When John Singer Sargent showed this portrait at the Paris Salon of 1884, the original shoulder strap on her right side had slipped down her arm. Critics were outraged. The sitter, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, was a famous Parisian beauty born to a Louisiana family, and her family was humiliated. Her mother is said to have begged Sargent to take it down. He refused, but he did repaint the strap, lifting it onto her shoulder, and a couple of years later he left Paris to make his career in London.
It was not just the strap. Madame Gautreau was known for her skin, which she powdered to a luminous, almost lavender pallor, and Sargent painted it that way, hard and cool against the dark dress. The pose, in profile with her face lifted and her hand resting on a table, was strikingly bold and artificial. People who knew her thought it too stylized and too revealing, and the reddened ear was mocked.
For decades he kept it in his studio. In 1916 he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and he asked that the sitter's identity not be given. It was shown as Madame X, which is how it has been known ever since. By then, he reportedly considered it the best thing he had done.
The strap story is part of the picture's appeal. Look at the black satin, the single gleam of silver on a bodice, the line from the chin to the toes. The subject looks away, as if she knew all about what the audience would say.
Sargent became one of the leading society portraitists of his time, but his career took a different shape because of this one painting.
Sargent's Madame X appears on our: