John Singer Sargent · 1883–84
Madame X
A silhouette that ended two reputations and rescued one.
01Where it came from
Sargent showed this at the Paris Salon in 1884. The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, an American in Paris known for her appearance, and the strap of her gown was originally painted fallen off the shoulder. The reaction was severe enough that he repainted the strap and left the country for London.
He kept the picture for about thirty years, then sold it to the Met in 1916, asking that the sitter not be named in the title. By then he considered it the best thing he had done.
◆What it is made of
02What the model made of it
The model has nothing to decide here. Sargent already cut her out, and a century before anyone wrote an edge detector he had made the single most legible silhouette in the museum. The machine simply agrees with him.
03Why this one move
Sargent cut this figure out of its background so cleanly that the edge does most of the work. Pull the surface apart into the samples that describe it and the edge is the last thing to go.
04Worth looking at
Break her into dust and the profile is the last thing to go. The scandal was never the dress. It was that a line this exact could be drawn around a living woman.