John Singer Sargent was an American portrait painter, born in Florence in 1856 and trained in Paris, who painted the wealthy society of the Gilded Age in Paris, London and the United States. He is remembered for Madame X, the portrait that scandalized the Paris Salon in 1884, for his luminous watercolors, and for Gassed, his huge picture of blinded soldiers from the First World War. He died in London in 1925.
The picture people look for is the one that scandalized Paris in 1884, and Sargent kept it out of public view for more than twenty years.
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Madame X was a real woman, and she wanted the picture gone. Virginie Gautreau, the American born wife of a French banker, was a celebrated beauty. Sargent painted her for the Salon of 1884 in a black gown with bare shoulders, and one jewelled strap slid down her right arm. The Salon was shocked, and she and her mother begged him to take the picture out of the exhibition.
Sargent refused. He claimed he had only painted her as she appeared, and he repainted the strap on her shoulder only when the Salon closed. Then he kept the canvas out of public view for more than twenty years, through his move to London and the career that followed.
In January 1916 he offered it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 1,000 pounds, about 4,770 dollars at the time, and wrote that it was the best thing he had done. He also asked the museum not to use her name, because of the row he had had with the lady years ago. That is why the portrait is still called Madame X.
What You'll Discover
Who taught him to paint directly.
What the critics really objected to.
Why a garden gave him ten minutes.
Why he walked away from portraits.
What he saw on a French road.
What his private life leaves out.