Madame Gautreau redux - portrait of madame Pierre Gautreau by Gustave Courtois, 1891

 

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. 

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."

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. 

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....

A contemporary illustration of the painting.

The Courtois portrait is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay.

Just as in the Sargent portrait, the strikingly pink/orange ear against so much white skin is rather alarming.

"Put a feather in his (or her) cap..." - twelve be-plumed portraits.

 

Princess Charlotte of Wales, Princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, by Alfred Edward Chalon, circa 1817-19.

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Gustave Courtois at the age of Thirty-One, by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, 1883.

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Julia, Lady Peel, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1827.

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Self-portrait, by Charles Gleyre, 1834.

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Portrait of an unknown lady with a dog, unknown Polish (?) artist, circa 1780-90s.

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Don Miguel de Castro, Congolese ambassador to the Netherlands, by Jaspar Beckx, circa 1643.

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 Dame aux plumes, by Georges Jacquemotte, circa 1900-10.

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Young Man with a Feather in his Hat, by Corneille de Lyon, circa third quarter of the sixteenth century.

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Portrait of an unknown lady, unknown artist, circa 1830s.

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Pes-Ke-Le-Cha-Co, Chief of the Pawnees, by Henry Inman, circa 1832-33.

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Maria Cristina of Naples and Sicily, Duchess of Genoa, later Queen of Sardinia, by Giacomo Berger, 1816.

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An Old Man in Military Costume, by Rembrandt, circa 1630-31.

Carl Ernst von Stetten, by Gustave Courtois, circa 1878

Carl Ernst von Stetten (7 March 1857, Augsburg – 1942), Bavarian artist.  He went to Paris in the 1870s for training, and there met Courtois and Dagnan-Bouveret at the studio of Gérôme; it was for Courtois and Stetten the beginning of a lifelong friendship.  The young Stetten posed for several portraits and was a model for works by his friend (and probable lover).

Saint Sébastien, ND.

The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, ND.

The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (detail).

Three paintings of Maurice Deriaz, by Gustave Courtois

"Portrait de l'athlète Maurice Deriaz", 1907.

Maurice Deriaz and his older brother, Emile, were the most famous of seven athletic brothers. They were born in Baulmes, Switzerland - Maurice in 1885 - but lived in France from an early age. Maurice was five foot six and weighed about two hundred pounds. His neck was nineteen inches around, his chest forty-eight, and his waist thirty-five. His thighs measured twenty-six inches, calves sixteen-and-a-half, forearms fourteen, and his biceps seventeen. He was celebrated for his weight-lifting feats, his impressive gymnastic abilities, and as a champion Greco-Roman wrestler. Called Le lion suisse or Roi de la beauté plastique, speaking fluent English, German, and Russian, he performed all over Europe. As his career wound down, he acquired a factory which produced reeds for oboes, clarinets, saxophones.  He would often return to visit his home town and he eventually returned to live in Baulmes, where he died in the summer of 1974.

Hercule au pied d'Omphale, 1912.

Persée délivrant Andromède, 1913.

I don't know if Deriaz commissioned them or how, otherwise, he came into possession of the three paintings by Courtois.  But he donated all three to the municipality of Baulmes, where they are hung along the staircase of the Hôtel de Ville.

Deriaz modeling for Courtois in the latter's studio.

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"Bouderie" Gustave Courtois dans son atelier, by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, 1880.  Courtois looks very jolly, but not so the unknown woman;
the title, "Bouderie", translates as sulkiness, so perhaps that's part of the story here.

Gustave-Claude-Étienne Courtois (May 18, 1852, Pusey – November 25, 1923, Paris), French painter, whose work is in the academic style. He showed an early interest in art, and at the age of seventeen, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There, Courtois formed a close friendship with a fellow student, the naturalist painter Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (January 7, 1852, Paris – July 3, 1929, Quincey), that lasted a lifetime; beginning in the 1880s they shared a fashionable studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and Dagnan-Bouveret married Courtois' cousin. Both artists would eventually be awarded the Légion d'honneur, as chevalier and officier, respectively.

(Detail of the above painting.)

Dagnan-Bouveret and Courtois, with a model, in their studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Courtois and Dagnan-Bouveret, 1888.

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1 November, 2016: I just came across this wonderful sketch of Deriaz by Courtois, dated 1911. 

"Se faire un chemin par la force" is a French translation of "Fit via vi" ("a way is made by force") a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid .