MY LAST POST OF GHOST STORIES PART DEUX REMINDED ME OF SARGENT'S MADAME X PAINTING. IT INSPIRED ME TO DO SOME REAL DIGGING ABOUT THE STORY BEHIND IT.
Portrait of Madame X is the informal title of a portrait painting by John Singer Sargent of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, wife of Pierre Gautreau. Virginie was an American expat who married a French banker, and became notorious in Parisian high society for her beauty and rumored infidelities. She wore lavender powder [so chic!] and prided herself on her appearance. It was the period in which in London the term 'professional beauty', was used as a woman who uses personal skills to advance to elite status, which was used to describe her.
Portrait of Madame X is the informal title of a portrait painting by John Singer Sargent of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, wife of Pierre Gautreau. Virginie was an American expat who married a French banker, and became notorious in Parisian high society for her beauty and rumored infidelities. She wore lavender powder [so chic!] and prided herself on her appearance. It was the period in which in London the term 'professional beauty', was used as a woman who uses personal skills to advance to elite status, which was used to describe her.
Sargent displayed his portrait of Gautreau in the Salon of 1884 and was met with a storm of criticism and scandal.
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"Vernon Lee, friend of Sargent, described him by saying:
“I feel certain that his conscious endeavor, his self-formulated program, was to paint whatever he saw with absolute and researchful fidelity, never avoiding ugliness nor seeking after beauty. But, like most, though perhaps not all, supreme artists. John Sargent was not aware of what he was really about, nor in what manner his superficial verbal program was for ever disregarded by the unspoken, imperious synthesis of his particular temperament and gifts. Also like other painters of those days, John Sargent did not know that seeing is a business of the mind, the memory and the heart, quite as much as of the eyes; and the valeurs which the most stiff-necked impressionist could strive after were the values of association and preference. Now to his constitution, ugliness and vulgarity were negative values, instinctively avoided. In theory, John Sargent would doubtless have defended Manet for cutting some of his figures in half, and even decapitating them by the frame, let alone choosing to portray bounders and sots in ballet stalls and bars. I can almost hear him [arguing] for Renoir's crowd of cads and shop-girls under umbrellas and for Degas's magnificent lady in her bathroom, under the ministrations of a corn-cutter
. . .
it seemed as if for years, he was engrossed in perpetually dissatisfied attempts to render adequately the ‘strange, weird, fantastic, curious’ beauty of that peacock-woman, Mme. Gautreau.”
“I feel certain that his conscious endeavor, his self-formulated program, was to paint whatever he saw with absolute and researchful fidelity, never avoiding ugliness nor seeking after beauty. But, like most, though perhaps not all, supreme artists. John Sargent was not aware of what he was really about, nor in what manner his superficial verbal program was for ever disregarded by the unspoken, imperious synthesis of his particular temperament and gifts. Also like other painters of those days, John Sargent did not know that seeing is a business of the mind, the memory and the heart, quite as much as of the eyes; and the valeurs which the most stiff-necked impressionist could strive after were the values of association and preference. Now to his constitution, ugliness and vulgarity were negative values, instinctively avoided. In theory, John Sargent would doubtless have defended Manet for cutting some of his figures in half, and even decapitating them by the frame, let alone choosing to portray bounders and sots in ballet stalls and bars. I can almost hear him [arguing] for Renoir's crowd of cads and shop-girls under umbrellas and for Degas's magnificent lady in her bathroom, under the ministrations of a corn-cutter
. . .
it seemed as if for years, he was engrossed in perpetually dissatisfied attempts to render adequately the ‘strange, weird, fantastic, curious’ beauty of that peacock-woman, Mme. Gautreau.”
