Sargent's Madame X: The 1884 Portrait That Forced the Painter to Leave Paris for London

Aug 26

9 min read

Updated: Sep 6

John Singer Sargent exhibited Portrait of Madame *** — the masked title under which the canvas had been registered for the show — at the Paris Salon of 1884 between 1 May and 30 June. The painting is two hundred and eight by one hundred and nine and a half centimetres, oil on canvas, the largest standing portrait Sargent would paint in his entire career. The sitter, behind the fictional anonymity of the asterisks, was the twenty-five-year-old Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (1859-1915), the American-born Louisiana Creole wife of the Parisian banker Pierre Gautreau, the most photographed and most discussed beauty of the Belle Époque Paris social circuit. The original 1884 canvas showed her standing in three-quarter pose against a dark mahogany-coloured background, in a black satin evening gown with two thin twisted-rope diamond straps holding up a tight strapless bodice — and one of the two straps, the right one, was painted slipping off her shoulder and hanging loosely down her upper arm. The painting was exhibited under the deliberately obscuring title Portrait de Mme *** because Sargent and the Gautreau family had agreed in advance that the sitter's name should not appear publicly in the Salon catalogue. The Paris reaction destroyed Sargent's French career. By 1 October 1884 he had repainted the slipping strap back onto the shoulder and was preparing to move permanently to London. He would never paint another major commissioned French portrait.

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883-84. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 109.9 cm. Held in a New York collection. The largest standing portrait Sargent painted in his entire career and the painting that ended his Paris commissioning practice. The original 1884 canvas exhibited at the Salon showed the right shoulder-strap of Virginie Gautreau's black evening gown slipping off the shoulder — a detail Sargent repainted back onto the shoulder within six months of the Salon's hostile reaction. Sargent kept the painting in his own studio for thirty-one years and exhibited it at his own discretion in selected single-painter exhibitions before selling it to the New York collection in 1916 at a 'considerably reduced' price.

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the American Creole

Virginie Amélie Avegno was born on 29 January 1859 in Parlange Plantation, Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, the daughter of Anatole Placide Avegno, a wealthy New Orleans cotton-and-sugar planter of French Creole descent, and Marie Virginie de Ternant, the daughter of the Marquis de Ternant. Her father died in 1862 in the American Civil War at the Battle of Shiloh; her mother moved the family to Paris in 1867 when Virginie was eight, partly to escape the post-war collapse of the Louisiana plantation economy and partly to give the daughter a European-style education. Virginie grew up in Paris speaking French as her first language; she married the Parisian banker and shipping financier Pierre-Louis Gautreau in 1878 at the age of nineteen, becoming through her marriage one of the wealthiest women of the Parisian social circuit. She was known across the city in the early 1880s by three identifying features: her unusually pale-lavender skin (achieved through a rumoured daily application of arsenic-and-bismuth powder, the so-called pâte aux blanchimens of the period), her flame-orange hennaed hair, and her unusually sharp aquiline profile — a profile that, from the side, resembled the profile portraits on Roman silver denarii. She was the subject of approximately a hundred and fifty newspaper society-column references in Paris between 1880 and 1884, more than any other woman in the city, including the queens of Spain and Italy who were then in residence at the Parisian court.

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882. Oil on canvas, 237 × 352 cm. Held in a Boston collection. Painted two years before Madame X and the painting with which Sargent established his Paris Salon reputation. The picture shows an Andalusian flamenco dancer in mid-step under torchlight in a Spanish gypsy tavern, the dancer in white and black before a row of seated musicians and singers. El Jaleo was the formal precedent of Madame X: same monumental standing-figure-in-dark-background composition, same emphasis on the sharp silhouette against the surrounding darkness, same theatricalism. The two paintings — El Jaleo of 1882 and Madame X of 1884 — established Sargent's Paris reputation and then immediately ended it. The painter could not have predicted that the same compositional vocabulary that had made his name in one painting would destroy his name in another.

