Sargent’s Madame X Is More Than Ready for Her Close-Up

The Met’s Sargent and Paris show lets us know that the artist’s unique flair stands the test of time.

O n Thursday I wrote about the first half of Sargent and Paris, the Met’s gorgeous and incisive exhibition about the lifelong spell the City of Light cast on John Singer Sargent, the nominally American artist who, coincidentally, died a hundred years ago last month. Not a touristical or romantic spell — no “we’ll always have Paris” bonbons here — but a foundational one. Sargent (1856–1925) studied in Paris, learned to look there, became famous there, and crafted his distinctly French, and modern, style there. His London and Boston portraits, his hundreds of scenes of everyday life, his biblical and mythological murals, even his work as a war artist — all have French panache.

Today I’ll look mostly at Madame X, Sargent’s notorious, engrossing portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau from 1884. The Met is doing the exhibition, along with the Musée d’Orsay, so I expected it to foreground Madame X, its prize Sargent, and I expected this to be yet another case of the Met touting what it owns at the expense of what it doesn’t own but ought to tout. I was wrong, since Madame X is indeed extraordinary and a pivot for Sargent. I ended on Thursday with Dr. Pozzi at Home, from 1881, which is Madame X’s precursor — or omen — and deserves a few more words.

Pozzi didn’t commission his portrait, among the first ever portraits of a distinguished man in, of all things, his evening dressing gown — one step above pj’s, and a red gown at that. Rather, he and Sargent collaborated. Sargent had met him through his first art professor in Paris, Carolus-Duran. Tall, swarthy, handsome, distinguished in the new specialty of gynecology, smart, charming, Pozzi was a Casanova who oozed sex and picturesque allure. Sargent was bound to want to paint him.

He hadn’t tried a full-length portrait of a man. His three-quarter-length portraits of his professor Carolus-Duran — seated and in a nice though casual suit — and his playwright friend Édouard Pailleron — informally dressed — crossed a boundary in that neither dressed in black and both looked suitably artsy. Pozzi wore that red dressing gown and embroidered slippers. The entrance to what was probably his bedroom is in the dark background. Talk about come hither.

Sargent didn’t exhibit Dr. Pozzi at Home at the 1881 Paris Salon. He thought it would be too hot to handle for Paris’s art gurus, given Pozzi’s unorthodox dress and his renown as a physician, surgeon, professor of medicine, high-society figure, and bon vivant. He showed it instead at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in London, where, odd to say, critics ignored it. Watts, Frith, Leighton, Millais, and Alma-Tadema ruled the aesthetic roost, no one knew Sargent, and the picture might have seemed too French and, for boring Victorians, beyond their scope.

Pozzi became a French medical giant, publishing books and hundreds of articles, including his late work on organ transplants. A veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, he reenlisted in 1914 and served as a field surgeon. He died in 1918 when a former patient — a man he’d treated for an enlarged scrotum — claimed that Pozzi had made him impotent. Pozzi told him it was all in his head, and — bang, bang, bang — his aggrieved patient shot him before killing himself. After the wounded but poised Pozzi called an ambulance, he told his assistant, Marcel Proust’s brother, that he wanted to be buried in his military uniform. Quel courage. Sargent’s portrait stayed with Pozzi’s family until Armand Hammer, no slouch in the rascal department, bought it. That blood-red dressing gown Sargent selected was prophetic. Sargent rarely picked a Bo Peep to paint.

When I walked into the next gallery, I was surprised to see that the Met got The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, from 1882, since it’s a local treasure owned by the MFA in Boston. In Sargent and Paris, its paired with Sargent’s copy of Velázquez’s Las Meninas from a few years earlier. The Boit painting, strange and soulful, is often seen as Sargent’s tribute to Velázquez. The Boits were from Boston, Mama an heiress, Papa a Harvard Law School graduate turned artist. They and their daughters were expats in Paris and part of Sargent’s soirée culture, but there’s not much of Paris in the portrait.

