The True Story of Madame X

High society, toxic cosmetics, and one loosened strap: on John Singer Sargent's masterpiece, and the woman behind the scandalous icon.

Detail of Portrait of Madame X, John Singer Sargent ca. 1884. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Of all the art critics and patrons in the world, none are so reliable in their predictive powers as the Parisians of the late-19th century. The works they found shocking and scandalous were practically guaranteed to stand the test of time.

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), Gustave Courbet’s scenes of working-class life—not to mention, anything by the Impressionists—all were decried as inappropriate, offensive, or just plain bad. The painting we will be examining today is no exception, and we will see that the story of outrage surrounding it is far more complex than that of a loosened strap.

The artist John Singer Sargent was born in 1856 in Tuscany to American parents—the physician Fitzwilliam Sargent and Mary Singer, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant. The Sargents were expatriates in the true sense of the term; they had journeyed abroad after the death of their first child (a girl who would have been John’s older sister), and rather than settling in a new country and establishing roots, they traveled from city to city around Europe. Moving every few months, they lived modestly off of a small inheritance. John Singer Sargent and his siblings received little formal schooling. They were rigorously tutored by their father, and their studies were supplemented by visiting museums.¹

Sargent’s talent for painting grew obvious by his teens, such that his father felt it prudent for the family to move to Paris. In the busiest art city in Europe, Sargent would have access to top studios and instructors. The year was 1874—the Impressionists had held their First Exhibition, the city’s growing middle and upper classes provided a promising market for artists, and the Salon remained the arbiter of taste and status. Sargent grew determined to place his work in its halls.

After returning from a long trip to the United States in 1876, Sargent indeed fulfilled this goal. Throughout his twenties, he steadily built his reputation as a portrait artist, continued his travels around Europe to learn from the Old Masters, and he began showing at the Salon.

Then, in 1883, Sargent approached a high society beauty with a request—could he paint her portrait?

Portrait of Madame X, John Singer Sargent ca. 1884. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Like Sargent, Virginie Avegno would never be fully accepted in French society. She was an immigrant from the United States; her family were leading figures in the French Creole community in New Orleans. The Avegno family were real estate investors in the city, and like many rich Southerners of the Antebellum period, their wealth was tied to the labor of enslaved Africans on their vast plantations. Virginie’s father fought for the Confederacy and died from injuries after the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.² In 1867, the eight-year-old Virginie and her mother left Louisiana for Paris, where Mrs. Avegno had family and where she often visited as a child.

Virginie’s mother had ambitious plans for her daughter’s future. By the time Virginie reached adulthood, she had already gained a reputation as a “professional beauty” and society darling, if not one who would face some suspicion as a foreigner. Just a few months shy of twenty, Virginie was married off to Pierre Gautreau, a French banker and shipping magnate twice her age.

The new Mrs. Gautreau was twenty-four when she sat with Sargent for preliminary sketches in 1883. Sargent would soon discover that Gautreau was not an easy subject to paint. He needed this portrait to work. A Salon submission of such a notable (and increasingly notorious) figure in society would surely result in more commissions. But Gautreau was impatient and struggled to sit still during their sessions. We get a sense of this irrepressible energy even in the final portrait: it is a gloriously defiant pose, with clear tension in Gautreau’s neck and right arm, her head in profile as her torso faces us. As if there is no reason to acknowledge the viewer.

Needless to say, it was not a pose with which viewers at the 1884 Salon would have been familiar. But Sargent faced another problem—Gautreau’s skin.

In Gilded Age America, makeup was a less-controversial subject than it was in France or Britain. Gautreau, despite spending most of her life in France, adopted the American mentality of makeup as public performance rather than deceit. She dyed her hair a deeper shade of red with henna, she used rouge on her lips and ears, and most famously, she employed a lavender, lead-based powder to achieve a glowing, purple-blue tint that accentuated her pale skin.³ This stood in direct defiance of French norms; women were expected to look “natural,” even if achieved through unnatural means.

There was a practical element to this: by the early 1880s, the public was beginning to understand the dangers of lead-based beauty products. Powders were far less likely to break through the skin barrier (which explains why not every person went mad), but salves and lotions containing lead, such as the deadly Laird’s Bloom of Youth, absolutely did.⁴ Not only did Gautreau’s lavender-tinted skin give her portrait a ghostly quality (which, in real life, appeared as a soft glow), but visitors of the 1884 Salon would have known that such products probably weren’t safe. Furthermore, in a time of rampant tuberculosis and syphilis, covering one’s skin with makeup suggested that the subject might have something to hide. Rumors of Mrs. Gautreau’s alleged affairs didn’t help her case.⁵

Sargent struggled to get Gautreau’s skin tone right, especially as her daily powdering would have changed her appearance from session to session. Critics were vicious, with Salon visitors commenting that Gautreau’s chest and exposed arms were of an “unpleasant purplish hue,” and appeared “decomposed” or “cadaverous and clown-like.”⁶

“Left: The painting as it appeared at the Salon of 1884, with the right strap fallen over the shoulder. Right: A photograph of Sargent’s studio from 1885 shows an adjustment to the right strap, as it is today.” Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Finally, we turn to the infamous strap.

Luckily for us, Sargent often photographed his paintings. Above, you’ll see that the original painting of Gautreau included a strap on her gown sliding off her body. One year after showing the portrait at the Salon, he would adjust the painting so that both straps appear on her shoulders.

Nudes of art models were acceptable if they were portraying subjects from ancient myths and other tales that stood safely far away from the Belle Époque. Even off-the-shoulder gowns were passable, so long as it was obvious that the gown was intentionally designed in that manner. In Gautreau’s portrait, the strap was clearly falling off.

This painting was not only defiant—it was suggestive. Even worse, its subject was a member of the upper class.

In a 2023 interview with the podcast Dressed: The History of Fashion, Dr. Erica Hirshler (Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) argued that the final cherry on top of the outrage-sundae was the backdrop of growing nationalism in French society. Sargent and Gautreau were Americans. For outsiders to “steal the show” at the Paris Salon at that particular point in history would have been unwelcome.

With this “failure,” Sargent made the career-defining decision to leave France and settle in London, with frequent trips to the United States. Over the following years, he became the leading portrait artist of his generation.

The notion that Virginie Gautreau completely abandoned society after the 1884 Salon is false. Though she did become more cautious regarding social engagements, she continued to pose for other artists, and she lived an otherwise lavish and affluent lifestyle until her death in 1915.

The following year, Sargent reached out to his friend Edward Robinson, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. By that time, Sargent recognized the importance of his portrait of Gautreau, and he wished for it to reside permanently in the States. He did have one request: “By the way, I should prefer, on account of the row I had with the lady years ago, that the picture should not be called by her name.”⁷

They settled on a new title: Portrait of Madame X.

1. H. Barbara Weinberg, “John Singer Sargent (1856–1925),” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–), https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/john-singer-sargent-1856-1925.

2. Deborah Davis, Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X (Tarcher, 2004), 11-13.

3. Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” American Art 15, no. 3 (2001): 18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3109402.

4. The makeup artist Erin Parsons produced a fantastic two-part series on YouTube on the subject of lead cosmetics, featuring historians, chemists, and more. You can watch Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

5. Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin,” 23.

6. Ibid.

7. Silvia A. Centeno and Dorothy Mahon, “Revealing Madame X,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020, https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/conservation-and-scientific-research/conservation-stories/2020/madame-x.