the schooner Sara (see right).

The Sara elicited bittersweet pride in Port Harris. She had been built there just a few years earlier, in 1919, the largest ever built in Chile at the time. She was likely built for Sara Braun, a wealthy entrepreneur, to haul wool from her extensive sheep estancias to market (see Sara Braun’s mansion in Punta Arenas as it appears today, at left). I say “likely” because the records are scanty and my Spanish scantier still. But I am allowing myself the conjecture because the dates are right, the spelling of Sara is right, and wool figures prominently in the short life of the Sara.

Just three years after her launch, Sara caught fire and sank. Her cargo? Wool. She went down without loss of life in February 1922, the same year Rockwell Kent found himself stranded in the little mill town of her birth. The emotions in Port Harris were still raw over the loss of their pride and joy so the offer, by a real artist, to preserve her memory on canvas was gladly accepted. “Dawson lived upon the memory of Sara,” wrote Kent. “And that time might never dim for them the recollection of her glory I would paint her portrait.” While the shipwrights worked on Kathleen, Kent worked on Sara. He worked from photographs and plans and from the vivid, loving recollections of the men who had built her.

While Kent was fiercely proud of the lines of his own boat, he was not terribly complementary of the Sara. In his journal he calls her “huge, clumsy, hideous” but also “tenderly loved” and “a triumph of construction.” Of course, he kept these views out of his book, perhaps in grateful respect to the many Chilenos so helpful to him throughout his trip. Instead, in the book he refers to Sara as Chile’s Great Eastern. This is still a backhanded compliment; the Great Eastern was an ugly, six-masted monster built in London in 1858 (see image, right). But, to the casual reader, Kent would appear to be comparing the vessels in their size and the accomplishement of their construction rather than commenting on aesthetics. Being more charitable, I prefer to compare Sara not to the Great Eastern but to the Great Republic, a lovely clipper ship built in Boston in 1853 and which, like the Sara, saw her life cut short by fire. Sara lasted three years before being consumed; the Great Republic (right, below) burned the very month of her maiden voyage. She burned to the waterline in New York on December 27th, 1853 in a fire that started on land, in a bakery located on the very block in which I write these words.

When Kent was finished with his protrait of the Sara he presented it to Senor Marcou, the manager of the mill and the man who had not only authorized the repairs to the Kathleen but befriended Kent during the weeks he was marooned on Dawson Island. Marcou was so taken by the painting he decided to hang it in his bedroom where he could admire it every day. Word of the painting had spread far on the island and Marcou believed his heavily-armed bedroom was the safest place for it. So fierce was his pride in possessing the painting he asked Kent to write a letter attesting the work had been given to Marcou himself and no one else, not the company, not the board of directors, not the designers of the vessel.

Imagine my astonishment, then, to find the painting, eighty six years later, not on Dawson Island or in a museum in Punta Arenas or Valparaiso but in a gallery in New York City. I immediately made an appointment to view the painting, now called "The Sara at Dawson Island" (see image, below). It was much larger than I was expecting and in-person you can properly take in the detail. This was no gauzy, impressionistic canvas. It was meant to be a portrait in the most complete sense of the word, a portrait destined for a lover with every detail of the beloved captured and preserved. And Kent delivers that detail. “…I began upon such an elaboration of details as only the…all-cherishing memories of the ship’s creators could have suggested…” In the painting you can see every line, every block, every reefing nettle. I can imagine Senior Marcou looking lovingly at his Sara each night before bed. Kent doesn’t say if Marcou was married, but if so, I can imagine his wife’s jealousy.

Kent describes his painting thus, “Upon a dark green sea, against a background of the gleaming snow peaks of Dawson and a thunder dark sky, I put her, sailing, all sails set, before the wind; and in the foreground, heedless of anachronism, appeared the little Kathleen.” Yes, in a final bit of conceit, Kent—betraying his habit of self-promotion—inserts himself into the painting, at the helm of the Kathleen, a tiny Stars and Stripes flying in friendly salute to the pride of Chile’s merchant fleet.

