An appreciation, of sorts, of the work of John Singer Sargent. And of Madame X…

I’m sure we all have our own Madame X lingering somewhere, but today I want to talk about American painter John Singer Sargent’s The Portrait Of Madame X. and it’s subject, Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau (born January 29, 1859 and died sometime in 1915), a Parisian socialite, artist’s model, and American ex-patriate. She was married to French banker Pierre Gautreau, and during her life she was known for her delicate beauty, her hourglass figure, and her especially ivory like skin. She was also known for her numerous infidelities.

The above portrait of her had it’s debut in 1884 at the Paris Salon, and the most anticipated of the paintings making it’s first showing there, partly because of Sargent’s reputation growing increasingly vogue but also because of Gautreau herself, a well respected if notorious woman, and one of the most sought out models at the time. Women wanted her lavender complexion and fashion style and painters wanted to capture it.

The painting above, however, isn’t the original version. The one that did debut that day at the Paris Salon was exactly the same, only the jeweled strap of the dress hung off her shoulder, raising the sex appeal quotient scandalously. Madame Gautreau’s own mother complained and begged Sargent to withdraw the portrait. Famously, he refused, informing her that he had painted her daughter “exactly as she was dressed, that nothing could be said of the canvas worse than had been said in print of her appearance.” Later, he did paint over the fallen strap and repainted a more secured one on her shoulder, which is the one you see above. A version of the original you now see below:

“One more struggle,” the reviewer in the French paper Le Figaro said on the possiblity of further revealment concerning that strap hanging so seductively, “and the lady will be free.”

I’m paraphrasing all of this from the various Wikipedia pages (one of which explains how the dress is made and what holds it together and asserts that one fallen strap, even two fallen straps, wouldn’t cause the dress to fall) and an excellent write up down here at Evil Slutopia, all of them very worth reading. The dress she wears, the way she reveals so much skin was incredibly provocative at the time and her pose is brilliantly sexually suggestive, having required more than 30 sittings with the model and artist before Sargent saw what he wanted.

Evil Slutopia quotes from a fascinating look about the painting, Gautreau, and Sargent as well called Strapless by Deborah Davis: He wrote about his struggles with “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau,” and in a letter to his friend Albert de Belleroche, “Mme. Gautreau is at the piano driving all my ideas away.”

They must’ve had a great time working together. The scandal that erupted from how risque the portrait was perceived to be caused Miss Gautreau to retire from society afterwards, though she was painted again by Gustave Courtois in a style that directly paid homage to the Sargent portrait, but was much better received publicly.

It’s fascinating since today it’s getting harder for a starlet to get out of a car without some photographer laying on the ground with a camera pointed up her skirt to capture a picture of her vagina. Or for a woman to go on a vacation with a married man without photographers drooling at the chance to snap topless photos of a “secret romantic break.” And yet, there’s Sargent’s Madame X, so scandalous in it’s day and age, so highly thought of in the modern age.

In 1907, Sargent was offered knighthood by Her Majesty’s government but he declined it, preferring instead to keep his American citizenship. He was “the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid excessive court to both,” said critic Robert Hughes. In 1927, Evan Charteris wrote, “to live with Sargent’s water colors is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, ‘the refluent shade’ and ‘the Ambient ardours of the noon.’” And painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, whom Sargent did a portrait of 1886, said after Sargent’s death that his sex life “was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.”

Originally I was inspired to write about Sargent after discovering a pretty generic book of his art a few days ago. I flipped through only a few pages, and knew I wanted to go read about the painter. I’d seen The Portrait Of Madame X years ago, but had completely forgotten about it and was happily reminded of it due to some rudimentary investigation online this morning. But originally I just wanted to talk about Sargent’s work in general. Sargent “made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they all have mood, everyone of them has a different mood,” Andy Warhol said back in 1986. But, not just his work, I wanted to talk about the little connections that I saw springing out from the man, like the fact that one of his critics was another painter by the name of Walter Sickert. Sickert was like the Eli Roth of painters in that time period and seems to be more famously known more for his connections to the Jack The Ripper case than his actual creative work.

Sickert believed that he had rented a room from a woman after Jack himself had lodged there, but many believe that Sickert himself probably was the Ripper. Some look upon that theory with derision, but either way, it’s a fascinating theory when you look at the evidence. And Sickert of course was also a character in Alan Moore’s brilliant From Hell graphic novel about the Ripper murders, playing a small but pivotal part by making the fatal introductions that got the whole wheel of fire spinning.

Moore’s gripping tale reads like a Pynchon novel and features allusions to the work of William Blake, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and Karl Marx, and a who’s who of esoteric period cameos including Oscar Wilde, John “The Elephant Man” Merrick, Buffalo Bill, Aleister Crowley, and William Butler Yeats, whom John Singer Sargent also painted a few years before he died.

Speaking of evil: The Carlyle Group now owns Le Figaro.

Sargent’s potrait of Teddy Roosevelt, 1903:

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882:

El Jaleo, 1882:

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1893:

I leave you now with hopefully a slight interest in John Singer Sargent and a few links to enjoy:

An online gallery of Sargent’s work.

Another online gallery, very thorough, and informative as hell.

Sargent at Harvard.

Sargent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The incredibly good page at Evil Slutopia on Madame X.

Portrait of an artist at Salon.

“It all went wrong,” The Telegraph‘s review of Strapless.

John Singer Sargent’s Myspace page. I don’t know about you, but I’m sending him a friend request.

Other assorted Madame X’s.