What do we look at when we look at John Singer Sargent?
It’s no special thing to have Madame X on view—the 1884 portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau has seldom left its place in the American Wing since the Met purchased it from the artist in 19161—and while there are some nice international additions to Sargent and Paris, a trip to the MFA Boston would scratch whatever itch remains after the Met’s holdings are exhausted.
And yet, a blockbuster Sargent exhibition remains a drop-everything event. Sargent startles you at every turn, no matter how familiar—or maybe because of familiarity. But what Sargent and Paris has that Madame X doesn’t is virtuoso curation to rival the painter’s bravura. More is said about Sargent’s gaze and the plasticity of desire in pairing the sketch of Albert Belleroche with one of Gautreau than a phonebook-stack of interpretive essays. The story of Madame X—“I suppose the best thing I’ve ever done,” Sargent acquiesced2—is rehabilitated from the standard of scandal, sensation, and sensuality, and reproach—the worst blow of his career.3 It has all of those, too, of course, but even better than the king’s jewels is the crown they sit in.
II. Suitable subjects.
The standard story is that the American expat Sargent presented the painting of American expat Gautreau at the 1883 Paris Salon, and the sensuality of the sagging shoulder strap was so salacious that painter and painted and painting were all ruined. It’s not entirely wrong—Gautreau endured social scorn after the painting’s debut, and Sargent was rattled by the blowback—but it’s not entire, either. The Madame X affair, not unlike the current academic consensus on Andrew Wyeth’s Helga series, was a calculated gamble by two shrewd players. If they each suffered in the short-term, there was a potential jackpot.
For Gautreau, that jackpot was the laundering of her outsider status into respectable French society. She had married into an established French family straight out of her convent school, and she was renowned in the papers for her sophistication and beauty. In spite of these and although she’d lived in Paris since she was eight and spoke French from childhood, she was often derided in the press as an American, and worse:
“One writer of the era used a litany of horrible racist stereotypes to criticize Gautreau’s Creole heritage, and he linked her affluence to commodities of the triangle trade. Specifically, he asserted that the ‘Beauty of the Season’ wore ‘diamonds [that] were bought with the produce of sugar-cane and coffee plantations. She was brought up in sub-tropical ease and listlessness, and among half-breeds who have no notions about women’s rights, higher planes of thought, and transcendentalism.’”
“Her mother’s family had amassed its fortune, at least in part, from Louisiana's brutal plantation economy,”4 Herdrich notes; her husband’s family fortune was “built on the import of guano—the nitrogen-rich excrement of seabirds or bats, commonly used as fertilizer—from Peru.” Nothing especially noble about fortunes built on slavery and bat shit, but it’s a bit rich that French society was closed to this woman on account of her Creole heritage and her canny navigation of patriarchy.
The great crime of the nouveau riche: not being the vieux riche. “Money,” opined one contemporary, “has been the lever which has opened the once narrow circle of society and admitted the ladies headed by . . . Madame Gautherot [sic], whose beauty is as the ideal of some painter.”
III. Some painter.
Meanwhile, John Singer Sargent was angling his own entry into the same circles, against similar headwinds. Sargent was born to American parents in Florence and lived abroad nearly all his life. His preternatural talents were celebrated in Paris from 1877 on, but always with an asterisk: “these Yankees [are] a little inconsiderate.”5 To infiltrate the city that was more his home than any American port, Sargent spread his talents, courting visual challenges and taking on the riskiest subjects. Sargent’s output from 1879-1882 is a real Green Eggs and Ham of super-hits: Can you paint a group portrait of an orchestra as it tunes up, looking down from the balcony? Can you paint them in the dark? Can you paint her in a hat? Can you paint them in boat? What about 82 sittings to get two squirmy children just right? Not only could he, but Sargent innovated with composition and palette in ways that remain fresh and compelling today.
So when “Madame Ramón Subercaseaux earned Sargent a prestigious second-class medal at the Salon . . . it also came with coveted hors concours status, meaning that he was no longer required to submit his paintings to the jury for acceptance into the Salon. Thus freed, in 1882 he sent his boldest, most ambitious work to date, El Jaleo, and Lady with the Rose.”6
This was strategic; and so was his approach of Gautreau. He sought and found an explosive subject for the 1883 Salon; he worked harder on it than on any other painting in his career. Gautreau was satisfied; she called it a masterpiece before it was shown.
But when the curtain raised to the public, the reception was brutally harsh to sitter and artist. Gautreau’s mother came to Sargent in tears, begging that the painting be removed from the Salon; Sargent was “crestfallen” by the thrashing he received in the press. He took the radical step of repainting the drooping strap up over Gautreau’s shoulder. And finally he left France entirely.
Gautreau’s gamble didn’t pay off. She wasn’t expelled from the country, but when good taste is the balance, the scandal around the picture was as good as an execution. A gallery in the exhibition is devoted to send-ups of Sargent’s painting—unkind to the artist, but how can you bounce back from having your nose be an object of national ridicule?
Sargent survived—flourished, even. Herdrich points out that he had been exploring the idea of finding patrons in England well before the scandal, and he eventually got away from the portrait painting he had grown to hate. During his Paris years, he built himself into the greatest practitioner of an art form that was already stepping into its own grave. Sargent got on with it—now with a reputation for being utterly fearless.
Sargent and Paris, on view through August 3, gives us that that painter—at his most reckless.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Here’s the Met’s record on the work.
As quoted by Stephanie Herdrich, “Sargent and Gautreau,” in Sargent and Paris, p. 185.
As reported by Sargent’s cousin, the painter Ralph Curtiss.
Herdrich, p. 168-169: “Her mother's family were among the richest landowners in Pointe Coupee Parish, farming cotton, indigo, and sugarcane through the forced labor of enslaved people at their plantation, Parlange, in New Roads." Raised in New Orleans, Amélie, who grew up speaking French, visited Parlange for holidays and withdrew there with her mother and siblings during the United States Civil War. Amélie's father, a major in the Confederate Army, died from wounds suffered at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, and her younger sister, Valentine, succumbed to yellow fever in 1866. The following year, seeing little hope for her diminishing family following the postwar collapse of the southern economy, Amélie's mother settled in Paris with her then eight-year-old daughter.”
Herdrich, p. 164.
Herdrich, p. 167.