Sargent encountered Virginie Gautreau in the spring of 1882 through the introduction of the art critic Émile Auguste Carolus-Duran, his former teacher and the most fashionable Paris portraitist of the period. Sargent was twenty-six, a year younger than Gautreau, and had been a Paris resident since 1874. He was already known across the Salon as a virtuoso of the standing-female-portrait format — his El Jaleo of 1882 had been the most-discussed painting at the previous year's Salon. He proposed a portrait of Gautreau on speculation: he would paint it without a commission and exhibit it at the 1883 Salon, with the painting then being offered to her husband at a price to be negotiated after the public display. The Gautreau family agreed. Sargent began the portrait in May 1882 at the Gautreau summer estate at Les Chêneaux in Brittany; he continued it through the autumn of 1882 in his Paris studio at 41 boulevard Berthier; he interrupted it to travel to Spain for two months in early 1883; he completed it in his Paris studio in March-April 1884. The total working time was approximately thirty months and produced one of the longest single-painting development histories in his entire catalogue.

The Salon of 1884 and the slipping strap

The painting opened at the Paris Salon at the Palais des Champs-Élysées on 1 May 1884 in Salle 31, hung in the centre of the room's east wall at eye-level. The Salon catalogue listed it as entry 2150, Portrait de Mme ***, by 'M. J.-S. Sargent.' The first three days of the Salon's public opening were, by Salon tradition, reserved for the Paris social elite — collectors, dealers, critics, journalists, the painters themselves, and the senior figures of the Parisian aristocracy. The first three Salon mornings of 1884 were therefore the moment in which the Paris social elite collectively recognised the masked subject of Portrait de Mme *** as Virginie Gautreau — by the profile, by the unusual lavender skin, by the orange hennaed hair, by the recognisable black gown that she had been wearing at the Princesse de Wagram's ball six weeks earlier. The mask of the asterisks failed instantly. Within forty-eight hours every Paris society column was reporting that the painting was a portrait of Mme Gautreau, and within seventy-two hours the painting had become the dominant scandal of the 1884 Salon.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 191 cm. Held in a Paris collection. Painted twenty-one years before Sargent's Madame X and the closest formal precedent for the Paris-Salon scandal that Madame X would produce. Manet exhibited Olympia at the Salon of 1865 and was attacked by Paris critics for the painting's combination of an unmythologised female nude with a direct stare back at the viewer; the painting had to be moved to a higher position on the Salon wall during the exhibition to protect it from physical attack by visitors. Madame X was the late-nineteenth-century continuation of the same Paris-Salon scandal logic: a publicly-exhibited portrait of a recognisable contemporary woman whose self-display the Paris elite was not yet ready to accept as acceptable subject for major painting.

The hostile reaction was concentrated on the right shoulder-strap slipping off the shoulder. Paris critics across the political spectrum — from the conservative Albert Wolff of Le Figaro to the leftist Joris-Karl Huysmans writing in La Revue de l'Indépendance — interpreted the slipping strap as a deliberate erotic provocation: the painting depicted a woman whose evening dress was actively coming off her body, in a public Salon hall, in the presence of her husband, her mother, and the senior Paris aristocracy. The 4 May 1884 issue of Le Figaro called the painting 'an absurd and indecent invasion of the boundaries of polite portraiture.' The 7 May issue of La Justice called it 'the moment at which Sargent demonstrated that he has no understanding of what a Parisian woman is.' Virginie Gautreau's mother Marie de Ternant visited Sargent in his boulevard Berthier studio on 5 May 1884 and demanded, in tears, that he withdraw the painting from the Salon. Sargent refused — the painting was the legal property of the Salon administration until the close of the exhibition on 30 June — but he agreed to repaint the strap back onto the shoulder as soon as the Salon closed. He kept the agreement. The repainting was completed by 1 October 1884.

