By Trevor Fairbrother

I wish this catalogue spelled out John Singer Sargent’s professional stance as a juste milieu painter more methodically. That term refers to those eager to be associated with new stylistic tendencies yet careful not to transgress the establishment’s norms.

John Singer Sargent died in his London home on April 12, 1925. A notice in The Times saluted the 69-year-old American bachelor as “the greatest portrait-painter of his age” and declared him English “by virtue of long residence.” But Sargent’s career began in Paris, where he lived from the age of 18 to 30. Now, 100 years after his demise, the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates that first chapter: Stephanie K. Herdrich, Curator of American Paintings and Drawings, has overseen a major exhibition and book, both titled Sargent and Paris (Yale University Press, 256 pages, $50). [Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (through August 3); Musée d’Orsay, Paris (September 22 through January 11, 2026)]

The Met’s stylish publication compares well with those from other museums, including Sargent and the Sea (2009), Sargent and Spain (2022), and Sargent and Fashion (2024). There are eight essays in Sargent and Paris. The first introduces the subject and the second reviews the artist’s evolution from outstanding student to rising star. Next comes a discussion of Sargent’s depictions of “exotic” women in the picturesque settings of Brittany, Capri, Tangier and Spain, then a look at French critical responses to his society portraits. The fifth essay considers his representations of glamorous Parisiennes and hints that Sargent’s “lack of carnal desire for women may, in fact, have made him even more alluring to them.” The keynote text examines his full-length depiction of the illustrious beauty Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. That portrait, owned by the Met and known as Madame X, is a Manhattan Mona Lisa for art tourists. The seventh essay surveys its influence on fashion, popular culture, and fine art. The concluding text reprises Sargent’s abiding esteem for French culture and states that the Beaux-Arts academic tradition permeates his later Boston murals.

Detail of Charles Baude’s engraving of Sargent’s Portrait de Mme *** (Le Monde illustré, July 5, 1884). Collection Jaquet (La Gravure sur bois), Bibliothèque nationale de France

I wish this catalogue spelled out Sargent’s professional stance as a juste milieu painter more methodically. That term refers to those eager to be associated with new stylistic tendencies yet careful not to transgress the establishment’s norms. Two progressive painters Sargent especially admired during his Paris years were Manet and Monet. Professionally, however, he was more engaged with middle-of-the-road favorites, including Besnard, Blanche, Carolus-Duran, Duez, Flameng, Helleu, and Roll: all of them crop up in the catalogue, but the information is delivered piecemeal. Surprisingly, there is no mention of the comments voiced by free-thinking artists who looked askance at Sargent’s rather boastful bravura technique. Such painters as Cassatt, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, and Whistler were suspicious of his keenness as a juste milieu artist in pursuit of bourgeois clients. In 1997 Marc Simpson created a chart with thumbnail images to show which paintings Sargent exhibited at which venue from 1877 to 1887. It appeared in his catalogue Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent. The Met would have been wise to emulate that tool to help explicate the rules, protocols, and cliques Sargent navigated in Paris.

Detail of Auguste Giraudon’s photograph of Sargent in his Paris studio, 1884-85. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is the newly altered portrait in the original Salon frame.

Sargent aficionados will be familiar with much of the information here. The best new nuggets embellish the saga of the Gautreau portrait. There’s a photograph of the resplendent 19-year-old bride looking far more cordial than the persona Sargent depicted six years later. Good use is made of the correspondence of Violet Paget, the feminist writer whose pen name was Vernon Lee. In October 1883 she told a friend about meeting Sargent in Florence; she learned that his Gautreau portrait alluded to Diane de Poitiers and Pauline Bonaparte, historical beauties who posed as the goddess Venus. She also formed an impression that Gautreau’s sinuous yet rigid posture made her look like “a hissing snake.” After viewing the portrait at the Paris Salon in 1884 Lee called it “a very puzzling but fine work.” She knew Sargent was currently “smitten” with the early Renaissance, but felt that his desire to “conciliate” Piero della Francesco with both Velázquez and Manet gave rise to confusion.

