“The Madame X Files,” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the January 1999 issue of Vogue.
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John Singer Sargent’s 1884 portrait of Virginie Avegno Gautreau, universally acclaimed as Madame X, is a definitive study in image-making. La Gautreau flaunts her otherworldly looks and her chosen role as that exotic ornament to society, a professional beauty. She is a sphinx without a secret, “prophetic of all the sophisticated chic of Vogue,” as Philippe Jullian, historian of fin-de-siècle culture, noted in 1965. But who was this fascinator whose mystery remains compelling more than a century after Sargent captured it in sensual oil paints?
John Singer Sargent, whose career is celebrated in a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from February 21 to May 31 (and then traveling to Boston), with a related show of drawings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from February 14 through May 9, was born in Florence in 1856. His American parents led peripatetic lives and raised their children gypsy fashion, traveling restlessly across Europe. By the early 1880s, after a solid schooling in the atelier of the respected academician Carolus-Duran and at the École des Beaux-Arts, Sargent was already establishing a name for himself in Paris as both a portraitist and a painter of exotic genre scenes of Italy, Spain, France, and Morocco. It seems inevitable that he should have been bewitched by the notorious Victoire Gautreau since throughout his career, Sargent was drawn to unconventionally exotic beauties. He had already delighted in the feral charms of Rosina Ferrara, a Capri girl, and mysterious Moroccan beauties like the one imbibing incense in his Fumée d’Ambre Gris, painted in 1880. Later, he produced some of his most spirited portraits when presented with sitters like the haughty Spanish dancer Carmencita; the art dealer Asher Wertheimer’s lively daughters Almina, Ena, and Betty; the madcap Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; and Vaslav Nijinsky. He called the fabulous and extravagant beauty Rita de Acosta Lydig “Art in its living form,” and presumably Madame Pierre Gautreau’s symbolist looks inspired similar sentiments.
Sargent found her “strange, weird, fantastic, curious.” Fascinated, he determined to capture her as a sitter, and he embarked on an elaborate courtship. He began by enlisting the help of a mutual friend, Ben del Castillo, to whom he wrote, “I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty... tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.” Virginie Gautreau conceded. The sittings began in Paris in 1883, and that summer Sargent set off for the Gautreaus’ country estate, the Château des Chesnes at Paramé in Brittany. Here, among the immemorial oaks that gave the 1708 house its name, the Gautreaus had planted clumps of pampas grasses and tropical palms in accordance with the fashionably exotic taste of Troisième République society.
Born in Louisiana on the eve of the Civil War, Virginie Avegno was essentially a Southern belle, trained from childhood in the wiles of her caste. She was raised in the family mansion Parmlange Plantation, a dizzyingly romantic house built a century earlier by her ancestor Claude Vincent de Ternant, on the banks of the False River (once a part of the Mississippi). The house preserves its antebellum charm to this day, its stately columned facade framed by a pair of pigeonniers and an allée of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Virginie seems to have inherited some of her sibyl’s ways from her grandmother, Virginie de Ternant Parlange, a steel magnolia who is said to have saved the plantation by strategically entertaining both the Confederacy’s general Richard Taylor and the Yankee general Nathaniel Banks; family lore has them both sleeping in the same room at different times. She was also an unreconstructed Francophile. She installed Parisian furnishings at Parlange and commissioned portraits of herself and her three children, Julie, Marie Virginie, and Marius, from the French court painter Edouard-Louis Dubufe. The artist, who had painted the Em- press Eugénie and the Prince Impérial, depicted de Ternani Parlange in midnight blue and regal ermine, and she hung these portraits in each corner of her salon, where they remain to this day. Collections of the calling cards that she carefully preserved (and which her descendant Angèle Parlange now incorporates into her textile designs) are testament to the high store she set by illustrious titles.
Her daughter Marie Virginie married the lawyer and Confederate major Anatole Placide de Avegno, who was felled by injuries at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. His widow, disillusioned with the outcome of the Civil War, took herself and her two daughters, Virginie and Louise—who already showed the promise of beauty—off to Paris. They would never return to America. In the glittering but morally dubious capital of the Second Empire, they established themselves at 44 rue de Luxembourg in a bon ton neighborhood, steps from the Madeleine. The street was later renamed during Haussmann’s sweeping “improvements” of the city, and after 1879 became the rue Cambon, where Gabrielle Chanel—another self-invented sibyl who built a reputation on a little black dress—would establish her couture salon.
