Madame X

Who Madame X was

Virginie Amélie Avegno was born in Louisiana in 1859. Her father, Major Anatole Placide Avegno of New Orleans, was mortally wounded at the battle of Shiloh and died in April 1862, and her mother, Marie Virginie de Ternant of Parlange Plantation, took her two daughters to Paris.[1] In August 1878, at nineteen, she married Pierre-Louis Gautreau, a Paris banker and fertilizer importer roughly twice her age.[3]

In Paris she became what the newspapers of the day called a professional beauty: a woman known, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it, for her artful appearance rather than for anything she did.[2] The appearance was partly manufactured and everyone knew it. Sargent said her skin was a "uniform lavender or blotting-paper colour all over".[4] He painted that effect instead of correcting it, which is why the skin in the portrait reads as powdered rather than living.

There was no commission. Sargent went after the sitter himself, with her agreement, because a sensational portrait of a famous beauty at the Salon was the fastest way for a young painter to be talked about.[2] He was twenty-eight. He worked on the portrait in the summer of 1883 at the Gautreaus' country house, Les Chênes at Paramé in Brittany, and wrote from there of "struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau".[1][5]

The Salon of 1884

The painting hung at the Salon of 1884 as catalogue number 2150, under the title Portrait de Mme ***.[6] In that version the right-hand strap of the dress had slipped off the shoulder and hung down her arm.[2] That is the only significant difference between the picture shown in 1884 and the one hanging in New York today.

Sargent's friend and fellow painter Ralph Curtis was at the Salon on the opening day and wrote to his parents about it. His letter is the closest thing to an eyewitness record of the reception.

“There was a grande tapage before it all day. In a few minutes I found him dodging behind doors to avoid friends who looked grave. By the corridors he took me to see it. I was disappointed in the colour. She looks decomposed. All the women jeer.”

Curtis also recorded that the mockery turned during the afternoon, and that painters in the room were calling the picture superb. The press stayed split. Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 June, Henry Houssaye went through the figure feature by feature and rejected each one. The profile was pointed, the eye microscopic, the mouth imperceptible, the complexion wan, the neck corded, the right arm out of joint, the hand boneless.[7] Louis de Fourcaud, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, listed the insults being thrown at the picture and then said he was won over by it.

None of that helped the sitter. Gautreau and her mother came to the studio in tears and asked for the portrait to be withdrawn, and her mother told Sargent that her daughter was ruined and would die of grief. He refused, on the ground that a picture cannot be taken out of the Salon.[5]

Evan Charteris records that the family meant to buy the picture back and destroy it once the Salon closed, and that Sargent removed it himself before the exhibition was over to stop them.[5] He repainted the strap upright afterward and kept the canvas in his studio.

What is under the paint

The Metropolitan Museum examined the painting with X-radiography and infrared reflectography in 1995, and with scanning X-ray fluorescence later. The X-rays show that Sargent adjusted the profile repeatedly, moved the ear a significant distance, and changed the positions of both arms before he was finished.[4][8]

The strap moved three times, not once. The X-radiograph shows that Sargent first placed it over the shoulder, then dropped it for the Salon, then put it back.[8] Paint samples date the last change. There is a layer of varnish underneath the reworking, so the canvas had been finished and varnished before he touched it again.

The background was not always this color. Sargent wrote that he had dashed a tone of light rose over what he called the former gloomy background.[4] He then covered that in turn with a loose mixture of yellow ochre, white and black, which is the neutral brown-gray there now.[8] Because he repainted the canvas while it was still in its frame, a strip of the earlier color survives along the edges.

The fluorescence maps turned up the pigments. There is a great deal of viridian, a dark transparent green, in both the black dress and her reddish-brown hair. Vermilion, the hot opaque red, appears only in small places — the eye, the nostrils, the lips, the ear — while the pale flesh of the chest and left arm is colored with a subtler transparent red lake.[4]

A photograph of the picture as it hung at the Salon survives, given to the museum by Sargent's sister, and an 1885 photograph of his studio is the first record of the repainted strap.[4] Tate holds an unfinished second version, Study of Mme Gautreau, accession N04102, which differs from the finished portrait throughout the figure and the background.[9]

Sold for a thousand pounds

Sargent did not show the portrait publicly for more than twenty years. It reappeared at the Carfax Gallery in London, and was then seen in London in 1908, Berlin in 1909 and Rome in 1911.[10] In 1915 he sent it across the Atlantic to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where the catalogue listed it as number 3630, Madam Gautrin.[1]

On 8 January 1916 he wrote from London to Edward Robinson, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a friend since the early 1890s, and offered him the painting.

“My portrait of Mme. Gautreau is now, with some other things I sent from here, at the San Francisco Exhibition, and now that it is in America I rather feel inclined to let it stay there if a Museum should want it. I suppose it is the best thing I have done. I would let the Metropolitan Museum have it for £1,000.”

Robinson had the letter by 22 January and told the museum's Committee on Purchases that he had tried in vain for years to get the picture. The committee approved the purchase six days later, and he cabled Sargent that the museum would take it at the price named.[10] A thousand pounds was then worth about 4,770 dollars.

Sargent attached one condition: on account of the row he had had with the lady years before, he would rather the picture were not called by her name.[10][4] The museum entered it as Portrait of Madame X. The New York Herald ran the acquisition under the headline "Sargent Masterpiece Rejected by Subject Now Acquired by Museum".[10]

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Almost the whole canvas is two colors: a gray-brown wall and a black dress. What Sargent gives detail to is small and widely spaced — a profile, two straps, two hands, a bit of gilt furniture. Take those first.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Reproduction and collection record.