The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gorgeous New John Singer Sargent Exhibition Proves There’s Much More to ‘Madame X’ Than That Scandalous Strap

For John Singer Sargent enthusiasts, Gilded Age buffs, and fashion historians alike, the story of Madame X’s notorious debut at the Paris Salon of 1884 is a tale as old as time. When the prodigious 28-year-old painter immortalized the idiosyncratic beauty of Madame Pierre Gautreau, a fellow American in Paris, he rendered her precisely—from her auburn chignon and prominent nose to her lavender-tinged complexion and figure-hugging black dress, whose jeweled strap had slid off her right shoulder.

Yet scandal quickly followed, the latter detail doing little to dispel Gautreau’s already controversial reputation. Savaged by critics for the portrait, Sargent famously repainted the strap in the upright position—but the damage was done.

In 1915, after holding onto the painting for more than 30 years, Sargent—who eventually resettled in London—sold Madame X to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it has become a highlight of the collection. “It’s a portrait that’s so compelling, and people are always so fascinated and want to know more about her,” Stephanie L. Herdrich, Alice Pratt Brown curator of American painting and drawing at The Met, tells Vogue. Over the last three decades, Herdrich has become a specialist in all things Sargent, proudly calling herself Madame X’s “caretaker, travel companion, and PR rep.”

“Even though people think they’re familiar with the painting’s story,” she adds, “I thought there was more to say about it.”

At first, Herdrich wanted to “set the record straight” and share a “more complex and nuanced” retelling of Madame X’s creation, reception, and impact through an exhibition focused on the painting. But over the last six years, that concept turned into “Sargent and Paris,” a spectacular and comprehensive show on the artist’s seminal decade in the French capital that culminates in the 1884 masterpiece. On view from April 27 to August 3 at The Met, it was organized with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it will travel later this year. (Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death, “Sargent and Paris” will represent the first-ever monographic exhibition of his work in France and the first time Madame X has been exhibited in the country in over 40 years.)

“In thinking about a show that made sense for our two institutions, the idea of Sargent’s early career in Paris, a very formative period in his life, seemed like a perfect match,” says Herdrich. She adds that Musée d’Orsay’s holdings include “magnificent Sargents” like La Carmencita (1892), one of the first works by an American painter to be purchased by the French state and the first portrait by Sargent to enter a public collection. “Sargent is much less known in France [than in America],” she notes, “so the show is also an opportunity to introduce him to international audiences.”

Nevertheless, even die-hard Sargent fans are in for a treat: For starters, the show’s approximately 100 works include the crème de la crème of Sargents from across the globe. “In a lot of cases, the works that you see here are among the one, two, three most cherished works within [the private and institutional lenders’] respective collections,” remarked Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French director and chief executive officer, at a press preview for “Sargent and Paris.”

The exhibition begins chronologically with the promising portraits and still lifes that Sargent made as an 18-year-old art student who moved to Paris by way of Florence, where he was born in 1856. Here and throughout the show, we see him pay homage to past masters, like Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez and Frans Hals, and engage with contemporaries such as Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, and Paul César Helleu. Subsequent galleries explore his landscapes and architectural studies from travels to Italy, Spain, and Morocco and show how paintings of fashionable Parisiennes by Sargent and his peers established a new, more modern kind of portraiture.

“I think people will be surprised to see the amount of work Sargent does in this decade and how good it is,” says Herdrich, referring to the mid-1870s to 1880s. “We think of Sargent as this amazing portraitist and that his opulent portraits of the 1890s are his boldest, but there’s something about this early period that is more intense and daring. He’s putting himself out there and taking risks to develop a strong artistic voice.”

Of course, nowhere does Sargent’s audaciousness shine more clearly than in Madame X. “It’s such an ambitious portrait for him,” Herdrich says. “He seeks Madame Gautreau out and asks her to pose for him, determined to create an attention-grabbing masterpiece for the Salon.” She notes Sargent’s admiration for Gautreau’s profile and artificial skin tone, achieved through layers of cosmetics. “Sargent made more preparatory studies for Madame X than for almost any other painting in his career. It’s as if by drawing her, he’s really trying to understand her unusual beauty.”

Despite debuting under the title Madame *** (it was Salon tradition to protect the identity of the sitter), the painting’s subject was immediately recognized. While some people critiqued the portrait for being harsh and unflattering, the disapproval of others ran deeper. Born to French parents in New Orleans, Gautreau moved to France with her mother after her father died during the Civil War.

“She becomes famous just for being beautiful but is always considered an outsider in Paris society,” Herdrich says. Many resented her social position, looking down on her parents’ fortune from farming cotton, indigo, and sugarcane through the forced labor of enslaved people: “The idea that this American had infiltrated French society was something that people were very offended by,” Herdrich adds.

With help from research assistant Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, she scoured French journals of the day and discovered just how close Gautreau was to the center of French political power. (One engraving they found shows her next to the president and prime minister at a party.) She also found commentary from a writer for the newspaper L’Illustration who, in 1881, deemed Americans “inconsiderate”: “They have painters, like Mr. Sargent, who take away our medals and pretty women who eclipse ours.” (Despite not setting foot in America until he was 20, Sargent, the son of American parents, always considered himself an American.) The fact that Gautreau’s head was turned away from the viewer in Sargent’s portrait only enhanced the sense of her haughtiness.

But while Gautreau’s décolletage and fallen strap garnered negative attention, the same Salon featured many paintings of women in low-cut dresses or nude figures “in the guise of allegory,” says Herdrich. So, to help contextualize Madame X, a room in the exhibition features projected reproductions of other artworks shown that year, as well as pertinent cartoons and reviews reinforcing the double standard around Gautreau’s perceived immodesty.

Even after Gautreau’s death, the lore persisted. In the 1950s, a Sargent scholar wrote that the American beauty, who was married to a French banker, had an affair with her gynecologist, Samuel-Jean Pozzi, whom Sargent famously painted in a crimson cloak. (That picture is also on view in “Sargent and Paris.”) “That’s one rumor I really want to debunk,” says Herdrich. “Both portraits are amazing and sensuous, but there is no concrete evidence to support that claim. In perpetuating that rumor—oftentimes the two portraits are purposefully hung near each other—there’s a tendency to denigrate Madame Gautreau. It also takes away from the accomplishments of someone who was a pioneering surgeon.”

When Madame X was first created, the sitter considered it a masterpiece. “She was all in—however, both she and Sargent miscalculated how people in society would respond,” says Herdrich. In a letter to The Met’s director on the occasion of selling the work to the museum, Sargent called Madame X “the best thing I’ve done.”

Yet while his fame continued to skyrocket in spite of the criticism, the artist became “more aware of pleasing patrons” after Madame X, Herdrich says, making these early works among his purest and most expressive. “Sargent’s work is so familiar to us today, but it’s important to know, at the time, it was truly pushing the boundaries of portraiture.”