Her name was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. When Sargent offered the portrait to the Metropolitan Museum in January 1916 he added a line to the letter: on account of the row he had had with the lady years ago, he would rather the picture was not called by her name. The row was thirty-two years old.
The strap, and the morning after
At the Paris Salon of 1884 the right strap of her gown was painted sliding off the shoulder. Sargent, then a rising name in Paris, had set out to make his reputation with the picture. A witness wrote down what happened in front of it: an uproar all day, the painter dodging behind doors to avoid friends who looked grave, the women jeering — there is the beauty, oh what a fright — and Sargent heartbroken. Gautreau, who had agreed to sit and had helped build the thing, came out of it as badly as he did. She and her mother asked him to take it out of the exhibition. He refused, on the grounds that he had painted her as she looked. When the Salon closed he put the strap back up onto the shoulder, kept the canvas in his studio, and did not show it in public for more than twenty years. He moved to London.
What the X-ray found, and what the edge shows
Technical work from 1995 onwards has mapped how much he altered while finishing it. The X-radiograph shows the profile adjusted again and again, the ear moved a long way, the arms shifted. The background was repainted too, and because he repainted it with the canvas still in its frame, a strip of the earlier colour survives along the edge where the frame covered it. Visitors to the studio had described the palette as blue, green, white and black; dissatisfied, he dashed a tone of light rose over the gloomy background before settling on the neutral tone that is there now. Scanning X-ray fluorescence found a startling quantity of translucent viridian green inside the black dress and in her reddish-brown hair, and very little vermilion in the skin. He described her complexion as a uniform lavender or blotting-paper colour all over.
A letter from London, 8 January 1916
From 1905 he began showing the portrait again: London that year, London again in 1908, Berlin in 1909, Rome in 1911. In 1915 it crossed the Atlantic to the Panama-Pacific exposition in San Francisco. Gautreau died the same year. On 8 January 1916 Sargent wrote from London to Edward Robinson, the Metropolitan's director and a friend of twenty-five years: the picture was in America, he rather felt inclined to let it stay there if a museum wanted it, he supposed it was the best thing he had done, and the museum could have it for a thousand pounds. Then the postscript about the name. Robinson agreed, and it entered the collection as a portrait of Madame X. The label today carries both: the X first, and her name in brackets behind it.
She asked him to take it down. He repainted the strap instead, and that is the version that travels.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.