Prime the tall canvas, lay her in quick with charcoal. The mirrored walls of the bathroom reflect her, sitting on the moderne gray satin vanity stool, legs apart, black pumps, a short pink circus gown, low-cut, string strap falling from her shoulder. She wears a top hat. A shiver of magenta vibrates a yellow aureole of wall, dark teal scribbles a cloud of gray-blue floor. She is young and slender, beautiful, you would say, but for the—what?—disconsolate fury given off by dark eyes, scraped at by the stick end of a brush, asymmetrical. The left eye is encircled with a shadow of teal and finished with a glint of white; the right is its dimmed double. The shadow of the hat brim colors her forehead lavender. Her cheeks are flushed the fluorescent melon orange that also glimmers on her lower lip. The upper lip is red, bigger, messed at.

The North Shore Breeze and Reminder, which chronicled "society" north of Boston, had not caught up with soignée girls wearing top hats, foreheads turned lavender with intensity.

"The District Offers More of Beauty, Romance and History Than Any Other Spot in the Country," read a headline at the start of a late 1 920s season. An article might authenticate Longfellow’s "The Wreck of the Hesperus" as the true story of a shipwreck at Norman’s Woe right up the road, or, reproducing a period engraving, recall the Salem witch trials. Photographs enshrined gardens of great estates, and captions described as "charming" oceanfront houses that rivaled the sea palaces at Newport in dimension. Each issue tracked the residents who moved from Boston to the Shore in summer; traveled in winter to Boca Grande, Palm Beach, or Aiken, South Carolina; booked staterooms on steamers for Europe.

Margarett, identified as "Mrs. Q. A. Shaw McKean (Margarett Williams Sargent)," was reported "busy with her art work all summer," in a column that followed the art colonies of Rockport and Eastern Point and activities of noted local painters like Cecilia Beaux and Charles Hopkinson. Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, breezing through as the portraitist who lured the retired golfer Bobby Jones to her studio, was the region’s fierce opponent of "Modern Art." Its advocate was Mrs. Morris Pancoast, who exhibited "selected groups of paintings by the modern men" in "an unusual gallery in East Gloucester."

The Breeze never mentioned the stock market crash. Margie, then almost eight, overheard her father tell "some terrible story" of a man he knew throwing himself from a window after learning he’d lost all his money. Harry and Caresse Crosby’s visits to Apple Trees, his parents’ estate in Manchester, were always reported, but the Breeze was mute on his suicide in New York (surely the talk of Boston), six weeks after the crash. Crosby’s death had nothing to do with money, but it marked the end of the 1920s "innocents abroad" and coincided with the turn in financial circumstance that brought the Gerald Murphys, the Archibald MacLeishes, and many other Americans home.

The crash affected Margarett and Shaw less than it did some of their friends. Bebo and Josephine Bradlee let servants go, sold a great house, moved to a smaller one, and Mrs. Bradlee opened a dress shop. The alimony Betty Parsons lived on abruptly ceased, and she was forced to leave Paris. Marjorie Davenport lost her uncle’s legacy and left New York to live the year round in Vermont. For the very, very rich like Shaw’s mother and Harry Crosby’s parents, nothing much changed. Margarett and Shaw did not go to Europe in 1930 or 1931, but they went to Cuba in 1932 and returned to Europe in 1933. Margarett kept her studio on St. Botolph Street, but she and Shaw closed their Boston town house on Commonwealth Avenue in 1931, put it on the market, where it moldered unsold for years, and wintered at Prides. What Margie remembered was Shaw sitting at the edge of Margarett’s bed, whispering, "We’re all right."

Asymmetrical eyes slant like the eyes of a jungle cat. Muscled arms bulge from a short-sleeved shirt. His green sweater vest is patterned yellow and red and black. No one knows who he is. Outsize hands loose on a knee. Where did she find him, this no-account sitting in the corner? Walls a saturated sky blue, broken by gray the color of storm clouds. She crops the top from his cap, the feet from his legs. The cuffs of his gray trousers billow. His chair is deeper yellow, more orange than butter, and it’s coming apart—disrupted, perhaps, by his unsettled, piercing, contemptuous gaze. Its ladder back tilts—bands of gold sprung from proportion—so he seems pushed toward us, as if what caused the bright chair to fall apart were emptying him from its arms.

Painting the growl that came from the young man’s eyes, Margarett pulled from herself what she could put nowhere else, turned that furor into something that could exist independently, seared what she felt and saw into the eye of the viewer. The girl with the lavender forehead and the boy in the yellow chair represent her at the height of her powers. From these paintings she has sheared the clutter of life as Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw McKean. Margarett Sargent burns fiercely, with a burning that both divides her from those around her and enables her to live her double life. Her painting protects her, as magic does a sorceress, but it also endangers her. As her work homed in on the truth of her circumstances, Margarett became more vulnerable.

In the wake of the crash, Shaw closed down the investment banking firm he’d started after the failure of Richardson, Hill and "pretty much retired," John Spanbauer said, to devote himself to "sporting interests"—fishing and hunting trips to Canada, golf at Myopia, bridge in the evening. Prides Hill Kennels was a going concern. Shaw’s fox terriers, with names like Bounce and Miss Barbarian, were advertised monthly in the kennel pages of Vanity Fair; in 1928, a dog called Style won the Best American Bred Bitch at the Eastern Dog Club Show in Boston, where her competitors in other breeds were dogs shown by Shaw’s North Shore friends. Margarett hated fox terriers. They were small and they yapped. They were Shaw’s pride, and just one of their differences.

