John Singer Sargent’s Scandalous Paintings: An Introduction to Madame X and Dr. Pozzi at Home

Hen­ry James, per­haps the most famous Amer­i­can expa­tri­ate nov­el­ist of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, won a great deal of his fame with The Por­trait of a Lady. John Singer Sar­gent, per­haps the most famous Amer­i­can expa­tri­ate painter of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, won a great deal of his fame with a por­trait of a lady — but not before it seemed to kill his illus­tri­ous career at a stroke. When it was first shown to the pub­lic at the Paris Salon of 1884, Sar­gen­t’s Por­trait of Madame X drew a range of reac­tions from bit­ter dis­missal to near-vio­lent anger. But today, as Great Art Explained host James Payne says in the new video above, “it is gen­uine­ly hard to see what the fuss was about.”

“Twen­ty years before, in 1865, Manet had shown Olympia at the Salon, to a scan­dal­ized Paris. So why the shock now? The dif­fer­ence was that Manet’s Olympia was a pros­ti­tute, like the women in Toulouse-Lautrec’s paint­ing also on dis­play in 1884. But Madame X was part of French high soci­ety.” She was, all those first view­ers would have known, the socialite, banker’s wife, and “pro­fes­sion­al beau­ty” Vir­ginie Amélie Aveg­no Gautreau. Her rumored pen­chant for infi­deli­ties would­n’t have been unusu­al for her par­tic­u­lar place and time, but her back­ground as the New Orleans-born daugh­ter of a Euro­pean Cre­ole fam­i­ly cer­tain­ly would have.

Behold­ing Madame X, “Parisians were forced to con­front their own deca­dence, which they pre­ferred not to acknowl­edge, and this was where Sar­gent went wrong. The salons were a sacro­sanct part of French cul­ture, and he, a for­eign­er, was flaunt­ing immoral­i­ty in their faces with a paint­ing of anoth­er for­eign­er, an exot­ic one at that.” He’d already stirred up a cer­tain amount of con­tro­ver­sy three years ear­li­er with Dr. Pozzi at Home, anoth­er full-length por­trait that por­trayed its sub­ject – the high­ly accom­plished and noto­ri­ous­ly hand­some gyne­col­o­gist Samuel-Jean Pozzi — in a man­ner whose sheer infor­mal­i­ty verges on the con­cu­pis­cent.

Payne thus regards Dr. Pozzi and Madame X as “male-female ver­sions of the same type. They are both flam­boy­ant pea­cock fig­ures, with a streak of van­i­ty and a knack for seduc­tion. There is some­thing in the way they are posed which is uncon­ven­tion­al. They have an indi­rect gaze, and they both have supreme con­fi­dence verg­ing on arro­gance.” That only Sar­gent could have — or, at least, would have — cap­tured and trans­mit­ted those qual­i­ties with such direct­ness was­n’t appre­ci­at­ed quite so much at the time. Ostra­cized in Paris, where he’d been a sought-after por­traitist to the wealthy, he packed up Madame X and set off for Lon­don, where he soon rebuilt his career. The advice to do so came from none oth­er than Hen­ry James, who knew a thing or two about advan­ta­geous relo­ca­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How John Singer Sar­gent Became the Great­est Por­traitist Who Ever Lived — by Paint­ing “Out­side the Lines”

When John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” Scan­dal­ized the Art World in 1884

The Scan­dalous Paint­ing That Helped Cre­ate Mod­ern Art: An Intro­duc­tion to Édouard Manet’s Olympia

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Art His­to­ry School: Learn About the Art & Lives of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gus­tav Klimt, Frances Bacon, Edvard Munch & Many More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.