One slipped shoulder strap nearly ended John Singer Sargent's career in Paris.
At the 1884 Paris Salon, Sargent showed a socialite in a black gown with one jewelled strap fallen from her shoulder. Crowds jeered and critics called it vulgar. Sargent repainted the strap, kept the picture for over thirty years, then sold it to the Met as the best thing he'd ever done.
The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, an American from New Orleans who had married a French banker twice her age and become a famous 'professional beauty' of Paris society, known for her lavender-tinted powder. Sargent, another ambitious expatriate, asked to paint her rather than being commissioned, hoping a striking Salon picture would bring him portrait work. After many refusals to other painters, she agreed in 1883.
She was a restless sitter; Sargent complained of her 'unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness'. He made around thirty preparatory drawings and settled on a demanding pose: body facing forward, head turned in sharp profile, one arm braced on a table. Her skin, painted with lead white, rose madder, vermilion, viridian and bone black, is startlingly pale against the dark dress and brown background, and only her rosy ear hints at ordinary flesh.
When it was shown in 1884 as Portrait of Mme ***, few were fooled about who it was. In the original, the right strap had slipped off her shoulder, and one critic quipped that one more struggle and the lady would be free. Women in the crowd jeered, reviewers called her corpse-like and the pose indecent, and a caricature showed her dress falling off. Gautreau and her mother came to the studio in tears asking him to withdraw it. He refused, but later repainted the strap securely on her shoulder.
The scandal set Sargent back in France and may have nudged him towards London and America, where he became hugely successful. He kept the canvas for decades, and in 1916 sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, telling its director he supposed it was the best thing he had ever done. An unfinished version, with the strap still unresolved, is in the Tate in London.
Source: Wikipedia — Portrait of Madame X · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
