Fin de Siecle: Sargent and Madame X

Madame X scandalised late 19th Century Parisienne society by being painted with a slipped shoulder strap. Yet only a few years later Isadora Duncan danced in diaphanous dresses to great acclaim. More than a 100 years on, Christopher Wheeldon recreated the scandal for the balletic stage at the Royal Opera House in 2016. His ballet Strapless has music by Mark-Anthony Turnage, with sets and costumes by Bob Crowley.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is today remembered as the greatest portrait painter of his age. His bravura style of realism was unrivalled, leading Rodin to describe him as “the Van Dyck of our times.” The friendship between Sargent and the novelist Henry James has naturally led many to draw parallels between their works. Both were American expatriates living in Belle Époque Europe and each left behind vivid representations of the continent’s haute-monde. Whether in paint or on the page, they recorded the complicated interaction between the old European aristocracy and the new international class of the American ‘super-rich’. It was precisely out of this collision of worlds, Old and New, that Madame X (1883-4) emerged – along with the scandal that greeted its unveiling. Sargent’s portrait of the American-born Madame Pierre Gautreau remains his most famous work; indeed, he remarked towards the end of his life, “I suppose it is the best thing I have done.” But its significance runs deeper – the controversy surrounding the portrait would have a seismic impact on the young Sargent. Fleeing Paris for London, his confidence was so shaken that he even considered giving up painting altogether. Whilst he would eventually go on to great success as a society portraitist, something had been lost amid the uproar. The scandal would effectively end his flirtation with the avant-garde, and with it the experimental nature of his early work. For the art historical record, at least, Madame X would come to represent both triumph and tragedy.

Dr Fitzwilliam Sargent and his wife Mary had decided to leave behind a life of comfort in America, in exchange for a peripatetic existence in Europe. They were on a quest for culture. It was during their travels across the continent that their son, John, was born – in Florence – on 12 January 1856. He was educated ‘on the move’, which appeared to do him no harm. As a child, he spoke four languages, read voraciously, and displayed prodigious gifts for both the piano and for art. His talent for sketching naturally suggested a career as a painter. During his family’s wanderings from city to city, the teenage Sargent had taken art lessons in both Italy and Germany. For his formal training, however, his parents settled on Paris. It was not without consequence that they chose to enroll their son in the studio of Carolus-Duran. Their timing was no less significant. It was 1874 – the year of the first Impressionist exhibition.

For too long, art historians have presented the Paris art world of the 1870’s as ghettoised between two rival camps – the Academic and the Avant-Garde. This conventional narrative has painted the Salon as bulwark of traditionalism against the progressive tendencies of the Impressionists, with the French Academy blindly resisting the ‘Independents’. In reality, the situation was far messier than this binary division suggests. Sargent himself embodied the fluidity between the traditional and the ‘modern’. While he did indeed attend drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts, he was simultaneously studying with Carolus-Duran at the most progressive independent atelier in the city. Duran’s method of instruction was unique for his time and would leave an indelible stamp on Sargent’s art.

Duran was close friends with Manet, the most radical artist of his day. Like the avant-garde as a whole, they shared a fascination with the work of the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Velázquez. Love of all things Spanish had even caused Duran to affect a name-change – he had in fact been christened with the unwaveringly Gallic name of ‘Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand’. He would exhort his pupils: ‘Search for the half-tone, put down some accents, and then in the lights… Velázquez, Velázquez, Velázquez, ceaselessly study Velázquez.’ The Spanish master’s realism – an unerring illusion when seen at a distance, but created in reality by loose, broad, painterly mark-making – was precisely what many young Parisian painters were striving for in their own work. Duran’s method distinguished itself from Academic teaching on the one hand, and Impressionist practice on the other. If the former was characterised above all by line, and the latter by colour, then Duran’s approach was defined by tone. Unlike traditional teaching of the time, which insisted on precise preliminary drawing and under-painting, Duran preached painting ‘au premier coup’; a form of direct painting, whereby one brush stroke was placed next to another, each of the correct value. One student described the process: “all was solid, and there were no gradations by brushing the stuff off the lights gently into the darks or vice versa, because Duran wished us to actually make and match each bit of the tone of the surface.” Another summarised the aim as: “seek first for absolute truth of tone and colour, and getting this truth in the simplest and most obvious way.”