From this elegant vantage point, but within the compromised terrain of the expatriate arriviste, Mme Marie Virginie de Ternani Avegno embarked on an ambitious program to launch her striking daughters into social orbit. Eventually, however, la belle Virginie, who was not entertained in the highest social circles, had to settle for mere riches, and snared the wealthy banker and shipowner Pierre Gautreau. Monsieur Gautreau remains a cipher, a man said to be so smitten by his forceful and beauteous wife that he initially conceded her a mariage blanc. Certainly, marriage proved something less than an encumbrance on his young wife’s romantic escapades. The scandal sheets of the day established her as a fast woman with a unique sense of style. Her name was associated with Léon Gambetta, the French Republican leader (who died before her portrait was completed), and one of her lovers was rumored to be Samuel Jean Pozzi, a fashionable gynecologist and a notorious roué whom Sarah Bernhardt (supposedly another of his exotic conquests) called “Docteur Dieu.”
Pozzi was also a discriminating amateur of art, with collections of antiquities and works by Tiepolo and Guardi. Sargent, who had already painted his portrait in 1881, would later describe the dashing doctor (in a letter to Henry James) as “a very brilliant creature.” Sargent’s cousin Ralph Curtis wrote of him as “the great and beautiful Pozzi.” In Sargent’s early masterwork Dr Pozzi at Home, the artist portrayed him full-length and larger than life-size, standing before an operatic fall of crimson draperies. Pozzi wears a carmine robe that, despite its papal connotations, is nevertheless frankly déshabillé, and cunningly suggests the sitter’s alluring bedroom manners. While one hand rests in stately attenuation on his breast, in painterly allusion to the portraits of grandees by El Greco or Van Dyck, the other toys with the silken cords of his robe, as if in preparation for a less ceremonial unraveling. As he would later with Mme Gautreau’s fallen shoulder strap, Sargent uses fashion to suggest carnality.
The allusion seems to have been lost on the London critics, however, when the picture marked Sargent’s Royal Academy debut in 1882 (it was not shown in the Paris Salon). In fact, they seem to have more or less ignored it altogether, although Sargent’s childhood friend, Violet Paget (known by her pen name Vernon Lee), wrote of its “insolent kind of magnificence, more or less kicking other people’s pictures into bits.” After its inclusion in an avant-garde show in Brussels two years later, the critic Emile Verhaeren sniped that “like a champagne glass filled too quickly, it holds more forth than wine.” Pozzi was as vain as Mme Gautreau, and it is tempting to associate them romantically. This remains tantalizing hearsay, however, although the doctor did acquire Sargent’s intimate painting Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast for his personal collection.
Even after her marriage, Mme Pierre Gautreau continued to present herself as a highly fashionable ornament to the demimonde. She eschewed the stately conservatism of the couturier Charles Frederick Worth, preferring to work with the more publicity minded Félix Poussineau on her singular and dramatic outfits. Although she chose not to wear flamboyant jewels (she didn’t want them to detract from the beauty of her skin), she was free in her use of cosmetics, penciling her eyebrows, dyeing her hair auburn, and powdering her skin a soft mauve to set it off (“a uniform lavender or blotting-paper color all over,” as Sargent would write). Sargent’s biographer Stanley Olson has even hinted darkly that Virginie Gautreau ingested arsenic in the pursuit of lint-white skin. When her portrait was unveiled, Ralph Curtis felt that she looked “decomposed,” and the young artist Marie Bashkirtseff found that Gautreau’s shoulders had “the tone of a corpse.”
La Gautreau proved to be an impatient and recalcitrant sitter. To Vernon Lee, Sargent complained of “struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Mme Gautreau,” and he found it difficult to settle on an effective pose. Sargent painted her listlessly drinking a toast by candlelight, and his lightning pencil sketches suggest Gautreau’s restless nature and her bored and wanton attitudes—staring out of a window, playing the piano, perusing a book as she flaunts her spectacular embonpoint, collapsing on a sofa and carelessly letting the train of her dress fall aside to reveal an ankle and the dainty heel of her evening slipper.
Finally, Sargent decided to place his sitter resting against an Empire table, its circular top symbolically supported by sirens. In this assertive and defiant pose, the worldly 24-year-old leans a sinuously twisted arm on the edge of the table while her free hand catches up her fan and the luxuriant folds of her satin gown with an almost rapacious grasp. Picking up the paste sparkle of the straps of her gown, a tiny crescent moon flickers in her evidently hennaed coiffure. The crescent moon, then a fashionable jewel, was of course a symbol of the huntress goddess Diana, and might be read as a subtle allusion to Virginie Gautreau’s own socially predatory instincts; this however was not Sargent’s touch but an element of her own highly studied self-presentation. As a final masterstroke, Sargent painted one of her glittering shoulder straps fallen from her shoulder in an act of sensual negligence.