In October 1928, Paul Gauguin’s great portrait of Meyer de Hahn was delivered to their rooms at the Ritz in New York. Margarett had bought it for $3,500—a huge sum—at Kraushaar. She knew what Shaw’s reaction would be, even relished its inevitability, but his anger made no sense to her, at least not as much sense as the painting. She hung it like an icon at the entrance to the great hall at Prides, so that from anywhere in the room, you could see its audacious diagonal divide darkness from light; the pensive, magical, inward-looking face; its flagrant blaze of reds and yellows.

Increasingly, where Shaw was concerned, Margarett’s lack of ease overcame her natural courtesy. The difference now was that their friends knew it. "They were physically drawn but mismatched," said Ted Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly, one of Shaw’s golfing friends. "Shaw always stood to the side," said Garson Kanin, who met them in the 1930s. "She was so artistic, so creative," said Mabel Storey, with whom Margarett rode to the hunt. "Margarett needed something. . . else."

Guests were quiet when she got a laugh at his expense, when she taunted him at the table, Marie Laurencin’s Femme au Balcon—black rail restraining her, hat abundant with pink roses—gazing down from above the fireplace.

"Fights about what?" I asked Margie.

"Nothing. The sugar."

The children joined in when Margarett suggested a game: Name the most appalling combination of food you can think of. "Oh, for God’s sake, Margarett," Shaw would yelp. She invented an ongoing story she told the children, of Lizzie and James, a married couple who did nothing but argue. Shaw took Mountain Valley spring water along whenever he traveled. Margarett forged a letter from the company awarding him a certificate as its most esteemed customer and roared with laughter as his delight turned to speechlessness when she exposed the hoax. Once, during a party, she hid behind the curtains and kicked at his ankle as he passed. Sometimes he was able to laugh. Often, suppressing rage or hurt, and with natural tenderness and a kind of hopeless faith, he continued to try to please her.

In 1931, Shaw finally launched an enterprise that pleased Margarett very much. His friend George Thomas, dog judge and breeder, had two extraordinary dogs, which had been imported from England by Zeppo, the youngest Marx brother. Afghan hounds were virtually unknown in America and had been bred in Britain only since 1921, when Begum, a pale dog with large brown eyes and perfect carriage, was glimpsed by an English horsewoman galloping the plains of Baluchistan. By acquiring Zeppo Marx’s pair, Shaw became the first American breeder of Afghan hounds. "Can kill leopards," he wrote in the Prides Hill brochure, quoting a Britisher who used Afghans to hunt white leopard in North India. The centerfold photo had Shaw, two leads in each hand; a twin son to either side, a lead in each of their hands; eight dogs attentively flocked to face the camera, pale fur ruffled by the breeze.

The dogs entranced Margarett. After Sunday lunch, as guests stepped from the darkness of the house into the bright afternoon, she saw to it the kennelman opened the runs. "You couldn’t believe it," a visitor said. "There they’d be, thirty Afghans, leaping across that great green lawn."

Some of her friends considered Prides Margarett’s greatest achievement. John Walker, a Harvard student in the late twenties, saw it as an exquisite net in which she ensnared herself. "She would have been much better," he said, "if she had broken the net and flown away." For Margarett, Prides was not a prison but a context, and she worked to realize it as single-mindedly as she worked on a painting. When she talked to Joe Leland about the shape of an addition, with her gardener, George Day, about a plan for a topiary hedge, she spoke with creative excitement. The house continued to evolve; in the summer of 1929, another addition was completed. The big room, the living room since Margarett moved her work to the studio on the hill, had been extended, an entryway added.

"Room" is the wrong word to describe what Margarett had composed to resemble the great hall of a Florentine villa—two stories high, giant skylights facing north. If you came through the iron gate that separated the entry from the living room and turned to look back, you saw, to the right, the portrait of Meyer de Hahn, and to the left The White Blackbird, George Luks’s portrait of Margarett. The way paintings were hung, how sculpture and furniture were placed across the vast expanse, suggested landscape rather than decor.

Odd decorative ends of antique wrought iron, a multitude of Italian and Spanish chairs, a pair of Venetian corner cupboards, challenged Calder’s wooden giraffe and Ossip Zadkine’s brass bird for attention as sculpture. Lengths of tapestry or textile—tawny, terra-cotta, dusky blue—lay across surfaces. A huge abstraction—flags and banners, all gray and black, Jean Lurçat’s Les Bateaux a Voiles, traded from the artist for two Afghans—commanded the south wall. Over the fireplace hung a narrow horizontal Derain still life of a loaf of bread. Small Degas bronze horses gathered on an open desk, and near the fireplace, a polychrome marble head of a woman by Gaston Lachaise gazed from the top of a Shaker cabinet. During the day, shafts of light fell through skylights, breaking the shadow and brightening the creamy walls. At night, the light of candles and hanging lamps rose into the darkness so the high beamed ceiling was barely visible. The glow illuminated a profusion of cut flowers and was reflected when dark floorboard interrupted an expanse of pale Oriental carpet or a maze of American hooked rugs.

It was here, in the big room, that drinks were replenished until dinner was called, here that Margarett wandered, adjusting an imperfect flower arrangement or exchanging one painting for another so that she could see each anew. Looking out a sequence of leaded windows nearly the height of the room, she could see the arborvitae topiary, the espaliered apple trees, the pool, and beyond it the schoolroom, with its own kitchen, where the children had their lessons in the morning.

Senny’s older brother, John Neary, had arrived when the twins were old enough for a teacher. He was a warm, funny, intellectually passionate, hard-drinking Boston Irishman. ‘When he wrote Margarett a note accompanied by some of the children’s writing, he commented that their poems had not sprung "full-fledged, like Minerva, from the brain of Jove." He did not think them too young—Margie was eight when he came, the boys five—to insist that they reflect before choosing a word, and he criticized the results "with a little imaginative baiting now and again." Nothing fine could be finished without reworking, he told them.