How did this painting, born in the furthest southern reaches of the hemisphere, make its way from under lock and key in Senior Marcou’s bedroom to a sleek Fifth Avenue gallery? The records are unclear. The current owner of the work, D. Wigmore Gallery has no record of its provenance and Christie’s, which sold the work in 1997, could not disclose how, or even when the work made its way to the United States.

Marcou was just 35 when Kent met him so any children he might have had may yet be alive today living out their remaining years in or around Punta Arenas. Certainly any grandchildren might be alive. Kent’s diaries and letters make no mention of any future contact with Marcou. Although he liked and admired the man, there was apparently no correspondence between them. This is particularly surprising because Kent kept in touch with others he met there and, without Marcou’s generosity, Kent’s travels in Tierra del Fuego would have ended almost before they began, and the art he produced there and the book that propelled his fame would never have seen the light of day.

So, what happened? Was the work stolen, as Senior Marcou had feared? Did he give it to one of his heirs who then cashed in on Kent’s fame? Or did some enterprising collector, reading about the painting in Kent’s book go to Tierra del Fuego to seek out Marcou and make him an offer? By the 1930s, Rockwell Kent was arguably America’s most famous artist. The hard dollars a collector would have offered could have gone a long way to making Marcou's life significantly more comfortable. But the mystery remains. Just how did this painting make its way those 9,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the island of Manhattan?

I intend to keep searching but, for now, I’ve reached a dead end. All I can do is admire the picture I have of the Sara and hope to learn more once I get to Punta Arenas and Dawson Island. [To be continued.]

Getting to Know Hugo

Even his name is weighty. Victor Hugo. The kind of name you’d expect a great man of letters to have.

Can’t you see him sitting there, in his robe, in a comfortable arm-chair in his study, dictating to a secretary his latest story or perhaps going through the never-ending correspondence from his many admirers, a fire crackling in the hearth beside him?

As I picture him, he’s running his fingers contemplatively through his beard, speaking deliberately, slowly, each magnificent sentence coming from his lips fully-formed, perfection uttered.

I had always placed Hugo high in the pantheon of great writers in my mind, perhaps not on a par with the greatest, but securely in the clouds, beyond the point where they can be seen clearly, enveloped in reputation amplifying haze, up there with Gogol and Schiller, Ovid and Proust, and all those others I’ve hardly read but who I’m told are great. And with Hugo, the particular charm was that he could appeal to the most highly cultured and the most brutish of souls both. I recently came across a travel piece in which the writer encounters on a remote island a poacher, a dangerous man, a murderer, an ex-convict, yet someone who speaks fondly of his favorite writers, Dostoyevsky (of course) and Victor Hugo, the great portrayers of tormented souls.

But the sad fact is until very recently I’d never read anything by Hugo. As someone who speaks a little French, I had always told myself I should wait to read French literature when I can read it in the original. Sadly, that level of fluency always seemed to remain just out of reach. So, despite my French name and French relatives and extensive travel in francophone countries, I am embarrassingly illiterate when it comes to French literature.

Several months ago, in Skyline Books on 18th Street -- one of my favorite places in spite of the pervasive cat odor -- I came across a small copy of Hugo’s Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-three), about the bloodiest year of the French Revolution, 1793. It was in one of those school editions designed for students of French complete with a vocabulary at the back and handy notes to explain the idiomatic expressions and other bits of French arcania. I dove into it. Well, actually, wading would be the more apt metaphor. Like a swimmer tentatively walking into chilly water, I went forward slowly, my progress halting and deliberate, flipping back and forth between text and vocabulary, rereading sentences whose meaning was unclear, referring back to earlier chapters to see if Hugo’s use of a once new, now familiar, word had changed. Eventually, however, I was in deep, swimming slowly, deliberately, but still keeping my head above water. I was reading Victor Hugo, in French and I was very pleased with myself.

But I was not at all pleased with the story. From the very first page I was confronted with wooden, two-dimensional characters. I could hardly believe what I was reading. Was this sappy stuff really by Victor Hugo, that towering genius of French letters? To excuse him I told myself it must be the subject matter that was causing him to write this way. Maybe for a Frenchman it is just too difficult to portray both sides of participants in the Revolution with depth and subtlety, so great were the passions, so raw the violence.

