Strapless (28 page)

Years after the portrait arrived at its current home in New York, yet another mystery presented itself. Curators at the Metropolitan realized that
Madame X
was not wearing her original gold frame. A photograph of Sargent posing with the painting in his Paris studio in 1884 showed that first frame in glorious detail, a contrast to the simple gilded strip of wood enclosing
Madame X
in her new home.

In 1989, the museum began an extensive inventory, and in the process searched through its vast collection of frames in the hope that the original one for
Madame X
might be there. After a year of studying and measuring hundreds of frames, curators reached the disappointing conclusion that Sargent had removed the original frame before sending the painting to San Francisco in 1915. Perhaps the heavy weight was a problem; the painting was being shipped all the way to America’s West Coast. A more appropriate frame than the single wood-strip version was, however, found in the museum’s inventory, one constructed between 1892 and 1899 in a lavish period style by the New York framer Thomas A. Wilmurt. This is the frame that
Madame X
wears today.

Even in the case of the most well-known works of art, details are obscured by time and things get lost. With
Madame X,
the frame was lost, the replica was lost, and even the scandal itself was lost, as eyewitnesses died off and the fallen strap was forgotten. Most significant, the person in the painting was lost.

The woman who never worked a day in her life, except as a professional beauty, now works six days a week, putting her best face forward for the thousands who pass through the American Wing of the Metropolitan weekly.
Madame X
has been described as “the face that launched a thousand loan requests.” Museums around the world frequently ask to borrow the painting to hang in temporary exhibitions; most of these requests are refused. In a rare exception, she was absent from the Metropolitan for several months in 2002, when she was sent to Jefferson Alumni Hall at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia to take the place of Thomas Eakins’s
The Gross Clinic,
which had been loaned for a traveling Eakins exhibition that was then at the Metropolitan.

If
Madame X
were on the market today, the line of suitors would be endless. The works of the artists who were stars in 1884—Gérôme, Henner, Puvis de Chavannes, Benjamin-Constant, Bouguereau, Cormon, and Chaplin—have not had the enduring fame that has been bestowed on
Madame X.
Today, a great Gérôme or a Bouguereau might command a few million dollars. But
Madame X
would be worth tens of millions, for she is a star attraction.

Amélie Gautreau’s image is immediately familiar to people who have never entered the Metropolitan Museum. She is the idol of fashion designers who invoke the elegance of her famous black gown when searching for a definition for
chic.
One of her descendants, the artist and designer Angèle Parlange, has paid homage to her with a line of sumptuous fabrics that feature Amélie’s profile and a signature X. Parlange’s parents live on Parlange plantation, once home to Virginie Ternant Parlange, her daughter Marie Virginie, and young Amélie. It is still a working farm, and it is just as much a showplace as it was in the nineteenth century.

New Orleans residents continue to fall under
Madame X
’s spell. Several years ago, an Avegno descendant opened a restaurant and named it Gautreau’s. Diners there sit beneath framed hotel and restaurant bills from the south of France—all bearing the name Gautreau. An antique dealer, Charles “Chuck” Robinson, has spent ten years restoring 927 Toulouse, the French Quarter house built by Philippe Avegno, Amélie’s grandfather, which she inherited from her father and sold in 1884, the year of her great disappointment. This monument to Creole life, complete with its original walled garden, now features a Madame X suite, where a full-size copy of the portrait hangs over the fireplace.

In 2000, the noted doll maker Madame Alexander included a Madame X doll in its limited-edition Arts series. The doll, a brunette with jeweled straps, black gloves, and a train on her dress, is already a collector’s item, subject to feverish rounds of bidding on eBay.

Madame X,
or versions of her, appear widely in the media: on the cover of
The New Yorker;
as embodied by the actress Nicole Kidman posing in
Vogue;
in an episode of the television show
Will & Grace.
Almost 120 years old,
Madame X
was paid a high compliment when she was named “Babe
du Jour
” at
popula.com
, a website that identifies the best of vintage images and objects. She has also inspired a play by Ann Ciccolella, a ballet score by Patrick Soluri, and a memoir by one of her Avegno relatives, Mettha Westfeldt Eshleman.

