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The two panels on the long east wall,
Synagogue and Church, are not glorious. Their color is muted,
their themes not optimistic, and their bleak affect is increased by the large empty grey wall between
them. The more famous of the two (because it created a scandal when it was unveiled) shows Synagogue
as a strong woman, blindfolded and collapsing in the ruins of the Temple.
Church, a youthful matron
enthroned, stares blankly forward, surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists and displaying the
host and the chalice of the Eucharist. She is also a pietà, supporting the dead Christ between her
knees. We recognized the medieval iconography of Synagogue and Church, but we found it strangely
altered here.
That day as Dan read the small pamphlet the Library provided for visitors, the work of Sally M.
Promey, he stopped at her comment that the features of Church were those of Sargents niece and a
favorite model, Rose Marie Ormond.
Dan already knew some of her story because Rose-Marie had been the
wife of Robert André-Michel, historian of medieval Avignon.
Dan�s academic research specialty is in the
archives of the popes of Avignon, and he knew the posthumous volume of Robert�s articles by André Hallays
(1920) which included an homage to Robert, 
some of his wartime correspondence, and a brief account of his
young widow Rose Marie, a volunteer nurse for blinded soldiers and then herself a casualty of the War.
When the grand Tate Gallery exhibition of John Singer Sargent�s paintings came to Boston in the summer of
1999 we spent a long time studying Sargent�s Gassed, in which blinded soldiers are led in lines towards
a field dressing station. When we left the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that day, our heads were full of
the elements of a noble and tragic story.
The murals in the Sargent Hall; Sargent�s sophisticated medieval iconography; the world of
artistic, scientific, academic excellence that was France before 1914; the Great War that crushed
that civilization; the two admirable young lives snapped off short; the evil excellence of the Paris
Gun; Sargent�s uncanny perceptions of all that, on canvas and on paper and finally on the walls of
Sargent Hall: those points of light made a constellation, the outline of a story. The Great War
destroyed the lives of eight million soldiers and another eight million non-combatants, each one
the center of a story of loss and sorrow. We tell the story of two, and because we are historians
and not poets, our story is a history and not an epic poem. The poetry, as Wilfred Owen observed,
is in the pity.
It is a story made up of many stories, set in many scenes. Three families came together in the
decades around the turn of the century, Sargent, Michel, and Ormond, families that embodied the
European civilization of that moment, cosmopolitan artists, connoisseurs and collectors, music lovers,
scholars. It was in Paris in the 1880s that John Singer Sargent met André Michel, the one a
prodigiously rising painter and the other a critic on his way to becoming the premier art historian
of France. André�s son Robert became one of France�s leading research historians of art and culture
while in his twenties. Sargent�s sister Violet married into the rich Swiss family Ormond, and her
daughter Rose-Marie grew up a member of both parents� families and in her teens she was Sargent�s
favorite model in his summertime painting in the Alps. Robert married Rose-Marie in the summer of
1913. Just a year later Science and Engineering were conscripted into a war against Humanity and
Beauty that snuffed out those two emblematic young lives, first Robert, then Rose-Marie. Mourning
marked and changed the survivors. Sargent suddenly engaged with the War and went to France to paint
it. Then he brought his Boston Public Library decorations to an end, not as he had intended when
he began them.
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