Her right strap, you’ll notice, sits firmly in place.) (Compare to the painting at the top, the one at the Met. That original, the one exhibited in Paris in 1884, showed Madame Gautreau’s dress with the right strap suggestively falling off her shoulder. The painting shown to the right here is what it may have looked like. We can only speculate what it looked like. The painting that hangs in the Met today, “Madame X,” however, is not the same Madame X as the one that Sargent painted in 1884 and exhibited in Paris. "Madame X" is shown as it must have originally appeared Some said her white pallor and icy charm made her resemble a cadaver. Not all thought she was lovely to look at. She was rumored to mix her powder with mauve tint and to ingest arsenic wafers to make her skin more translucent, giving it even more of a bluish-purple tint. Gautreau achieved her affected, highly artificial look with hennaed hair, heavily penciled brows, rouged ears and powdered skin. Madame Gautreau was rumored to take great pains to be beautiful: Once they agreed, Sargent began to paint, devoting himself to capture the “strange, weird, fantastic, curious beauty of that peacock-woman, Mme. She, too, needed the publicity to maintain her social superiority. Sargent sent word to Madame Gautreau that she must sit for a portrait she consented, realizing that a rising tide lifts all boats. He felt that if he painted her, all Parisian society women would flock to his studio demanding that he paint their portraits. Once he laid eyes on her, he knew at once he must paint a portrait of her as an homage to her beauty – and a boost to his lagging career. It was only a year earlier that John Singer Sargent had met her at a party. It was 1884 and Madame Gautreau was the Talk of Paris. The subject of the painting is Madame Virginie Gautreau, a professional beauty, who moved in the top tiers of Paris society and was often mentioned in the scandal sheets for her numerous dangerous indiscretions and passion for self-display. “Madame X” was painted by the American society painter John Singer Sargent. In the Metropolitan Museum of New York hangs a seven-foot tall portrait of a rather pale woman in a black velvet evening dress held up by sparkly straps. "Madame X" by American portrait painter John Singer Sargent, 1884
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