We already know that Sargent’s friends in Paris — an eclectic bunch and often rich — included Americans who were insiders because of their wealth but outsiders as Americans. This sets the stage for Madame X, a portrait of another American and, on one of its many levels, a sinister, unsettling picture. As curatorial arrangements go, too, with Boit and Las Meninas opposite each other in the same gallery, it’s a place to breathe and reflect after a room of six full-length, grand, smashing Sargent portraits, the centerpiece of which is Dr. Pozzi at Home.

The painting of the Boit daughters is also a few steps from Madame Paul Escudier (Louise Lefevre), from 1882. The portrait depicts her in a blue dress, maybe peacock blue, maybe periwinkle, as she stands in a dark room between two curtained windows through which sun pours. An Aubusson carpet covers the floor, and a cushy chair covered with impressed velvet sits next to her. It’s intimate and a study of how light and dark models figures.

It’s lovely and, like The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Dr. Pozzi at Home, Madame X, and so much else in the show, a Sargent social type. Sargent is best known for his aristocratic portraits — old families, old money. But in the 1870s and well into the 1880s, his subjects were intellectuals and professionals at the intersection of Third Republic politics and new money, people who were making the modern Paris tick. The Boits were expats. Dr. Pozzi, the orphaned son of Italian immigrants, was born in southwest France, not in Paris, and was a pioneer in the new science of antiseptics and hysterectomies. Madame Escudier’s husband chaired the Paris City Council. Édouard Pailleron, whose three family portraits I treated on Thursday, was a famous playwright. Artists, musicians, writers, and Jews, many friends, most nouveaux riches, outnumber Sargent’s lords and ladies of the realm, businessmen, and, in America, two presidents.

This takes us to Madame X. Sargent’s portrait has a vista location in the show, seen in the middle of a large gallery, on a freestanding wall, from three galleries away. It’s got wall power. The portrait starts with Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (1859–1915), a New Orleans–born beauty whose French-born mother, from a rich plantation family, moved herself and her daughter to Paris after Gautreau’s father, a Confederate general, died in battle. Gautreau was well known by celebrity trackers as a fixture at parties and salons linked to France’s new, Third Republic regime. In 1878, at 19, she had married a much older man whose family business imported Peruvian guano.

She was also, we learn, a new Paris type called the professional beauty, famous for being famous, the supreme flower of American infiltration of Paris high society. And what a distinct look she had — tall and sleek, more taut and muscled than zaftig, with a big, ski-slope nose that gave her a haughty profile and lavender powder lending her skin a weird pallor. She had the quintessential “je ne sais quoi” of her epoch. Sargent knew her from the salon circuit. In 1882, he asked a mutual friend to approach Gautreau with a proposition. He’d paint her portrait, a homage to her beauty, and, by the way, tell her “I am a man of prodigious talent.” Gautreau agreed. As with the Pozzi portrait, artist and subject collaborated.

Among the many high points of Sargent and Paris is this gallery, with the finished Madame X surrounded by Sargent’s many preparatory studies, the most, were told, of any other portrait in his career. He drew her standing, seated, and from behind to understand her lines. He drew her as she whispered to a friend, and looking out a window, as if Sargent wanted to get into her head. A splendid oil sketch shows her raising a glass in a candlelit room. Once or twice, Sargent called her beauty “unpaintable,” but, in time for the 1884 Salon, he did it. Gautreau was identified as “Madame ***” on the Salon label, but everyone knew who she was. She wears a black satin skirt, a black, low-cut velvet bodice, holds a fan and tugs her skirt ever so with her left hand, and stretches her right arm across a round side table, which exposes muscles and veins. We don’t see her bustle, which would interrupt her lines. She wears a crescent ornament in her hair and a wedding ring. As far as jewelry goes, c’est tout.

The laws of gravity being what they are, her stretch lets her gown’s right strap, lined with crystals or pearls, to drop from her shoulder. Next to her, supporting and augmenting her, is the Louis XVI–style table with mahogany veneer, ormolu mounts, winged sirens for trusses, and lion-paw feet.