At 28,Sargent had already proved himself a darling of the Parisian critics, and he had high hopes for the success of this portrait. His master, Carolus-Duran, assured him that he could submit it to the Salon with confidence. The Salon of 1884 accepted it, but by then Sargent was already beginning to have some misgivings about how it might be received. These misgivings were far surpassed by the uproar that the painting provoked. As Evan Charteris, Sargent’s friend and early biographer, coyly records, “the public took upon themselves to inveigh against the flagrant insufficiency... of the sitter’s clothing.”
It is difficult for us to imagine the scandal that ensued, especially considering the institutionalized double standards and louche atmosphere of Parisian Troisième République society. Virginie Gautreau was well established in the tabloids of her day as a woman of dubious morality. To know all this, apparently, was one thing, but to have her wanton sensuality captured on canvas with such dashing felicity for all the fashionable world to see was a different matter altogether. Fashionable women mocked Sargent’s accurate rendition of his subject’s prodigal use of cosmetics, and the art critics were merciless in their facetious observations. Le Figaro’s Albert Woolf quipped apropos her fallen shoulder strap, “one more struggle and the lady will be free.” Alas, Sargent thought better of his initial depiction and later painted out this fallen strap, returning it to its rightful place.
Virginie Gautreau realized too late how compromised she was by Sargent’s flamboyant portrayal. After a solemn lunch at Ledoyen with the artist, Ralph Curtis found himself back at Sargent’s studio on the boulevard Berthier, fending off Mmes Gautreau and de Ternani Avegno, who descended on him “bathed in tears.” Mme de Ternant Avegno returned later, cornered Sargent “and made a fearful scene,” begging him to remove the “lewd portrait” from the Salon and declaring that her daughter “was lost. All of Paris is making fun of her ... she will die of shame.” Sargent refused to remove the work, claiming that this would have been against Salon rules; however, he was careful to take it himself before the exhibition closed, fearful that the furious Gautreau camp would destroy it were they ever to take possession of it.
Crushed by the weight of criticism, Sargent aborted his plans to conquer the Parisian art world and more or less fled to London, where he eventually established himself in Whistler’s old studio on Tite Street. His work from that period, suffused with impressionistic light effects and a sense of bucolic English countryside, was as different as possible from the hothouse air that the orchidaceous Mme Gautreau breathed. And although it would take him some time to win the confidence of conservative British portrait sitters, wary of his piercing depiction of Mme Gautreau, by the end of the century his bravura portraits had become affirmations of position for British aristocrats and status symbols for worldly Americans and the stylish nouveau riche.
The 1884 Salon episode seems not to have soured the resilient Mme Gautreau too much, seven years later she was sitting for a portrait by the highly considered but lackluster academician Gustave Courtois. Lacking the flattering élan of Sargent, Courtois’s documentary approach reveals a coarsened beauty, her eyebrows crudely penciled over, her skin still paley powdered, her ears pink. The headstrong Virginie Gautreau had evidently not learned her lessons well; in a sly allusion to the Sargent debacle, Courtois painted one strap of her pale goddess-like dress fallen from her plump, livid shoulder. And as a counterpoint, her triple-row pearl bracelet falls negligently over a hand that grasps at an airy tulle stole. Perhaps it was this moment in her life that prompted this acidic couplet from the dandy Robert de Montesquiou:
To keep her figure she is now obliged to force it
Not to the mould of Canova but a corset.
By 1906, when Sargent was firmly established as the preeminent society portraitist, Mme Gautreau had evidently come around to her portrayal enough to communicate to him. He wrote to his friend Major Roller that “Madame X” had confided to him that “the Kaiser, who was such a dear, thought her portrait the most fascinating woman’s likeness he has ever seen, and that he wishes me to have an exhibition in Berlin.” Virginie Avegno Gautreau died in 1915; in despair over her lost beauty, she spent her last years as a recluse, banishing mirrors from her homes, which she left only with her face misted in thick veils.
The following year, Sargent arranged for her portrait to be acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even his most virulent critics, among them de Montesquiou and the Bloomsbury set’s Roger Fry, conceded that his portrait of Mme Gautreau was a masterwork. Sargent himself wrote, when he allowed the Metropolitan to acquire Madame X for a token £ 1,000, “I suppose it is the best thing I have done.”