Madame X caused a scandal at the Paris Salon of 1884 because John Singer Sargent painted a well known society woman, Virginie Gautreau, in a tight black gown with one jeweled strap slipping off her shoulder, and visitors read it as a respectable woman shown half undressed. The portrait now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Gautreau was an American born Paris beauty whose face the Salon crowd already knew. Sargent had gone after the portrait himself, aiming for the Salon of 1884, and the uproar that followed may have helped send him to London.
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The strap is the part everyone remembers, and it is the part that fails as an explanation. In 1891, seven years after the Salon, the painter Gustave Courtois showed Gautreau in a portrait of his own, and her strap slips off her shoulder there too. The public received it well, and the picture caused no outrage at all.
So the strap cannot be what Paris was laughing at in 1884. Something else in Sargent's canvas made a woman the visitors recognized look indecent, and the people who wrote about it said where to look: at her skin, at her pose, at a face Sargent would not flatter.
Sargent himself later called the reaction the Gautreau disaster. When the Salon closed he repainted the strap, and it did not save him. He kept the picture in his studio for more than thirty years.
What did the critics actually attack?
Her color and her bearing, at least as much as her clothes. The Times found the pose absurd and the bluish coloring atrocious. Many critics saw a corpse.
A writer for L'Artiste, going through the undressed women at the Salon that year, picked Gautreau as the most interesting one "because of the indecency of her dress," and another critic could not resist the strap: "One more struggle," he wrote, "and the lady will be free."
The strap was the easy joke, one slipping detail on a figure that already looked too cold, too pale and too sure of herself. Gautreau and her mother went to Sargent and asked him to withdraw the portrait from the Salon. He refused. At the close of the Salon he repainted the strap and lifted it onto her shoulder, where it sits today, and the change did nothing for the picture's reputation.
Sargent moved to London afterwards, perhaps because of the uproar, and the canvas moved with him. Madame X sits among the paintings that caused a scandal, where a single detail so often takes the blame. Here the detail was worn by a woman the whole Salon could name, the wife of a Paris banker.
What You'll Discover
Who she was before the portrait.
What was in her powder.
Why the title is a letter.
What became of Gautreau.