Sargent would adopt this tonal approach for the rest of his career. However, his innate virtuosity would carry it to an entirely unmatched pitch of achievement. Moreover, he would straddle two worlds – his solid modelling of form kept him from full-blown impressionism, but his loose, ‘sketchy’ brushwork set him apart from traditional academic painting. This state of ‘in-between’ was captured in the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, story of the time he borrowed Monet’s paint-box. Sargent, on finding that there was no black, was told by Monet that he had long since stopped using any in his work. Sargent, for whom black was essential in the modelling of form, via subtle shifts of tone, replied, ‘then I can’t paint.’ Sargent’s work was a world away from the ‘tight’, meticulous finish of academic painting, but he stopped short of adopting the Impressionist approach of painting as patches of pure colour. Rather than interpreting this as some sort of bloodless compromise – as many have – Sargent’s method was his own. Moreover, in the early part of his career, he deployed it with startling effect.

The young Sargent truly announced himself in the 1879 Paris Salon with a portrait of his teacher, Carolus Duran. Such was his evident ability, Henry James remarked that his work promised ‘the slightly “uncanny” spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.’ Portrait commissions naturally followed – but Sargent was at the same time also experimenting with landscape and genre pictures. His most obviously ambitious work was El Jaleo (1882), but it was a portrait, The Daughters of Edward D. Boit (1882) that signalled his capacity both for brilliance and risk-taking. Clearly drawing inspiration from Velázquez’s Las Meninas, so many things about the painting are strange and unconventional; from the format of the picture, which is square, to the fact that one of the girls is almost entirely subsumed by shadow. Ormond notes that such a portrait abounds “with psychological nuances and dissonances, underscored by his use of asymmetrical composition, and his feeling for the mysteriousness of light in shadowed spaces”. It stands as one the very greatest paintings of the nineteenth century – and held out a tantalising prospect of what might follow.

The portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau – to become immortalised as Madame X – was not a commission. Sargent had sought out Gautreau and persuaded her to sit. For Sargent, Gautreau’s striking and unconventional beauty offered an ideal subject with which to make an impact on the Salon. Before asking her, he had written to one of her relations, stating: ‘I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty’. One could rightly describe it as a collaboration between two expatriates, looking to cement their respective places in their adopted homeland, and in particular, on the Paris social stage. Gautreau, née Virginie Avengno (1859-1915), was from New Orleans, born to an American father and French mother. On moving to Paris, she married the successful banker Pierre Gautreau and quickly become a fixture of the society pages – as much for her looks as for her numerous alleged infidelities. She proved a lazy sitter, much to Sargent’s consternation, and the progress on the picture was slow. Nonetheless, it was ready in time for the 1884 Salon; exhibited as Portrait de Mme ***. Despite the evasive title, the subject’s identity was an open secret. Sargent had wished to make a splash, but very quickly it became clear he had misjudged his audience. Ralph Curtis, who was present at the opening, recounted, ‘(Sargent) was very nervous about what he feared, but his fears were far exceeded by the facts’.

What precisely provoked such outraged reaction? After all, it was reported that crowds swarmed the picture to the cries of ‘Détestable! Ennuyeux! Curieux! Monstrueux!’ Perhaps to a modern eye, it all seems a little hard to grasp. The Salon-going public were shocked by her décolletage; in particular, critics fell on the sexual suggestiveness of one strap having slipped down across her right shoulder. Le Figaro commented, “one more struggle and the lady will be free”. Sargent would hastily repaint the strap in its upright position, but the damage was done. Onlookers also took gory delight in her unusual and distinctive pale lavender skin. Curtis noted: ‘She looks decomposed. All the women jeer. Ah voilà “la belle!” “Oh quell horreur!” The fact that Sargent had portrayed the vivid redness of her ear – highlighting quite how much make-up Gautreau wore elsewhere – only added fuel. Her efforts at ‘whitening’ her skin were mocked as an attempt to contrive an ‘aristocratic’ look. Indeed, the controversy centered as much on class as it did female sexuality. Gautreau was condemned as a ‘professional beauty’ – a middle-class woman on the make, using her skills to attain status above her station. The scandal of 1865 surrounding Manet’s Olympia turned on precisely the same issues – but, of course, the earlier painting dealt with a woman from the lower classes. Madame X, touching as it did on the upper echelons of society, was arguably an even more combustible concern.