Today,
Madame X
shows some signs of age; the cracks in the paint are due probably to Sargent’s rolling up the canvas to transport it from Brittany to Paris before it was completely dry, or to his applying quick-drying paints over slow-drying ones. The professional beauty whose fashion choices were reported in the newspapers and who was rarely seen in the same dress twice now wears the same gown every day. She is famous, as she once wished, but no one ever calls Madame X by her true name: Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau.

8 “have seen the last of Mardi Gras”: Augusto Miceli,
The Pickwick Club of New Orleans
(New Orleans: Pickwick, n.d.), p. 8.

8 The event was a great success: Robert C. Reinders,
End of an Era
(Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1998), p. 157.

8 The Krewe of Comus resolved: Miceli,
The Pickwick Club of New Orleans,
p. 11.

8 “The city care forgot,” the best place, “the most glamorous”: Reinders,
End of an Era,
pp. 151-152.

10 one of the unhealthiest cities: Ibid., p. 87.

11 the largest real estate holdings: Robert de Berardinis, telephone interview with the author, July 13, 2002.

13 Ternant home inventory: Brian J. Costello,
From Ternant to Parlange
(Baton Rouge: Franklin, 2002), pp. 65-73.

14 “the Lady of False River”: Ibid., p. 56.

15 an extensive library: Ibid., p. 81.

15 one who did not survive: Ibid., p. 83.

16
“le grand m’sieu”:
Ibid., p. 99.

16 “the girls of False River”: Ibid., p. 97.

17 Her Acadian grandfather: Ibid., p. 52.

19 “Dixie”:
www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/dixie.html
.

20 He and his brother Jean-Bernard: Robert de Berardinis, telephone interview.

21 Major Avegno’s “gallant little band”: United States War Department,
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,
Series 1, vol. 52, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989), p. 491.

21 “rallied for a moment”:
Daily Delta,
April 16, 1862.

21 “where the brave love to die”: Ibid.

23 In 1867 she and young Amélie: Theories conflict as to when the widowed Marie Virginie left New Orleans. If she traveled with Jean-Bernard Avegno and his family, she left soon after her husband died, in 1862. She would then have returned to Louisiana a few years later, since she was in New Orleans to sign papers relating to Anatole’s will and to bury her younger daughter, Valentine, in 1866. A more plausible theory is that Marie Virginie, Amélie, and Julie Ternant sailed together for France in 1867.

26 “an army whose task”: David P. Jordan,
Transforming Paris
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 220.

27 the first
grand passage:
“Paris Under Glass,”
France Magazine,
July/ August 2002, p. 48.

31 Such behavior would have been: Michael Miller,
The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 20.

31
filles à la cassette:
George Washington Cable,
The Creoles of Louisiana
(Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2000), p. 26.

32 hot-air balloon escape:
http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Hoop/4390/history2.htm
.

33 But the genealogist Robert de Berardinis: Robert de Berardinis, “‘Madame X’: Virginie Amélie ‘Mimi’ Avegno (Mme. Gautreau) and a Family Note to Art History,”
National Genealogical Society Quarterly,
90, no. 1 (March 2002), p. 65.

33 The Communards, as the dissidents: Jordan,
Transforming Paris,
p. 345.

36 “an habitual state of mental derangement”: Costello,
From Ternant to Parlange,
p. 113.

41 They would instead share:
Contract de Mariage entre M. Pierre-Louis Gautreau et Mademoiselle Avegno.
Paris, M. Deves, notary, 1878.

48 “genius for grooming,” “fragrance of sensuality”: Patrice Higonnet,
Paris, Capital of the World,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 115.

48 “In Paris, half the female population”: Quoted ibid., p. 115.

49 “There is no falsehood”: Baronne Staffe,
My Lady’s Dressing Room
(New York: Cassell, 1892), p. 8.

50 “to be seen and to shine”: Octave Uzanne,
The Modern Parisienne
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), p. 170.

50 “spiritualized”: Ibid., p. 28.

50 “is even accomplishing” . . . “anathematized”: Charles Baudelaire,
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays,
ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 33.

51 “The combined business”: Uzanne,
The Modern Parisienne,
p. 27.

53 A famous cartoon: Valerie Steele,
Paris Fashion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 101.

54 “women wore high coiffures,” “effervescence”: Gabriel-Louis Pringue,
30 Ans de Dîners en Ville
(Paris: Édition Revue Adam, 1948), p. 212. Translation by Mark Urman.

57 “La Belle Américaine”:
The New York Herald,
March 30, 1880.

57 “And if I am”: Edwin H. Blashfield, “John Singer Sargent—Recollections,”
The North American Review,
June 1925.

58 “The mother-of-pearl coloring”: Pringue,
30 Ans de Dîners en Ville,
p. 213.

59 “In Saint-Malo-Paramé”: Perdican, “Courrier de Paris,”
L’Illustration,
August 11, 1883, p. 83.

59 “could not help stalking her”: Edward Simmons,
From Seven to Seventy: Memoirs of a Painter and a Yankee
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), p. 127.

62 “I learnt my trade”: Quoted in John Milner,
The Studios of Paris
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 18.

65 “a Parisian woman never”: Ibid., p. 45.

65
au premier coup:
Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray,
John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 2.

65 then racing forward: Evan Charteris,
John Sargent
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), p. 28.

66
“En art, tout”:
Ibid.

68 family members believed: Stanley Olson,
John Singer Sargent: His Portrait
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), p. 6.

69 He wrote that Mary: F. W. [Fitzwilliam] Sargent Papers, 1820-1889, Reel D317. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

70 “the land of rocks”: Quoted in Charteris,
John Sargent,
p. 22.

71 “makes me shake myself”: Quoted in Olson,
John Singer Sargent,
p. 46.

71 “one of the most talented”: Quoted in Marc Simpson,
Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, and Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1997), p. 7.

72 “We cleared the studio”: Quoted in Charteris,
John Sargent,
p. 37.

78 “the artist is engaged”: Lorne Campbell, “Portraiture,”
The Grove Dictionary of Art
(online), ed. Laura Macy.
www.groveart.com
.

79 “increased sense of life and personality”: George T. M. Shackelford and Mary Tavener Holmes,
A Magic Mirror: The Portrait in France, 1700-1900
(Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), p. 9.

80 The biographer Stanley Olson: Olson,
John Singer Sargent,
p. 57.

81 The next time his name: Ibid.

81 Emily told Vernon Lee: Carter Ratcliff,
John Singer Sargent
(New York: Abbeville, 1982), p. 41.

82 It could hold up to seven thousand: Lois Marie Fink,
American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, and Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), p. 119.

83 Many artists were condemned: Milner,
The Studios of Paris,
p. 51.

83 Edward Simmons, the American: Simmons,
From Seven to Seventy,
p. 127.

84 “Later on came Mme. [Gautreau]”: “The Paris Salon and the American Exhibits,”
The New York Herald,
May 1, 1890.

84 Gyp, a satirist: Milner,
The Studios of Paris,
p. 53.

85 “To my uneducated eye”: F. W. [Fitzwilliam] Sargent Papers, Reel D317. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

85
“un charmant portrait”:
Henri Houssaye,
Revue des Deux Mondes,
1877, quoted in Ormond and Kilmurray,
John Singer Sargent,
p. 42.

88 “one of the best portraits of the Salon”: Outremer, “American Painters of the Salon of 1879,”
Aldine,
9, no. 12 (1879), pp. 370-371, quoted in Simpson,
Uncanny Spectacle,
p. 85.

88 “No American has ever”: Quoted in Ormond and Kilmurray,
John Singer Sargent,
p. 44.