strapless john singer sargent and the fall of madame x

The records showed the family bought 'white rice face powder,' a much less exotic - and less dangerous - beauty treatment. It helped her unlock Gautreau's 'best-kept beauty secret.'įor more than a century, it had been rumored that she took small doses of arsenic to maintain her ultra-pale, nearly cadaverous complexion.

'And I thought, 'Is this the way it's going to be?' 'īut in provincial Brittany, where Gautreau had also lived, Davis struck gold.Ī local archivist showed her a detailed financial ledger that belonged to the Gautreau family - 'essentially, their American Express bills,' Davis says. 'The butcher looked at me in great bewilderment and went in the back room and came out with his portly wife and said, 'No, this is Madame Gautreau.' She saw a butcher shop called 'Gautreau.'Īmazed at her luck, she went inside, showed the butcher a picture of Virginie, and asked him if he knew anything about Madame Gautreau. Her worst moment came when she went to an address where Madame X had lived. 'I literally walked around with her picture and asked people if they'd ever heard of her,' she says in a phone interview. In Paris, she sought out places associated with Gautreau. That is the way it appears today on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.īut what was 'Madame X' really like, and what did she think of Sargent's painting of her? Davis went to France in search of answers. After the show, Sargent had touched it up, moving the strap back over her shoulder. He found evidence that the portrait had originally been painted with one of the straps of Gautreau's gown falling down over her shoulder, a risqué detail that was probably the source of much of the shock the painting produced in Belle Époque Paris. Trevor Fairbrother, a Sargent scholar, solved a major piece of the puzzle in 1981. Davis read, the more she became fascinated. That much was known - but little else - about Gautreau and the circumstances surrounding the painting, except that it had caused a scandal when it was first shown at the Paris Salon in 1884. It was a portrait of a young American woman living in Paris, Virginie Gautreau. Wearing it had reminded her of a character in a famous painting, and she searched through art books until she found it: 'Madame X,' a portrait by the virtuoso 19th-century American painter John Singer Sargent. A few years ago, she had borrowed a designer dress - black, chic, with jeweled straps - to attend the Golden Globe awards. That was true for Deborah Davis, whose background is not in art but as a story editor and script analyst for movie companies like Warner Bros., Disney, and Miramax.

An amateur with a little Nancy Drew-like curiosity and determination can go a long way.

Scholars aren't the only ones who have unraveled mysteries surrounding great art and great artists.

Strapless john singer sargent and the fall of madame x