Was the painting itself truly so shocking? It is hard to disentangle whether the real ire was directed towards Sargent’s work, or the subject herself. It has been argued that the painting provided the perfect pretext for Parisian high society to vent its already extant disdain for Gautreau – a contempt that, up to then, had only been expressed via veiled allusion and innuendo. Regardless, the outcome for both painter and sitter was devastating – humiliation for Gautreau and possible professional ruin for Sargent. Curtis records, “John, poor boy, was navré… Mde. Gautreau and mère came to his studio “bathed in tears”. I stayed them off but the mother returned and caught him and made a fearful scene saying “Ma fille est perdue – tout Paris se moque d’elle…Elle mourira de chagrin”. Commissions in Paris evaporated overnight for Sargent – leaving Paris for London seemed to be his only option. The extent of how deeply the affair shook Sargent was revealed a year later, when he told Edmund Gosse that he had seriously entertained giving up painting for music or business. Unlike Manet, Sargent evidently did not possess the requisite stomach for such infamy.

In many regards, the scandal would serve Sargent well – the notoriety that carried over from Paris would eventually become benign celebrity in London – even veneration. He would go on to redefine the ‘grand manner’ portrait for his own age, and in doing so, paint many of the finest portraits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Portraits, such as that of Henry Lee Higginson (1903), arguably hold their own against any in history. So in what sense was Madame X a tragedy? Sargent’s pride in the portrait itself never wavered – he kept it on display in his studio, refusing all offers on the painting – only finally selling, after Gautreau’s death, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916. However, never again would he display quite the complexity and daring of The Boit Daughters. Something of that early appetite for experimentation was lost amid the shrieks of the Salon that day. His career after 1884, although dazzling in terms of success, seemed shorn of this hunger. The precariousness of his position had been brought home to him. On setting up his stall in London, he appears to have reconciled himself to being ‘just’ a society portrait painter – albeit a brilliant one. Sadly, he grew progressively more bored of portrait commissions and would relieve his frustration with landscape painting. He also arguably made the mistake of accepting a huge commission to decorate the Boston Library. While the resulting murals were not entirely without merit, he was unsuited to the task – worse still, it consumed time and energy that might have been put to more interesting use. Without the debilitating effects of the controversy, one cannot help but wonder what direction Sargent’s work might have taken.

At the time of his death in 1925, his reputation appeared immovable – but it was to suffer a swift and dramatic collapse. As the 20th century unfolded, he became the proverbial punching bag of modernist art critics and art school tutors. His paintings came to be dismissed as nothing more than displays of empty facility. Even in his own day, there was something a little strange about Sargent’s critical reception. The remark levelled at Monet – ‘only an eye, but what an eye!’ – was also regularly thrown at Sargent. He himself lamented that he was not given much credit for “insides”. But the idea that Sargent’s painting was devoid of psychological depth seems an odd one – a glance at his portrait of the Pailleron Children (1881), to take just one example, would suggest otherwise. After his death, his depiction of the upper classes was also criticised on moral grounds, as a defence of an antiquated status quo. To writers like Roger Fry, he represented everything that the avant-garde stood against (despite a younger, less ideological Fry having often championed Sargent’s work). One might be forgiven for detecting a note of envy in the attempts to diminish his talent – particularly in their degree of vitriol. Thankfully, recent years have seen a reappraisal of his work. The arcane debates of high-modernism – with its highly proscriptive canon of ‘heroes’ – have come to be seen as outmoded, even rather quaint. There has been a growing acknowledgement of painters who resist simple classification as either ‘Academic’ or ‘Avant-Garde’. Moreover, a new generation of contemporary painters, unencumbered by well-worn prejudices, have come to appreciate his work in a new light. Nonetheless, a nagging doubt remains about a road not taken – as such, Madame X will always stand as one of the great “what ifs?” of late-19^th century art.

FURTHER READING

Evan Charteris, John Sargent, London and New York 1927

Julius Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait, London and New York 1986

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits, Complete Paintings vol. 1, London 1998

James Lomax and Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian Age, London 1979

Elizabeth Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent, New York 1999