The children took to John as they had to Senny, and he was perfect for Margarett’s requirements. She remembered her boredom at Miss Winsor’s and was convinced the local private school, organized by one of her childhood friends, would be deadly. She didn’t care that the children longed to go to school with their friends; she wanted them to be inspired. With the Nearys, she devised a curriculum that was intellectually serious and unusually advanced for children so young. John and Senny took care of literature, geography, and history, and twice a week, "Madame," Mrs. E. Power Biggs, the wife of the organist and renowned interpreter of Bach, came out from Cambridge to teach French and piano. John introduced Latin when the boys were five, and by the time she was nine, Jenny used it to write letters to Margarett.

‘When the girls were tiny, Senny sat at the foot of their beds at night, wrote down what they said about the day, and later typed it up. John would direct all four children to keep their own diaries. They also published a mimeographed newspaper, The Prides Hill Gazette, and occasional books—a collection of poems and stories when Margarett and Shaw went abroad in 1933, and, the next year, for their wedding anniversary, The Onion River Anthology—poems in the voice of everyone in the household, including the divorced Joe Leland: "It seems to me/ That all of life/Is just the problem/of a wife."

On rainy days, Senny and the girls climbed to the attic, pulled out trunks of Margarett’s out-of-date clothes, dressed up, and put on plays in the schoolroom. The Gazette of April 1932 reviewed Jenny, aged nine, as Macbeth ("She had a good costume and her acting was marvelous") and Margie, eleven, as Macduff ("did it very well especially fighting Macbeth"). The art column covered exhibitions by Freddie Hall, an artist friend of Margarett’s ("I liked Mr. Hall’s etchings better than his paintings"), and Margarett Sargent ("She is a great artist. Her work shows ability and strength of character—one or two of her pictures I feel could be more finished—especially the young woman holding a child"). Once, when Margarett and Shaw were in Europe, the children put on their own exhibition and invited friends of their parents who they knew were interested in art. "4 under 8" was the name of the show, and Harry sold two nudes.

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ONE AFTERNOON early in 1930, the last winter the family spent in the house on Commonwealth Avenue, a big man in a mustard-colored suit lugged five large, battered suitcases to the door of number 205. "Paris," read layers of labels and luggage tags. "Calder," read the large painted signature. Margarett greeted her old friend at the door, summoned Walsh, the chauffeur, to help with his bags, and offered Sandy Calder a drink. The children had been told Mr. Calder would bring a circus, but what kind of circus could possibly fit into a suitcase? Margie and Jenny knew he was going to make portraits of them later in the week. They were accustomed to Margarett painting them, shouting "Hold that pose!" as they scampered away, but Mr. Calder was going to use wire, Margarett told them, instead of ink or paint.

Margarett had met Calder in New York, probably in 1922 or 1923, when he was studying with George Luks, painting city scenes with a bright palette inspired by John Sloan and emulating Luks’s fast, blunt brush. He always called her Maggie. When she saw him again in Paris with Betty Parsons, it was 1927, and Josephine Baker was his subject. Margarett was entranced by the witty ease of his wire line. Any household quandary was an occasion for sculpture—the broken spigot he replaced with a wire dog that lifted a leg when the water was turned on; the fish Betty Parsons found, wire head and tail out either end of the toilet paper, after he left one evening.

Calder began the circus by accident. He’d always made toy animals to entertain his family; now he’d sell them to make money. "A lion with a wire body and tawny head of velvet and wool led to a cage on wheels," his sister wrote. His Paris friends loved how he moved the animals with his fingers, making animal noises. Soon he was manipulating a score of creatures and trapeze artists with a web of pulleys or by hand so deftly his pudgy fingers seemed to disappear. "He was lightfingered like a thief," said one enthusiast.

After a year, he had made enough figures to fill two suitcases and had printed bright linoleum-cut announcements. Circus performances at Calder’s studio became the rage of Montparnasse. Isamu Noguchi cranked the gramophone, and Mary Butts brought Jean Cocteau. Sylvia Beach and Janet Flanner came, André Kertesz and Tristan Tzara, Mondrian and Miró, Adge Baker and Betty Parsons. Wherever Margarett saw the circus first—in Paris or at a New York performance in 1929—she was utterly charmed. Who could resist? The figures, seemingly thrown together with spit and paste, had the quirk of life, the poignance of a cripple hurling aside a crutch to break into dance.

The occasion for Calder’s Boston visit was an exhibition of his wire sculpture at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in Cambridge. The story got out that he arrived at South Station with nothing but pliers in his pocket and a bolt of wire slung over a shoulder, but actually, he wrote later, "I took the circus along." His exhibition opened in Cambridge on Tuesday, January 27, and a circus performance at Harvard the following Friday was packed with students. The performance in Margarett’s huge living room would be the only one in Boston, and she invited a crowd.

Margarett did not mind Sandy pushing the furniture into rows or constructing bleachers from boards and pails. He rolled back the rug, threw sawdust on the floor, and set out the peanuts. He unrolled a bit of green carpet and laid out a ring made of red and white rounds of painted wood. Crawling around the floor and talking to himself, he erected two steel poles about three feet high, a miniature French flag fluttering at the top of each. He suspended trapezes and a tightrope between them, looped a red-striped curtain to either side of the ring so his "performers" would have "privacy" offstage, and aimed a homemade spotlight at the center of the ring.

