Empty Mansions

women: A woman with a dragonfly pin in her hair smokes a cigarette, another holds a fan looking at a castle, and a third delicately cuts flowers. Huguette’s geishas are women trained to keep their emotions hidden.
    One of her smallest paintings, only six by nine inches, shows Huguette’s dedication to detail. A young geisha stands barefoot, her eyes averted pensively. She is wearing a floor-length robe with a large golden bow. Her black hair is decorated with a dozen combs, ornaments, and tassels of gold. The subtle lighting brings to life the exquisite textures of silk and gold.
    Huguette’s shelves were stacked with illustrated and scholarly books on Japan, in several languages:
The Changing Social Position of Women in Japan, Palaces of Kyoto, Japanese Court Poetry, Japanese Art of the Heian Period
. These books resided alongside her wider collection of Homer, Virgil, Plato, Descartes, Lao-tzu, and Oscar Wilde.
    The paintings in her home studio in Apartment 12W show how she immersed herself in Japanese culture, an archaeologist studying the markers of Japanese nobility: traditional calligraphy, the Osuberakashihairstyle tied in the back with a ribbon, elaborate hair accessories, richly brocaded silk fabrics in red and gold. She didn’t only study these objects in books; she collected them, filling shelves with delicate wooden boxes of kimonos and hairpieces. These details are lifelike in her paintings.
    Huguette was also influenced by the work of illustrators and artists of her native France, from Parisian magazine illustrations to the Monets and Renoirs hanging on her walls. While the Impressionists applied a Japanese aesthetic to European subjects, Huguette’s artwork shows an Impressionist style applied to Japanese subjects.
    Though her art shows years of training, it doesn’t quite match the technical skill of her instructor, Tadé Styka. While some Impressionist art conveys a hurried approach, trying to render the light as they experienced it, Huguette’s landscapes of Japanese castles and bridges look as if they were painted entirely in her apartment from detailed photos, without exposure to real life. And when she painted people, it’s possible that Huguette, as her social contacts declined, used herself as the body model for her paintings of Japanese women.
    Nevertheless, her works show a dedication to excellence and an ability to adapt to newer styles. Her painting of an ornate bowl of pink and yellow tulips, with two still-fresh petals lying on the table, is a bit disjointed, shown from more than one perspective at once, just as Cézanne did in the still life of an earthenware jug hanging on Huguette’s wall. Huguette finished many paintings of this scene, always with two petals fallen.
    She signed many of these paintings in an Asian style with an artist’s chop, or personal stamp. She arranged the letters of her first and last names in two vertical columns inside a rectangle.
    For many of the women she painted, Huguette also chose a name, which she painted in Japanese characters into the corner of the canvas. On into the 1940s and 1950s, she corresponded with Japanese advisers, discussing appropriate names for a modern princess—a “young lady of a good family.” She wanted to know the proper names indicating gentleness, goodness, and grace. Among her favorites were Ume-ko Hime (Princess Plum Blossom) and Fuji-ko Hime (Princess Wisteria). After she learned that the American government in postwar Japan had abolished the peerage and its titles, she went with names such as Yoshi-ko (meaning “graceful and noble”).
    Another of her life-size paintings shows a sober maiko, or apprentice geisha, in a brilliant red, pink, and white kimono, holding a long, silver tobacco pipe that is smoldering. In a round seal next to Huguette’s signature is the name she associated with this woman, Ku-Raku, meaning “sorrow and joy.”
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    Perhaps as a personal favor to its twenty-two-year-old benefactor, the Corcoran museum in Washington showedseven of her paintings in 1929. “From the day of her birth,” said the catalog for the two-week showing, “Huguette Clark has lived in an artistic atmosphere. She has been surrounded with the many treasures of various Schools and Periods, contained in the notable art collection bequeathed to this Gallery by her father, the late William Andrews Clark. She has had the benefit of extensive European travel; and, added to these advantages, she is endowed