‘Madame X’: the painting so scandalous it exiled its creator
Fine art is full of nudes. Galleries are so frequently filled with Renaissance women in various states of undress that we’ve all collectively forgotten the supposedly scandalous element in the first place, but we can at least make sense of why they’d have 19th-century audiences up in arms. What’s more puzzling is that a full-clothed portrait had the same effect.
In 1884, John Singer Sargent’s Madame X drove audiences to tears and Sargent to a different country without so much as a flash of nipple. One elegantly dressed woman in black, for a brief time, brought Paris to its knees.
Displayed in the Paris Salon was Sargent’s vision of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Many artists had tried and failed to get her to sit for a portrait, but Sargent’s perseverance won out in the end. Both wanted a slice of the social capital of the Parisian elite, and each wrongly assumed the painting would be a fantastic vehicle for it. It was never even created off the back of a commission, just Sargent’s near obsession with her beauty.
“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,” he wrote to a friend. “If you are ‘bien avec elle’ and will see her in Paris, you might tell her I am a man of prodigious talent.” When he eventually got to utilising that talent, he found his muse was not a natural.
Her packed social calendar meant she didn’t want to sit for hours at a time, so Sargent suggested he travel to her estate instead, doing sketches of her in oil and pencil when she found the time. He produced around 30 of these preparatory pieces but spent most of his time in the country estate quietly seething, often complaining about the “unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau,” who was none the wiser. She simply stood back and admired his many masterpieces.
When first exhibited, the painting was titled Madame XXX, a sign of things to come when it came to its reception. At the opening of the Paris Salon, it became immediately apparent the painting was not well received. It was reported a mob formed, and women jeered in what must have been a collective hysteria. In Madame X, Gautreau stood regally in a floor-length black gown, but French critics called it “vulgar”, accusing Sargant of “shattering” the beauty of his model.
The issue seems to be one strap of her dress had fallen slightly, which was taken a lewd sexual invite, despite the fact the canvas stood along actual nudes, which provoked no reaction. “Of all the undressed women at the Salon this year,” L’Artiste reported, “The most interesting is Madame Gautreau because of the indecency of her dress that looks like it is about to fall off.”
Gautreau denounced it, demanding he withdraw it from the exhibition. Sargent refused, instead withdrawing himself to Britain until the controversy blew over.