After dinner, Margarett summoned her guests, bespangled in evening clothes, to sit on the "bleachers," the children to sit on the floor. "Ladies and gentlemen," Sandy declaimed, and music cranked from a gramophone heralded a grand procession led by Monsieur Loyal, the spool- faced ringmaster. Applause! Loyal blew his whistle, and wooden horses with manes of string circled the ring, powered by an eggbeater, wire cowboys leaping to their backs. Enter clowns, Sandy’s fingers effecting stumble and pratfall, then he barked for seals and roared for the lion, which leaped as the tamer lashed his whip.

Skinny tightrope walkers, feet weighted with fishing sinkers, traversed the high wire. Dalmatians sprinted between spokes of a buggy’s spinning wheels, and a flock of doves—bits of white paper, weighted, spinning down a wire—fluttered to the creamy shoulders of the bejeweled passenger. Drum roll! Rigoulet, the strong man, strains at his dumbbell. Drum roll! The sword swallower is fed his sword. Are the children still awake? How thirsty are Margarett’s patient guests, who have been eating peanuts for two, maybe three hours?

The trapeze act was the pièce de résistance. Sometimes the girl did not leave hold of her swing, and the act failed. Would she tonight? Would she spin through the air, hook her wire hands through her fellow’s wire feet? A net reassured beneath. Sandy hesitated as if taking aim, then jerked the wire and released her into the air, wire arms outstretched. It was over in a moment, and there she was, hooked to her consort, swinging like a pendulum!

Calder and his circus had come to Boston through the efforts of three imaginative Harvard undergraduates. One fall afternoon in 1928, Lincoln Kirstein, John Walker, and Edward W. W. Warburg had marched into the university’s new Fogg Art Museum and confronted Paul Sachs, its assistant director: "Why is there no modern art at Harvard?" Sachs—a bond trader turned connoisseur, who was heir to the Goldman, Sachs investment house—had collected his first Picasso drawing in 1920. He considered Modernism "the work of actuality," but his opponents on the Harvard faculty had balked at endorsing works that had not stood the test of time, and so the Fogg included nothing newer than the Impressionists. "Why don’t you do it?" Sachs suggested to the three students. The result, six months later, was the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art.

Through Sachs, Margarett soon met the three "executives" of the new organization. For each, as for her, art was a redemptive passion. After an "excessively affluent" childhood in Pittsburgh, John Walker contracted polio at thirteen and was taken for treatment to New York, where he discovered art while spinning through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum in his wheelchair. By the time he got to Harvard, he wanted to be a curator, and one day, drawn by reports of Picasso reproductions on his walls, his traveled classmate Lincoln Kirstein turned up, "dark, saturnine, shaved-headed," to discuss modern art.

Earlier in his Harvard career, Kirstein launched Hound and Horn, which shared writers, artists, and point of view with journals published by Americans in Paris. In England, with his sister, Mina, he’d gone to Bloomsbury parties and met Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, and in Paris he’d seen Diaghilev’s company dance on sets by Picasso and Derain. On his return, Boston seemed, as it often did to Margarett, "a combination of a prison and Friday afternoons at the symphony." He enrolled at the Museum School but soon ran up against "old Philip Hale who loathed Modern Art and any young twit like me who tried to draw from casts in the manner of Wyndham Lewis or Eric Gill."

Eddie Warburg had also traveled in Europe, but until the summer of 1929, when he bought Picasso’s Blue Boy in Berlin, his taste for simplicity and directness had drawn him to the Renaissance rather than to modern art. The gouache portrait of a humble young man was a far cry from the brocaded, luxurious taste of his collector father, Felix Warburg, whom he immediately recruited for the board of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. "Eddie was our clown," said John Walker. "He raised us a lot of lovely money."

Money was easy to come by in early 1929, and Paul Sachs helped connect his protégés with patrons and lenders—dealers and collectors of modern art in New York, Boston, and Chicago. For gallery space, the three leased two rooms above the Harvard Cooperative Society in Harvard Square. They painted the ceilings silver and the walls white, furnished one room with steel café chairs and tables, the other with a large rectangular table Lincoln and John constructed by balancing a highly polished metal top on marble legs from an old soda fountain.

‘When they asked to close their first year with a full retrospective of Margarett’s work, she enthusiastically accepted. The Society’s first exhibition, "Americans," included the abstract work of Mann, O’Keeffe, and Demuth, set off by the figurative and landscape painting of George Bellows, John Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, and others. The second show, an exhibition of European artists, brought "the work of thirty-three painters and sculptors, regardless of nationality, who have been working in Paris and who have made the influence of ‘Modern’ art what it is today."

Not only did Kirstein, Walker, and Warburg share Margarett’s frame of reference as far as painting and sculpture were concerned; they also understood her impulse, demonstrated at Prides, to mix crafts like American quilts and hooked rugs with modern paintings. For the first time in an American art context, the Society showed contemporary design, folk art, and works in media not then considered art. Their first season also acknowledged the aesthetic attributes of certain technological advances; a photography exhibition included not only works by Americans and Europeans but aerial photographs, pictures from astronomical and surgical laboratories, and photos from the daily press. Their most sensational show, revived the second year by popular demand, was of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, a" ‘machine-for-living-in’ that could be constructed by mass productive methods, cost approximately $500 a ton."

As the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art was getting under way, some of its lenders and patrons, including Paul Sachs, Frederic Bartlett, and Margarett, became involved in a project in New York. When the Museum of Modern Art opened, on November 8, 1929, Bartlett and Sachs were on its board of directors, and Margarett’s Gauguin hung on the walls of its temporary galleries, four rented rooms at 730 Fifth Avenue. Alfred Barr, recommended by Sachs as the new museum’s director, had chosen for its inaugural exhibition the four painters he considered preeminent in "the genealogy of contemporary painting"—Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh. When he characterized their work in the catalogue essay, he might have been articulating the aesthetic of Margarett’s painting. "For soft contours they substitute rigid angularities; instead of hazy atmosphere they offer color surfaces, lacquer-hard."

