Madame X, the Scandal of the Art World
Today in 2024, it’s hard to see why John Singer Sargent’s 1883–84 painting Madame X scandalized Paris. If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American wing, where it now hangs in an ornate gold frame, you’ll see a simple composition of a porcelain-skinned woman with an updo standing against a brushy brown background. She wears a plunging black gown with gold straps, one hand clutching a fan while the other rests on a round table. Her face is in profile, the line of her long nose leading the viewer’s eye slantwise out of the picture.
Today, the painting looks elegant, a woman with immaculate skin and patrician features, clothed in what appears to be an expensive, well constructed dress. That perception belies the sordid history of its model, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, and the brouhaha surrounding the portrait’s debut at the 1884 Paris Salon. The public’s reaction was so vehement that Sargent moved out of the country, and his high-society model’s reputation was forever tarnished.
This response was partially due to what now seems like an innocuous detail: Sargent’s picture initially featured an intentionally suggestive off-the-shoulder dress strap, on her right side only, which made the overall effect more daring and sensual.
After creating numerous preparatory sketches and several painting attempts, Sargent managed to finish his picture for the 1884 Salon, which he originally titled
Portrait of Mme*** After the Salon, fame briefly morphed into infamy, and Madame Gautreau was subject to derision and jeers in the drawing rooms of Paris. Viewers understood the subject’s bare shoulder, with its dangling strap and exposed cleavage, as a nod towards Gautreau’s loose sexual morals.
This wasn’t a new claim: Gautreau already had a reputation as an adulteress, with rumored liaisons with French statesman Léon Gambetta and diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. Not all contemporary writers fault her for this alleged promiscuity: Her wealthy husband, as Miranda Seymour wrote in the
New York Times, was “small, singularly ugly and twice the age of Amélie Avegno.” Yet such a public, visual display of her sexuality brought Gautreau additional disrepute.
Parisian tastemakers recoiled not just from the subject’s revealing clothing, but from her ghostly skin-tone as well. It was alleged that Gautreau may have been ingesting arsenic to lighten her skin, although today it is believed she more likely used rice powder. In a review of the 1884 Salon, the
Times reported "Sargent is below his usual standard this year… The pose of the figure is absurd, and the bluish coloring atrocious. The features are so exaggerated that the natural delicacy of outline is entirely lost." Under Sargent’s brush, the "so-called beautiful" subject looked like a mere "caricature."
Gautreau’s mother was furious. She lamented to Sargent, “All Paris is making fun of my daughter... She is ruined. My people will be forced to defend themselves. She’ll die of chagrin.” Gautreau never recovered from the shameful incident and retreated from Parisian society for the rest of her life.
Sargent was meanwhile concerned with his own reputation. Critics so lambasted the canvas that the artist opted to make a crucial change to the composition: After the exhibition ended, he repainted Gautreau’s strap to fall properly on her shoulder. In 1886, he escaped his infamy in Paris and lived the rest of his life in London, never again taking such a risk with his practice.
Sargent kept the painting prominently displayed in his London studio until he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916 after moving to the United States, and a few months after Gautreau's death.
Book Review: I Am Madam X by Gioia Diliberto
A wonderful fictional exploration of the woman that was Madame X. Although the author clearly states that there is very little to be learned about the actual life of Madame X or Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau she does write an interesting tale of what she presumes Madame Gautreau’s life, and legend was like during her years in the United States, as well as in Paris.