Portrait of Madame X

Why was this the most referenced painting at the Met Gala?

John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 109.9 cm | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

Three separate guests at this year’s Met Gala arrived in outfits referencing the same painting. That painting is John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, and it is currently hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the same building that hosted the event.

The subject is Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a Louisiana-born socialite living in Paris, and the painting almost ended Sargent’s Paris career. When it was shown at the Paris Salon of 1884, the scandal centred on a single detail: a jewelled strap, fallen from her right shoulder. In the social context of 1884, a fallen shoulder strap on a married woman of Gautreau’s social position implied that she was offering something sexual. This is barely hinted at in the rest of the composition, but that one detail said all it needed to. After the exhibition, Sargent repainted the strap in the upright position.

What the painting actually shows is a woman who has decided to be looked at. The profile, the black dress, the ivory skin, and the confidence of the pose, are all purposeful. Gautreau sat for Sargent over many months and was very invested in the result. The detail that Paris found intolerable at the Salon was not her shoulder, but her face. Gautreau doesn’t look at the viewer, or directly invite anything, but it was obvious that she knew what she was doing. They had seen paintings that were far more explicit, but the idea of a woman who used her beauty for herself rather than for her audience was, in 1884, the thing that caused most offence.

Portrait of Madame X is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84 (original version, showing the fallen right shoulder strap as exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884, before Sargent repainted it in the upright position). Oil on canvas | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.