It was at this new museum in New York that the eclectic experiments of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art would eventually become exhibition policy, but by the time Margarett’s exhibition closed the Society’s first season, its reputation had already reached beyond Boston, and the debates that had roiled Back Bay art clubs for decades had become obsolete. The conservative Boston painter Ives Gammell could sneer in his diary that Lincoln Kirstein’s discussion of Margarett’s paintings at a dinner at Prides was "too broad a caricature for slapstick farce," but something new had taken root in Boston, and Margarett was close to its center.

Two women—boisterous, naughty, and big. They wear swimming costumes cut high on the leg. It’s a close-up that crops heads at mid-brow, legs at mid-thigh. One woman, her back to us, wears bright yellow; black stripes encircle buttock, hipbone. The other, facing us, wears aqua, four thin black stripes low on her hips. Two women— color against blue sky, flappers rowdy at the beach to jazz in the air. They have confidence and size. Yellow looks away, black cap, face in profile, eye a line, orange cheek, lips open. She has hips. She moves. Aqua has a brown bob, red mouth, full-face, no eyes, as she leaps to catch a yellow ball with big hands. Margarett has fixed them, hip-to-hip.

"First reaction: Immense thrill," read the dispatch from Cambridge to the Chicago Evening Post. "It’s her colors. Her loving feeling for colors. Her sensitiveness for grading colors, molding colors, contrasting colors." Bathers illustrated the review by a writer named H. von Erffa. "I like arms," Margarett told her. "I like arms and their movements, and striped blouses." At the galleries of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, twenty-eight of Margarett’s paintings hung on bright white walls, their colors reflected in the silver ceiling. This was her first one-person show in the Boston area and included fifteen watercolors, two pastels, a wall of drawings, and the bronze heads of George Luks and Chaffard.

At the private view on Thursday, February 7, 1930, collector friends like Frederic Bartlett and John Spaulding circulated among Harvard and Radcliffe students and old friends like Emily and Henry Cabot Lodge and Vivian Cochrane. Maria de Acosta Sargent greeted the portrait of herself as Tailleur Classique, and Paul Sachs bought a drawing. Marian Haughton bought a watercolor of her grandchildren, rascals around a table. Freddie Hall gazed back at himself on canvas— about to laugh, intelligent eyes through round spectacles, cheeks flushed, a gardenia in his buttonhole. His wife, Evelyn, wore purple and carried an alarm clock in her purse, set to go off when she wished to depart. The children crowded near two paintings of Jimmy Durante—"If you can find enough oils, paint that schnozz of mine again," he’d written Margarett on a photograph he sent after the first time he sat for her.

"She is an out-and-out modernist in style as well as spirit, and her special field seems to be the interpretation of the post-war life that is our modern world," wrote the Transcript reviewer. Margarett was now considered a major Boston artist, and the writer met her on her own terms:

Her style is slap-dash, but when she confines herself to a few bold colors, and a few bold slashes of the brush, she has an uncanny knack of saying everything with the most powerful economy. Her drawings reveal this gift in its greatest purity. Here a line will betray a whole trend of emotion or indeed an entire personality with the lift of an eyelid, the slouch of an arm, the sag of a mouth....

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"SHE WAS A GOOD PAINTER at a time when that kind of expressionism was not very much in vogue. I felt then and feel now that she’s not been appreciated enough," said John Walker at eighty-two, his careers as assistant to Bernard Berenson and director of the National Gallery in Washington years behind him. His dark hair had gone bright white, and the effects of polio had returned in old age.

In 1930, he was a young man whose life had been saved by art, and Margarett was an artist, a glamorous woman, fifteen years older than he. "She had a big mouth, I remember that. And a deep voice." He was physically drawn to her. She appreciated him, he said, flattered him, but always seemed to withhold something. He was fascinated. "She never seemed to do things like other human beings," he said.

Sometime during the spring of 1930, Margarett began to imagine John Walker’s face in paint—vivid dark eyes, wide brow, dark hair. He met her at the studio on St. Botoiph Street. It was not the first time he’d been there; he’d come before, to choose paintings for her Harvard exhibition. "She had an idea of what I looked like—which may not have been what I actually looked like, but very few portraits are of the sitter: they are rather an idea of the sitter."

Margarett painted him as a romantic young man, swooped at the canvas with her brushes, painted a ground that was almost mauve. "Her rapidity was what struck me," Walker said. She sculpted his suit with soft browns, modeled the salmon-pink tie so it seemed to stand up from his chest. He sat just once for that portrait, which she framed in white and hung over the fireplace in her Art Deco bathroom.

Margarett was painting ferociously that spring and contributing to Mrs. Pancoast’s series of group shows, "Moderns at Pancoast." She went to Palm Beach in April, and when she returned, John saw her whenever he could. Often they went to galleries, to museums. The way she thought about painting converted him to an instinctive way of looking that cracked open the formalism he’d learned at Harvard. "She was a great teacher," he said.

"What did you learn?" I asked him.

"I learned how to look at pictures."

"How?"

"You couldn’t show it with words. She’d grab my arm and point. That was it."

"Did you have a crush on Margarett?"

"When you met her—"

"Of course I did," the old man snapped, as if it should have been self-evident. "She was the love of my youthful life."

The culmination of their relationship came one evening in June 1930, just after his graduation from Harvard and before he left for Italy to work for Berenson. He was invited to Prides for the night. Shaw was away, but the children were in the house. He and Margarett had dinner alone, or perhaps there were guests who then left. She’d given him the tower room, with its silvery mirrored ceiling. "I feel quite sure I could find the room if I were in the house again," the old man said. "What I remember is a bed and a chair."