In Hugo’s characters, the two sides, revolutionary and royalist, conformed to the most crude generalizations. The revolutionaries were stalwart folk. Parisian workers for the most part, but leavened with a few hardy peasants who had finally risen up against the venality of the aristocracy and the clergy to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with they oppressed urban brethren. They were tough, brave, and loyal, fired by revolutionary and nationalistic zeal to rid the land of their former oppressors and the foreign monarchs now preying on France. Interestingly, in Hugo’s version, they are never led by one of their own but always by a former aristocrat or clergyman or general who has embraced the revolution. As if to say, these simple folk make great soldiers, but don’t ask them to actually think or take initiative. The royalists, in the main, were made up of ignorant peasants still in the thrall of the church, too timid or too stupid to envision an alternative to their miserable lives. These were led by aristocrats, men of great honor and character who committed great acts of cruelty against the revolutionaries, as if these could not be Frenchmen anymore having risen up against the ancien regime.

The very first character Hugo introduces as the book opens is of a piece with the others that follow. She is a peasant woman, three young children huddled miserably around her, the youngest one literally at her breast. She is in hiding in the deep woods, hungry, clothes in rags, running from the life that saw her house destroyed and her husband wrenched from her arms, sent to fight by priest and seigneur for a monarch he had never seen. She is found by the hardy Parisian revolutionaries and immediately taken into their company, her children happily adopted as mascots of the unit. It doesn’t get much better. In each new chapter I was confronted by yet another cardboard character: the kind-hearted hermit who befriends a lost stranger and shares with him his humble hovel and simple evening meal of chestnuts, not realizing until later that the stranger was actually a noble, returned from abroad to lead the counter-revolution and a devastating scorched-earth policy; the defrocked priest, now revolutionary leader, who risks his life to save a young nobleman who had once been his charge in more peaceful days; the bloodthirsty aristocrat whose sense of honor compels him to walk into a burning building to save three peasant children knowing as he does so it will mean certain capture and execution by the encircling revolutionary forces. And there were many others, each one utterly unsatisfying. How, I kept asking myself, could Victor Hugo, the great, perhaps greatest, novelist in French be responsible for characters like these? What does this say about him? What does it say about French literature?

I kept reading. Who doesn’t love melodrama, after all? But, it was more than that. For every cringe-inducing character, for every syrupy statement, there were descriptions of sublime beauty. Interestingly, these tended to be descriptions of landscape or movement or atmosphere, not the utterings of his characters. One of the most harrowingly beautiful descriptions is the life he breathes into a canon broken loose on the pitching deck of a ship. In the destructive, utterly irrational, careening of this canon Hugo paints an astonishing portrayal of evil suddenly come to life. Among the hardened sailors -- men who cheer when they learn they are about to face an enemy in battle -- this wild animal of wood and iron invokes instant terror. They know it can crush a man, that it obeys no known rules of movement, has no mind, yet it is alive, an enraged, malevolent beast bent on killing or maiming every crewmember who comes within its reach. I read that passage and my pulse was racing. I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a more terrifying, more beautifully breathtaking description of an inanimate object.

And there were many others, interspersed between the embarrassing utterances and actions of his cut-out characters. It was for these I kept on reading Quatre-vignt-treize.

To illustrate, I’ll end by quoting a passage contrasting nature’s creation with one of man’s as dawn breaks over the land and the morning light illuminates the scaffold of a guillotine erected for an early morning execution.

***

”Never was the fresh sky of day more charming than that morning. A soft breeze stirred the heather, the haze crawled softly in the branches, the forest of Fougeres, fully infused by the breath that came from the springs, smoked in the dawn like a vast pan full of incense; the blue of the firmament, the whiteness of the clouds, the clear transparence of the waters, the verdure, this harmonious gradation which goes from aqua-marine to emerald; the fraternal groups of trees, the sheets of grass, the deep plains, all had this purity which is the eternal counsel of nature to man. In the midst of all that was spread out the awful human immodesty; in the midst of all that appeared the fortress and the scaffold, war and torment, the two figures of the bloodthirsty age and the bloody minute. In the presence of flowering creation, perfumed, loving, and charming, the splendid sky inundated [the fortress of] La Torgue and the guillotine at dawn, and seemed to say to man: look at what I make and look at what you make.”