John Singer Sargent’s Scandalous “Madame X”

Summer is a season ripe for scandal; people tend to be overheated and understimulated, looking to mist their crisping minds with idle gossip. Minor controversies can boil over, given the right temperature, into full-on imbroglios; such was the case in Paris in 1884, when the twenty-eight-year-old painter John Singer Sargent débuted a new large-scale portrait at the Salon, then the world’s most influential summer art show. Sargent had every reason to feel confident going into the Salon; since he’d arrived in Paris, at eighteen (from Italy, where he was born to American parents), to study at the École de Beaux Arts, Sargent had blazed an ambitious path through the art ranks to become one of the city’s most in-demand portraitists.

Sargent’s early work had a more Impressionistic bent—as a student, he travelled through Spain and Morocco painting mystics, courtyards, and beach scenes—but he honed his professional niche in painting portraits of Belle Époque aristocrats, who found Sargent’s sumptuous style (rich, saturated colors, glowy lighting, fastidious attention to little details like fingertips and fabrics) to be immensely flattering. Sargent became famous for making women look beautiful, so it made sense that for years he actively pursued the most famously beautiful woman in Paris to sit for him. Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau—then Paris’s leading It Girl—was, like Sargent, an American arriviste (she was born in New Orleans and moved to Paris at eight); she married rich, and became notorious among the haut monde for her sportive personality and striking looks. (She had a distinctive Roman nose, thick russet hair, a preference for heavy makeup, and a complexion so pale it was nearly translucent.) Sargent expected his portrait of Gautreau (the painting now known as “Madame X”) to be a sensation at the Salon—and it was, but not in the way he hoped. The public hated it. They thought Gautreau looked sickly, bored, and awkward. Sargent painted Gautreau in profile to highlight her regal bone structure; crowds thought it made her look diffident and snotty. He’d painted one dress strap slipping off her shoulder, a move the critics considered profane. (Sargent later edited the strap back into place.) All summer long, the press brayed about the fiasco, to the point where Sargent fled Paris for London.

In 1915, Gautreau died, at only fifty-six, never having quite recovered from her “Madame X” summer. She became so self-conscious about her own image that she had all the mirrors removed from her home. The next year, Sargent sold “Madame X” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with a note calling it “the best thing I have done.” The painting has been a jewel of the Met’s collection ever since—the winds of time have shifted its reputation from disgrace to masterpiece—and it is now the focus of a new Met exhibition called “Sargent & Paris” (through Aug. 3), which explores Sargent’s brief, industrious decade in the city. The show is a perfect summer escape, full of popsicle-saturated colors in cool dark rooms, all leading up to the blockbuster event: “Madame X” comes late in the exhibition, but you can see the painting shining like a beacon from several rooms away. (“The Birthday Party,” from 1885, is pictured above.) And if you need even more refreshing fizziness, you can hit the gift shop to buy a copy of Deborah Davis’s dishy Gautreau biography, “Strapless,” which will allow you to keep chattering about scandále all summer long.—Rachel Syme