Margarett came to him, unexpectedly, in the night, wearing a filmy dressing gown and carrying a candle. He was a virgin.

"She seduced me. No, that’s not right. I wanted to be seduced."

John Walker was not the only young man whom Margarett visited in her negligee. Nor were all the men she seduced as young as he was, nor is there any possibility of coming up with a complete list. The translator Louis Galantiere, wandering up and down the road in Dorset, calling her name; Artur Schnabel, a frequent guest at Marian Haughton’s, in Boston to perform a concerto under Koussevitzky or an evening of violently swift, heartbreakingly delicate Beethoven sonatas. "We saw Mr. Schnabel," Jenny wrote Margarett in Europe in 1933, "and he told us how wonderful he thinks you are." And of course there was Roland Balay, in New York or in Paris, for years. And, like a descant, the women.

Attention still came to Margarett naturally, and to respond, she believed, transgressed nothing. She fixed you with her eyes, and if you looked back at her, the room disappeared. Then she began to talk, to smile at you, and you were riveted, fascinated, caught. She did not miss the erotic subtext to a smile or gesture.

She must have been lonely, living as she did in the midst of a crowd of people, intimate with none of them—not even with the children once they passed the age of coming unbidden to her arms, except in the quiet moments when she drew or painted them, or when she got them laughing in a game. Certainly not with Shaw, with whom, now, tenderness was rare—with whom she now had something that could be called an arrangement.

Shaw looked away when it came to Margarett’s romances, or perhaps he genuinely didn’t know about them—no one is sure. What bothered him was her drinking, a vague problem at the beginning of their marriage, which now alarmed him. She was late coming in to dinner, or she fell asleep at the table. She was present in a conversation, then she was not. He wished she would not drink, and after a while he began to ask her not to, to exact promises she’d take it easy, have just one drink or none at all—for the sake of the children, for the sake of health. He could handle her selfishness when it came to her art, even when it came to the Harvard boys she kept inviting to the house, whom he found boring and somehow threatening. But he could not bear the humiliation, becoming more frequent, of her behavior after a few drinks.

The roar of the twenties had reached Boston halfway through the decade and emancipated an entire generation to the cocktail, to booze procured through bootleggers. Dressed to the nines, the young of old Boston drank at dinner parties, at speakeasies in New York or Chicago, and in Paris at Scheherazade, the Blue Room, Bricktop’s. Margarett drank with Betty Parsons, who matched her drink for drink but she said she never saw her drunk. She drank with Roland Balay and she drank with Isabel Pell. She drank with Maria Sargent and with Vivian Cochrane, who drank in New York as a young actress, in Boston as a young widow, and who later, as Mrs. Dudley Pickman of 303 Commonwealth Avenue, made sure her house had a bar on every floor and that her butler greeted all who knocked with the offer of a martini.

Margarett and Shaw drank through the clamor of their parties and in the gleaming quiet of the dining room at Prides. They had cocktails with Harry and Bessie McKean, with Ham and Ruthie Robb, who lived up the road. "They all drank," said Ruthie Robb’s daughter, "and it turned on many of them." Alcohol turned on Shaw’s brother Harry and Eddie Morgan. And it turned on Margarett. By the time the stock market crashed, she’d been drinking almost ten years, and it had started to show around her eyes. Her body began to betray her. A woman’s liver, which succumbs to alcohol sooner than a man’s, separated her drinking from Shaw’s. The genes of the poet grandfather who sang sluiced with claret presented themselves, partnered by the depression that felled Hunnewell women at the prime of life. Increasingly, Senny greeted the children at breakfast with "Your mother has a headache. Please be quiet." Margie and Jenny had a word for it before they knew what it was: "Mama is languid today."

Apparently, Margarett had forgotten how extreme Eddie Morgan’s drinking had seemed to her as a girl. She drank as much as she wanted. Or, if it pleased her, she didn’t drink for weeks or months at a time. Her appetites were hers, and her capacity to satisfy them put her at a kind of liberty. She held to that liberty despite promising Shaw she’d never drink again, in spite of her love for her children. Her beauty and her talk still attracted anyone she wished for company, and she never drank when she painted. If she could not drink when she and Shaw were out together, she would drink by herself, hiding bottles in the bathroom, among the spangled shoes in all those mirrored closets. If she could not drink at Prides, she would drink elsewhere.

Margarett liked the release alcohol gave her, but she had no idea what it might take away. She was willing to sacrifice a few evenings to early drowsiness, a few daylights to the dark room of the headache, in order to have that particular vivid intensity. It did not threaten her in the slightest to stop or to promise to stop; she could stop, she kept proving, whenever she pleased. What she did not understand was that in abdicating to Shaw the responsibility for managing her drinking lay the threat of losing everything she had, that in months or years of lies and slips from his straight and narrow, she might lose her freedom, her upper hand, her magic.

"‘Beyond Good & Evil’ is the picture of me," Margarett wrote to Frederic Bartlett. She had painted the self-portrait during the summer of 1930, had been photographed in her smock painting it, by Bachrach. She placed the image of herself almost diagonally across a ground of pale, smoky blue—slender, black hair pulled to her neck in a chignon, her skin translucently pale, eyes wide and light, light blue. Her hands, one on the other, press into her lap; her arms are tensely extended. Animals crowd the canvas, as if eager to push her from it—a leopard, a goat, a dove. The dress, string straps, is patterned magenta, poison green, and aqua. This is a self-portrait not as an artist but as a woman. The woman restrains herself, keeps her breath in. She is frightened, without defense.

