At the end of the 19th century, the fiery charms of a dancer named Carmencita thrilled both European and American audiences. Claimed to be the child of a French army officer and Andalusian-Moorish mother, Carmencita’s 1868 place of birth is alternately and mysteriously noted as being near Pittsburgh, in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Poor, unknown, and evidently back in Spain, she reportedly danced like a gypsy for food or a place to sleep, traveling from town to town and learning her art as she went along.
By 1890, Carmencita had enchanted Paris and New York and ascended to the stages of various major entertainment venues. As one correspondent gushed, Carmencita possessed a “nature rich in Oriental color, a temperament ardent and generous as Andalusian sun,” and with “[m]otions swift as leaping flame…Carmencita dances from toes to finger tips, from crown to heel.”
Carmencita and William Merritt Chase
Not surprisingly, the captivating Carmencita began to intrigue many of the era’s top American artists, including William Merritt Chase, James Carroll Beckwith and John Singer Sargent. Sargent and Beckwith saw La Carmencita together in New York, and Carmencita danced and posed for her portrait at Beckwith’s 57th Street Sherwood Building studio.
Sargent also finagled a live Carmencita performance at William Merritt Chase’s 10th Street studio, and Chase accordingly produced an 1890 portrait of the dancer now located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Energetically petite, she wears a black and coppery-gold costume, her arms raised and hands cradling castanets while roses lie before her as if thrown by admirers in an audience. Carmencita was said to be quite ingenuously pleased with this portrait and enjoyed stopping by to admire her own likeness while Chase was showing the work at his studio.
John Singer Sargent and La Carmencita
John Singer Sargent had a passion and particular flair for things Spanish, as evidenced by his stunning 1882 El Jaleo. El Jaleo is a vastly impressive, approximately 8-foot-high by 12-foot-wide Spanish gypsy dance scene, a painting which so enamored art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner that she later had the Spanish Cloister section of her new museum built to showcase the work. Sargent had met Carmencita in Paris before her American debut and when he persuaded her to dance at Chase’s studio in 1890, he included Mrs. Gardner among the select and fascinated audience.
Naturally, portraits of La Carmencita by Sargent soon followed, with Sargent smoothing down Carmencita’s then-fashionably “frizzled” hair to suit his own preference and minimizing her heavy make-up. The results were Carmencita in a more formal pose, as in Chase’s work, and another fluidly vivid study of the dancer in motion. A simple yet striking sketch of Carmencita also done by Sargent demonstrates his ability to see beyond her public persona and reveal a deeper beauty.
Legacy
Aside from being immortalized on canvas, Carmencita and her dancing were captured on film in 1894—in fact, Carmencita is said to be the first woman to ever be filmed, this auspicious event taking place at Thomas Edison’s studios using the Edison-developed motion picture camera.
Carmencita attended her share of society gatherings, was featured in advertisements and numerous newspaper items, and she attracted the added notoriety of an occasional lawsuit or accusation of adultery. Despite such fame, however, the dancer apparently died circa 1910 without much attention being paid. She was rumored to have taken her act to South America and lost her svelte figure along the way, with the usual celebrity troubles of strong temperament, tendencies toward excess and changing public tastes befalling her as well.
The final resting place of Carmencita may indeed be an unknown grave in the “Spanish provincial town” she had exiled herself to. The real story of her early and later years might never be known, but her portraits still hang on museum walls and her image flickers on dimly crackling film, all recalling the forgotten yet vital fact that once upon a time, La Carmencita lit up the world.
Sources
- Carmencita and Her Painters – Lida Rose McCabe (The New York Times, July 8, 1923)
- Carmencita/Edison & Dickson – American Memory, Library of Congress
