![]() ![]() So there they were, the American society madam and the American painter, both in their late 20s, both eager for their big break. And the young John Singer Sargent, who had commissions from fellow expats but craved French acceptance, was keen to make his. She, and her ambitious mother, were keen to make her name. Every artist wanted to make her in marble or paint.” Yet though she had public admirers and a packet of money, she still struggled to climb to the top of Parisian society the gossip pages took only limited notice of her, and as a Creole she would have been excluded from the highest echelons of the French beau monde. “Her head and neck undulated like that of a young doe…. ) “I remember seeing Madame de Gautrot, the noted beauty of the day, and could not help stalking her as one does a deer,” wrote the American expatriate artist Edward Simmons. Not conventionally pretty, she nevertheless cut a striking figure with her thin lips and extreme pallor according to one Sargent biographer, she not only covered herself with powder, but also consumed arsenic to sap her skin of colour. She was there to get married, big time – which she promptly did, to a banker more than twice her age, Pierre Gautreau. But Amélie had been brought to Paris for more than that. The City of Light must have seemed like a daydream after the devastation of the Civil War and the travails of Reconstruction that were just beginning. Her widowed mother had had enough, and after taking out loans on the family plantation she left with her daughter to Paris in 1867. In 1866 her young brother died too, of congestive fever. Her father died fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. She was born Virginie Amélie Avegno, the daughter of white Creole parents in New Orleans. Madame X, so alluring and so enigmatic, was once a bona fide celebrity – before it all came crashing down. ![]() ![]() But her mystery, her anonymity, is not the result of lost historical documents or the covering of artistic footprints. The stern face and the pseudonymous title have made her into a figure of mystery, an American Mona Lisa of inscrutable character. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the so-called ‘Madame X’, painted in 1884 and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has attracted and repelled generations of gallery-goers. Between her long neck and the plunging, heart-shaped neckline of her dress lie acres of flesh, as cold and pale as ice milk. On her head is a little diamond tiara, but other than that and the ring she wears no jewelry. Her hair is twisted up, away from her shoulders – which are bare save for two straps, somewhat unconvincingly holding up her cinched, classical black gown. Her right hand rests upon a bare wooden table, while her left hand, decorated with a wedding ring, clutches a folded fan. She looks off to the right, staring out into the middle distance, her mouth shut tight, her dainty nose directed ever so slightly downward. ![]()
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