In September 1930, Margarett mailed an exhibition checklist to Frederic, who had arranged an exhibition for her in November at the Arts Club of Chicago. Incorporated in 1916 by a group of collectors, the Arts Club soon became an innovative forum for modern art, years before New York, let alone Boston, had any such venue. By 1921, it had shown Mann, Demuth, and Lachaise, and, among the French, Seurat, Delaunay, and Cezanne. In 1924, it presented the first one man show of Rodin’s sculpture west of New York and the first American exhibition of Picasso’s drawings, with a catalogue essay by Clive Bell. In the late 1920s, Marcel Duchamp installed a major Brancusi exhibition and Léger showed his film Ballet Mecanique. In its small theater, Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev performed their music, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost read their poems, Marsden Hartley lectured on art, and Ford Madox Ford spoke on literature.

At nine o’clock in the morning on the day of the opening, Margarett met Alice Roullier, the club’s secretary, and Isabel Jarvis, her assistant, at the Arts Club, then housed in the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue. Miss Jarvis was skeptical about the woman whom Mr. Bartlett had praised as "married, but a very good artist," but fifty years later, she remembered "an unusually beautiful woman, a very good painter, very informed about modern art." In the largest of the club’s three galleries, they supervised the hanging of forty paintings, twenty-five watercolors, and fourteen drawings. Like the show at Harvard, this was both exhibition and retrospective. Two of the paintings were loans from Frederic Barlett, who, in his home, hung them on a wall with a Matisse and a Utrillo. "They have all the beauty of color of Marie Laurencin," a society columnist wrote, "and an underlying primitive power of their own."

Unlike Boston, where a gathering to celebrate modern art had the feel of a conspiracy, Chicago had boisterous pride in its innovation. The opening was celebrated with a tea, and fashionable Chicago crowded the gallery. Margarett arrived on Bartlett’s arm, to be greeted by Mrs. John Alden Carpenter, the club’s president, and by Mrs. Potter Palmer, daughter-in-law of the great collector who had commissioned Mary Cassatt’s mural for the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

In its weekly magazine of the art world, the Chicago Post headlined Margarett’s exhibition. Bartlett, who personally handled the publicity, made sure photographs were provided, and Blue Girl took all of page one under a banner headline. The city’s most prominent critic, C. J. Bulliet, was a conservative who usually panned the Arts Club’s shows; he hated abstraction and would declare in 1936 that Modernism "began with Cezanne and ended with Picasso." In Margarett’s work, however, he saw a kinship to his beloved Post-Impressionists; she was, he wrote, the leading Modernist in a city "where ‘Modernism’ has even a tougher row to hoe than it has here." and a rebel "regarded over in her hometown as a lost soul because of her art bolshevism." The strength of the exhibition was reflected in the clarity of Bulliet’s review. As influences he cited "Matisse, principally, and Picasso and Chagall and Modigliani" but concluded that "despite the influences, there is a unity of effect running thru her work—something distinctively ‘Margarett Sargent.’ "He praised her gift for capturing character, in particular her ability, unusual in a woman, to paint men. "Given another three years like the last three and Margarett Sargent will have sublimated all her ‘influences’ and stand revealed in all the power of her own high talent."

‘When the exhibition closed, Margarett, long back in Boston, cabled Frederic to have her paintings packed. She had set up her easel backstage at the Metropolitan Theatre, she told him, and, with the company standing about, had painted Harpo Marx, first with a flaming corkscrew crown of orange hair, then with a parrot on his shoulder and his scribbled caption, "a portrait no artist would paint." Frederic directed the Arts Club to ship half the paintings to a New York warehouse to await Margarett’s third exhibition of the year, which was to open on January 3. Harpo with his parrot illustrated the Kraushaar announcement. "Burlesque Picture a Hit," read the headline of a New York World report that the painting had "attracted many to the gallery."

Margarett showed fourteen paintings at Kraushaar, all of which, except for Harpo, she had shown in Chicago, and a group of drawings and watercolors, of which she sold six. The exhibition was her first in New York in two years, and the critics took note of her development. The Post reported a burst from prior reticence "into a full-fledged palette." Like Bulliet in Chicago, the New York reviewers were interested in what lay ahead. "If she is ever able to forget, or conceal, her somewhat noticeable admiration for Matisse she will prove an artist that has to be taken very much into account," Henry McBride wrote in the Sun. "A little more concentration and what used to be known as ‘slogging’ would do wonders for this gifted and imaginative painter," Margaret Breunig wrote in the Times.

There was no need to tell Margarett to keep working. She brought her sketchbook to the breakfast table and took watercolors out to dinner. Her most significant attention to her children was the command "Hold that pose," and when they came up the hill to visit her studio, she might ask them to sit for an hour and a half, "hardly entertaining if you’re seven and prefer baseball," said young Shaw. Jenny escaped to the barn and her pony, so Margarett got her, dark-eyed, in the bathtub, a pink towel turbaning her black hair. Of the children, Margie was her favorite subject: prim and solitary in a chair; in the library with Senny reading to her; face resting in her arms; a solemn portrait, her blond hair, a slate-blue ground.

Often Margarett hired a model. Betty Fittamore arrived on the train from Boston, and Margarett painted her over and over again— chestnut hair, deep-set black eyes, and smooth, lean face. Betty was the Blue Girl, with a hawk-wing swoop of black hat, forbidding gaze, hands grasping the white chair. She was the Amazon, with a crimson headdress, eyeing the miniature man she held between thumb and forefinger. And a woman stripped naked to the waist, her luxuriant, flowered yellow hat vibrating against a deep black ground.