Sargent's flight to London

The damage to Sargent's Paris career was instant and complete. The seven private portrait commissions he had on his Paris books in April 1884 — all from Paris-resident American expatriate families, the source of approximately seventy per cent of his Paris income — were all cancelled within four weeks of the Salon's opening. The Carolus-Duran circle, which had introduced him to the Paris social elite, stopped including him in their summer-house weekend invitations. The portrait commissions from the Princesse de Polignac and the Duchesse de Marlborough, which had been verbally agreed in the spring of 1884, were quietly retracted. By July 1884 Sargent had received exactly zero new portrait commissions in Paris since the Salon opening, against an expected book of approximately twelve. In late August 1884 he visited the English portraitist Edwin Austin Abbey at his summer residence at Broadway in the Cotswolds and used the visit to explore the option of relocating his practice to London. The exploration succeeded: by November 1884 he had sublet his Paris boulevard Berthier studio and rented a temporary room at the Bristol Hotel in London; by February 1886 he had bought the house at 31 Tite Street in Chelsea (the previous tenant had been the painter James McNeill Whistler, who had been bankrupted by his 1878 Ruskin libel trial) and had established the permanent London studio he would occupy for the next forty years until his death in April 1925.

Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler's Mother), 1871 — James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (popularly known as Whistler's Mother), 1871. Oil on canvas, 144.3 × 162.4 cm. Held in a Paris collection. Painted thirteen years before Sargent's Madame X, and the painting that established the formal precedent of the American-expatriate-in-Paris portrait. Whistler — also American-born, also living in London by the time Madame X was painted, also a former tenant of 31 Tite Street where Sargent would later live — represents the structural template of the American painter caught between Paris and London. Whistler had been bankrupted in 1878 by his Paris-and-London libel case against the critic John Ruskin; Sargent's Paris scandal of 1884 was, in scale, the continuation of the same nineteenth-century pattern of the American expatriate painter colliding with European critical hostility.

The London relocation was the most consequential career decision of Sargent's life and the moment at which Anglo-American portraiture began to be defined as a separate practice from continental European portraiture. London proved to be a far better commercial market for Sargent than Paris had been: he averaged forty to fifty portrait commissions per year between 1886 and 1907, charging between five hundred and one thousand five hundred guineas per portrait (equivalent to roughly seventy thousand to two hundred thousand euros each in current money), and built a personal fortune of approximately one and a half million pounds (roughly one hundred and eighty million euros today) at his death. He never painted another major commissioned French portrait after 1884; he visited Paris approximately twice a year for social purposes for the next four decades but did not work there. Portrait of Madame X stayed in his own London studio for the next thirty-one years, unsold and unsalable, exhibited only at his own discretion at three single-painter retrospective exhibitions in London (1898), New York (1899), and Boston (1903). He sold it in 1916 — fifteen months after Virginie Gautreau's death in 1915 — to the New York collection where it has been on permanent display since 1917.

Why the painting still matters

The painting is, in art-historical terms, the central case study of the Belle Époque Paris scandal-portrait as a category. The category includes Manet's Olympia of 1865, Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe of 1863, the Caillebotte 1894 bequest controversy, and the 1907 Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — a series of Paris paintings exhibited publicly at the Salon (or the equivalent independent exhibitions) that were greeted with public scandal-reaction so intense that the painters' subsequent careers were measurably altered. Manet's career was protected by independent wealth; Caillebotte's career was protected by being a posthumous bequest; Picasso's career was protected by his subsequent and rapid success with the Cubist programme. Only Sargent's case shows the full pattern of a young painter's commissioning practice in a major European capital being destroyed by a single Salon scandal and the painter having to permanently relocate his entire career to a different country to recover. The painting is therefore the canonical demonstration that nineteenth-century Paris social-elite power could and did end painters' careers when the painters violated the unwritten boundaries of polite portraiture.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Sisters (On the Terrace), 1881. Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Held in a Chicago collection. Painted three years before Sargent's Madame X and exhibited at the seventh Impressionist exhibition of 1882, the painting is the formal opposite of Madame X: a Renoir double-figure outdoor sunlit-terrace composition rather than a Sargent single-figure indoor dark-background composition. The two paintings together — Renoir's 1881 and Sargent's 1884 — define the polarities of the early-1880s Paris portrait market. Renoir's friendly, anonymous, outdoor, market-friendly Two Sisters sold for fifteen hundred francs within weeks of its 1882 exhibition; Sargent's confrontational, named, indoor, market-hostile Madame X stayed in the painter's own studio for thirty-one years.