Gautreau is a piece of work, as are Madame X and Sargent. “Oh, quelle horreur” defines the critical and public response to the portrait. In the gallery leading to Madame X is a space called Les Parisiennes, displaying full-length portraits of elegant, fashionable Parisian women in black by Carolus-Duran and Leon Bonnat, both of them Sargent’s art teachers, as well portraits by Whistler, Renoir, and Manet, all from the late 1870s and early 1880s. Sargent and Paris makes the case that their sophistication, flair, love of culture, and subtle show of freedom were distinct to the bourgeois women of Paris.

This sets the stage for what went wrong for Madame X. What was depicted was less a woman than a machine, and a painted one at that, from head to toe. Renoir’s Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children is in the Les Parisiennes room. It’s very famous. The seated mother, dressed in black, looks perfectly comfortable with her two pretty children in blue frocks and a giant St. Bernard snoozing at their feet. But if you added a couple of kids to Madame X, you’d be tempted to call the child-abuse hotline. That Gautreau’s strap slipped was only part of the problem, signaling as it did the look of a low-class tart. “She looks like a hissing snake,” Vernon Lee, Sargent’s best female friend, said. What aberrations, physical, moral, ethical, and spiritual, lurked beneath her powdered skin?

Madame X’s reception is well-plowed territory, and the show reprises it with an economy that still grips us. Gautreau and her mother were horrified by the fuss and wanted Sargent to remove the picture from the Salon. He declined and kept it there for the run of the show. As a sop to them, he repainted it when it was back in his studio so that the fallen strap was back in its proper place.

Sargent was crestfallen by the public’s scorn, but, contrary to much scholarly thinking, he wasn’t driven from Paris. He’d been thinking for a few years of moving to London, in part because of endless prods to do so by Henry James but also because of Sargent’s assessment of the London art scene, which was dull, dull, dull. He felt there was much low-lying fruit, client-wise, among newly rich industrialists and Americans looking for portraits with pizzazz. Yes, there were women in London as well as Paris who feared that Sargent would make them look weird, as he did with Gautreau, but a chastened Sargent felt he could make it work. He was only 28.

How to end an exhibition with so many splashes, and with Madame X in the second-to-last gallery? Sargent and Paris does the best it can. We see two works from among his mid-1880s flirtation with Impressionism — his painting of Paul Helleu sketching with his wife on the banks of the River Avon in Worcestershire and a plein-air portrait of Monet, both French friends of Sargent’s. His portrait of Edith Vickers from 1884 is lovely. She was the wife of an arms manufacturer from Sheffield in the UK. It’s a study in gray and the antidote to Madame X. Sargent sent it to the 1885 Paris Salon to assure frightened French chickens that he could indeed do a conservative look. And La Carmencita, from 1890, is there, his full-length portrait of the famous flamenco dancer. It was bought by the French State in 1892 — its first Sargent — and one of the few portraits by anyone in France’s contemporary art museum.

Leading the catalogue is Stephanie Herdrich, the Met curator in charge of Sargent and Paris. She writes the essay on Madame X and also about Sargent’s childhood and years as an art student in Paris. Essays by others cover Sargent’s friendships, El Jaleo and his other early travel paintings, how the French responded to his Paris portraits, and the afterlife of Madame X. It’s still a famous picture and an icon of the kind of extreme fashion I wrote about a couple of weeks ago when I reviewed the Met Gala. Richard Ormond, Sargent’s grand-nephew, and Elaine Kilmurray, two of the authors of the majestic Sargent catalogue raisonné, some eleven volumes, contribute general and specific observations about Sargent’s technique and his Frenchness.

I have no complaints about the exhibition. Some of its scholarly points have been covered, especially in the Clark’s 1996 Uncanny Spectacle show, focusing on Sargent’s early years, but until the 1980s, Sargent was in an academic desert. He was considered a high-society portraitist, so the Great Depression, Abstract Expressionism, the Space Age, Pop Art, Minimalism, and the Cold War had no room for him. But pendulums swing. Quality, smarts, and, I’ll add, glamour are never overlooked for long. For once, the Met doesn’t pack an exhibition with extraneous art.

Here’s to restraint, but here’s to snap, crackle, and pop, too. And to Sargent. He’s the gift that keeps on giving.