Margarett sketched at Elizabeth Arden, on the train to New York. She carried her supplies in a neat leather case. She did watercolors "at restaurants and night clubs," reported the Breeze, "aboard ship, from the tailboard of a truck, from a garden chair." She took canvas and paints to Florida, ventured inland from Palm Beach cabana and beach club and returned with a painting of a young black girl, fierce and meditative, sitting at a table. She visited Frederic Bartlett at his beachfront estate in Fort Lauderdale and painted his caretaker and friend, Fred Lockheart, an older black man, with a chicken under his arm. She did not, as Town Topics reported, spend all her time chatting at Sea Spray beach.

Her Boston School forebears had painted in the New Hampshire landscape or the quiet of a Back Bay living room. Margarett painted in the dining room at the Ritz. She took her paint box to a party given on Beacon Street, billed as "an imaginary voyage to interesting places in the Mediterranean." While the travelers projected "moving pictures," Margarett took pencil and wash to the back of the invitation: a man, black-tuxedoed back to us, a woman to each side. He raises a hand to his face as if to express—what? It’s not evident from the diffident profiles of his female companions.

Later, in the studio, Margarett made a painting from the sketch:
the three figures on a hot-yellow ground; the gentleman’s black back and arm take the breadth of the canvas. The lift of his hand to his face expresses ennui, which, if one removes the humor, the trick of the turned back, cuts deep. Margarett was inside social Boston, but as an artist she stood outside, looking at its back.

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"I NEVER COULD UNDERSTAND," Gertrude Hunnewell often said, "how two such dear people as Uncle Frank and Aunt Jenny could have produced such unusual children." Gertrude had never questioned her own destiny, but Margarett and her sister and brothers all suffered from the requirements of the life they were raised to lead. Jane Cheever, well married and the mother of four children, was by 1930 an annual guest in a sanitarium, overcome like her grandmother by panic that alternated with debilitating depression. After a few years, Dan’s marriage to Louise became the torment Jenny had predicted: "When Dan became an instructor at Harvard, Louise went to bed and never got up," Margie said. He cowered at demands she delivered from her chaise, getting his attention with the rap of her cane on the floor. He supervised the care of their children as best he could, wrote his poems, his biographies of saints, and prayed fervently at daily mass.

Harry, still unmarried, lived with Jenny and her hired companion, Eva Niblock, in Wellesley, Boston, and Wareham. He had left banking to become "an explorer," first in the fjords of Norway. In 1929, he financed a film about the lives of seal hunters, and in March 1931, went along to Newfoundland for the final shoot. On March 16, a front-page article in the Transcript reported that an explosion on the seal steamer Viking had killed twenty-five. One hundred men walked nine miles across the ice to safety, but there were no Americans among the known survivors. Though no body had been found, the Transcript ran Harry’s obituary on March 17. When news came that he was alive, Margarett and Shaw sailed to Newfoundland.

Harry was alive, barely. He had spent two and a half days on an ice floe, his eyes burned temporarily blind, first by the explosion and then by the glare of sun on ice. He nursed a fire of ship debris, feeding cans of beans to two wounded crewmen until, three days later, a rescue ship crashed through the ice and carried him to shore with one surviving companion. In a hospital bed, he read he’d drowned.

When Margarett and Shaw brought her brother back to Boston, Margarett had a portfolio—sketches of seal men and caricatures of the Boston reporters who scavenged the Viking explosion, a watercolor of a cab stand in Quebec, a gouache of bellboys at the Hotel Frontenac. There was nothing, it seemed, she did not turn into art, and when that was true, the balance she managed between her life as an artist and her life as a woman was no feat at all. Florence Cowles celebrated Margarett on a full page of the Boston Post, under the headline "Applies Her Artistic Skill to Make Her Home Beautiful; Mrs. McKean’s Hobbies Modern Paintings and Old Doors."

The article was nationally syndicated, and at least two versions were published, one illustrated with a portrait of the artist, brushes in hand; the other, by a collage—the children, a view of the big room, Margarett at the pool with her sculpture of Pilgrim. Cowles was promoting Margarett’s first North Shore exhibition. Frederick Poole, an antique dealer, had suggested she hang her contemporary work throughout the twenty-six rooms of his shops, two seventeenth-century houses at Fresh Water Cove. By the summer, Poole, a friend and often Margarett’s portrait subject, had died. It was he who had reproduced the Venetian corner cupboard, so that two cabinets might frame the end of the big room, he who repaired the sticks of American furniture she bought at auction in Vermont. His daughter insisted the show proceed.

It was Margarett’s fourth exhibition in nineteen months—nearly two hundred paintings, watercolors, and drawings. "Into such a setting of antiquities come hundreds of people in fashionable cars each day to see her pictures," wrote the veteran Globe critic A. J. Philpott, who went on condescendingly to praise her work as "out of the ordinary ...distinctive and outré and all that sort of thing." The Transcript listed spectators, leading off with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, just retired from the Supreme Court. "Margarett Sargent Exhibition Popular, Pictures Attract Hundreds at Gloucester," read the Globe headline.

Margarett had had five major exhibitions in New York, one in Chicago, and one in Cambridge. Now she had shown a large selection of her work to a popular audience in an unconventional venue just miles from her home. She had painted for only three years, but she was recognized as a painter, collected, exhibited, and reviewed by those who were bringing an aesthetic she shared into the mainstream of American art. At thirty-eight and at the height of her productivity, she was well positioned to take advantage of her opportunities, but she seemed to harbor some ambivalence. Tucked into the Transcript coverage was the unexplained news that she had been "indisposed" since her return from Vermont for the exhibition, unable to supervise hanging the pictures or to attend the opening.