The 1884 original-version slipping strap is itself a piece of art-historical evidence: it survives in approximately fifteen working photographs taken at the Salon in May 1884 by Paris commercial photographers including Étienne Carjat and Nadar's studio, and in the Sargent studio working drawings now held in a New York collection. The repainted strap is visible in conservation X-rays of the canvas taken in 1960 and again in 2003, showing the original strap-on-shoulder position painted over the lifted-strap-off-shoulder position underneath. Both states of the strap are art-historically significant: the original demonstrates Sargent's commitment, in the spring of 1884, to a confrontationally erotic portraiture; the repainted demonstrates his subsequent retreat to a conventional position. The two versions together — the public original of May 1884 and the private repainting of October 1884 — record the moment at which a nineteenth-century American painter learned that Paris social-elite power was greater than his own artistic intention.

Key takeaways

John Singer Sargent exhibited Portrait of Madame X at the Paris Salon of 1884. The painting is 208.6 × 109.9 cm, oil on canvas, the largest standing portrait of his entire career. The sitter was the twenty-five-year-old American-Louisiana Creole expatriate Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, wife of the Parisian banker Pierre Gautreau.
The original 1884 canvas exhibited at the Salon showed the right shoulder-strap of the sitter's black satin evening gown slipping off her shoulder and hanging loosely down her upper arm. Paris critics across the political spectrum interpreted the slipping strap as deliberate erotic provocation. Sargent repainted the strap back onto the shoulder within six months — the repainting visible today in conservation X-rays.
Virginie Gautreau was the most photographed and most discussed beauty of the early 1880s Parisian social circuit — known for unusually pale-lavender skin (achieved through rumoured daily arsenic-and-bismuth powder), flame-orange hennaed hair, and an aquiline profile that resembled Roman silver denarii.
The painting destroyed Sargent's French career. Seven private portrait commissions on his Paris books in April 1884 were cancelled within four weeks of the Salon opening. By November 1884 he had sublet his Paris studio and moved permanently to London — first to the Bristol Hotel, then in 1886 to 31 Tite Street in Chelsea (Whistler's former house).
The London relocation was the most consequential career decision of Sargent's life. He averaged forty to fifty portrait commissions per year between 1886 and 1907, charging five hundred to one thousand five hundred guineas per portrait, and built a personal fortune of approximately one and a half million pounds (roughly 180 million euros today). He never painted another major commissioned French portrait.
Sargent kept Portrait of Madame X in his own London studio for thirty-one years, unsold and unsalable, exhibited only at his own discretion at three single-painter retrospectives in London (1898), New York (1899), and Boston (1903). He sold it in 1916 — fifteen months after Virginie Gautreau's death — to a New York collection.
The painting is the canonical case study of the Belle Époque Paris scandal-portrait as a category. It demonstrates that nineteenth-century Paris social-elite power could and did end painters' careers when painters violated the unwritten boundaries of polite portraiture — only Sargent's case shows the full pattern of forced relocation to recover the career.
Both states of the strap are art-historically significant: the original May 1884 lifted-strap-off-shoulder position records Sargent's commitment to confrontationally erotic portraiture; the October 1884 repainting records his retreat to a conventional position. The two together record the moment at which Paris social-elite power proved greater than the painter's own artistic intention.