Madame X Revealed
The painting is enormous, standing nearly seven feet tall. There is a strong use of dramatic monochromes, a stark difference between black and white and a powerful use of rich, deep browns.
John Singer Sargent, painter of beautiful women and powerful men, displayed his portrait of 23-year-old Virginie Gautreau at the 1884 Paris Salon. There is an intimacy implied in the relationship between the master painter and the great beauty he depicts. Madame Gautreau, like Sargent an expatriated American, had made it to the top through her wit, her looks and her social strategy. Sargent portrays her as a creature of tense elegance, with a profile as sharp and precise as if carved out of some hard, brittle material. She wears the crescent-shaped tiara of Diana the huntress - she is a woman of predatory sensuality.
In the original version, Sargent shows the New Orleans Creole with one strap of her dress dangling from her shoulder suggesting, to outraged Parisian viewers, either the prelude or the aftermath of sex. It scandalized the Paris establishment, causing a furor that neither Sargent nor Gautreau would live down. It crippled Sargent's bid to establish himself as a portrait painter in the City of Light and drove Gautreau into social exile.
Some say Madame X was Sargent's greatest painting - the brilliant but superficial society portraits with which he will be eternally associated came after that.
"Strapless: The Rise of John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X" by Deborah Davis provides a closer look at this chronicle of miscalculation.
John Singer Sargent, painter of beautiful women and powerful men, displayed his portrait of 23-year-old Virginie Gautreau at the 1884 Paris Salon. There is an intimacy implied in the relationship between the master painter and the great beauty he depicts. Madame Gautreau, like Sargent an expatriated American, had made it to the top through her wit, her looks and her social strategy. Sargent portrays her as a creature of tense elegance, with a profile as sharp and precise as if carved out of some hard, brittle material. She wears the crescent-shaped tiara of Diana the huntress - she is a woman of predatory sensuality.
In the original version, Sargent shows the New Orleans Creole with one strap of her dress dangling from her shoulder suggesting, to outraged Parisian viewers, either the prelude or the aftermath of sex. It scandalized the Paris establishment, causing a furor that neither Sargent nor Gautreau would live down. It crippled Sargent's bid to establish himself as a portrait painter in the City of Light and drove Gautreau into social exile.
Some say Madame X was Sargent's greatest painting - the brilliant but superficial society portraits with which he will be eternally associated came after that.
"Strapless: The Rise of John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X" by Deborah Davis provides a closer look at this chronicle of miscalculation.
posted by Flora at 8:17 AM
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