Virginie Amélie Gautreau (née Avegno; 29 January 1859, New Orelans – 25 July 1915, Paris), an American-born Parisian socialite. Her French Creole father died during the Civil War, her younger sister soon after, and the following year her French-born mother returned to France with her surviving child, the eight-year-old Virginie; she would, throughout her life, go by her middle name Amélie. Educated at a convent school, at the age of nineteen she married forty-year-old banker and shipping magnate Pierre Gautreau. They had a daughter the following year; after her marriage in 1901, they would live separately. Considered one of Parisian society's most fashionable beauties - she was often referred to as la belle Mme. Gautreau in the press - she cut a particularly striking figure with her hennaed hair and extremely pale skin, accentuated further by her use of lavender-tinted face powder.
John Singer Sargent, still early in his career and captivated by the extreme "picturesqueness" of the lady, asked if he might paint her portrait. He made several sketches and the final work was included in the Paris Salon of 1884, where Sargent hoped it would prove a boost to his career. Instead, it provoked a scandal. The critics and public were offended by the great expanses of unadorned and violently pale skin and, more than anything, the fallen strap; Sargent had painted the right strap of her gown as having slipped from her shoulder. It was seen as just too suggestive, certainly too much so for a respectable society portrait, and the artist and model were accused of being deliberately provocative.
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| A contemporary photograph of Sargent's portrait in its original state. |
Madame Gautreau refused the painting, and Sargent, depressed and abashed, decamped for London, taking the painting with him. Later he painted out the offending strap, repainting it in its "proper" place. But he was always proud of the piece, though, displaying it prominently in his studios in Paris and London. And in 1916, when he sold the painting - now discretely dubbed "Madame X" - to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he wrote of it to the museum's director, "I suppose it is the best thing I have ever done."
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| Madame X (portrait of madame Pierre Gautreau), by John Singer Sargent, 1883-84. |
In the midst of the scandal, Madame Gautreau, embarrassed, had temporarily stepped away from the spotlight, but she seems to have developed rather an affection for its glare, a taste for a certain degree of notoriety. And seven years later she herself commissioned something of a response to Sargent's portrait. And in her portrait by Courtois she is every bit as unadorned - "naked" - as in Sargent's, her skin is as freakishly pale, her décolletage as deep, and in an amazingly cheeky reference to the scandalous work of 1884 - and which was instigated by the model - the strap was once again down. And it stayed down.
She commissioned another portrait, seven years after the Courtois, this time by Antonio de La Gándara; the suave result was said to have been her favorite.
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| Madame Pierre Gautreau, by Antonio de La Gándara, 1897 or 1898. |
There were other, later, portraits, completed after the turn of the century, when she was nearly fifty. The results, even with all the artists' flattery, pointed out the reality of her faded looks and she retreated from the world, becoming a recluse until her death at the age of fifty-six. So there was no hint of notoriety in her last years, though her will prominently included the names of two men, Victor-Amédée Callaux and Henri Favalelli, who were totally unknown to her family....
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| A contemporary illustration of the painting. |
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| The Courtois portrait is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay. |
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| Just as in the Sargent portrait, the strikingly pink/orange ear against so much white skin is rather alarming. |