The account of Madame X in Sargent and Paris is partial, and most readers will not know that. Here is the gist:

• In 1884, when Sargent exhibited a painting of an affluent businessman’s wife at the Paris Salon, he titled it Portrait of Mme ***. The public ridiculed the bosom-revealing bodice with a fallen shoulder strap and the subject’s pronounced cosmetic regime.
• Hardly any critics defended the portrait and caricaturists had a field day. Gautreau’s mother asked Sargent to withdraw it from the exhibition and he refused.
• The original composition was sufficiently admired to warrant a full-page woodcut reproduction in the weekly magazine Le Monde illustré. Sargent, however, decided to paint out the fallen strap after the Salon closed. He allowed Auguste Giraudon to photograph him standing beside the newly altered picture in his Paris studio.
• Sargent began work on a replica. He left its background unpainted and gave absolutely no indication of a strap for the subject’s right shoulder. It is not known why he began and then abandoned the replica.
• In 1886 Sargent moved permanently to London. Soon after 1900 he showcased the Gautreau portrait in his enlarged and revamped Chelsea residence.
• When offering to sell the picture in 1916 he wrote “I suppose it is the best thing I have done. I would let the Metropolitan Museum have it for £1,000.”
• Sargent’s popularity declined immediately after his death in 1925. His comeback was boosted in 1987 by the retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art.

The following points are skipped or downplayed in the catalogue, perhaps to uphold the project’s underlying blockbuster objective:

• Sargent’s bout of repainting involved more than the strap: the entire setting got a makeover. In the Salon work the space behind Gautreau was atmospheric and light rose in color. He subsequently covered the background with a flatter coat of brownish ochre paint that made the figure’s graceful silhouette more evocative of a neoclassical cameo.
• Apparently Sargent authorized no formal photographic reproduction of the painting prior to 1903. That year he gave it prominence in an oversized book of photogravures that charted his rise to fame. Then, in 1905, he exhibited the canvas for the first time since the Salon, at the Carfax Gallery, London.
• Madame Gautreau died in July 1915 and a few months later Sargent decided to sell his portrait of her. After the Met agreed to his price, he asked that it use the title Madame X. The move to erase the sitter’s name seems high-handed; after all, he had allowed it to be reproduced as Madame Gautreau since 1903. Moreover, when Sargent lent it to exhibitions in 1905, 1908, 1909, 1911, and 1915, many critics identified the subject by her name.
• Neither Sargent nor his contacts at the Met spoke of the alterations that the original Salon picture had undergone.
• Hilton Kramer devoted a column to my 1981 article in Arts Magazine detailing how the art world completely forgot that Sargent repainted the portrait after the Salon (New York Times, February 1, 1981). The idea of a hotshot having second thoughts about a shoulder strap amused the critic: Sargent had diminished the portrait’s Manetesque modernity to safeguard his future, and, Kramer quipped, “He was never a bad boy again.”
• Natural aging processes, varnish discoloration, conservation treatments and cleaning campaigns have impacted Madame X since it entered the Met’s collection. In 1928 the Herald Tribune reported on “great fissures” caused by the slow drying of underlying paint layers. Three years later, in his book Paint, Paintings and Restoration, the industrial chemist Maximilian Toch declared it “practically ruined beyond redemption” due to “an enormous number of cracks around the upper outline of the figure.” A recent study by a conservator and scientist confirmed that the canvas was “lined and restretched” in 1926 to attain structural stability (Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol. 40, 2005). X-radiography revealed that Sargent painted at least seven heads in succession before completing the profile we see today.
• The fluctuations in Sargent’s status are a matter of interpretation, but I think a resurgence was well underway in the 1960s. One sign was The Private World of John Singer Sargent, a traveling exhibition that debuted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1964: its catalogue listed 167 works. In 1979 the Detroit Institute of Art presented John Singer Sargent and The Edwardian Age, an exhibition previously shown in the UK in Leeds and London; Madame X held sway in the Detroit installation.
• Madame X has sported three carved gold frames over the years. The original extravagant Salon item is lost. By 1905 Sargent had selected a narrower, more subtle replacement. In 1990 the Met gave the portrait a more “period” presentation by resizing and resurfacing an ornate frame made in Manhattan in the 1890s.

Left: the book cover design presented on the website of Yale University Press. Right: the cover of a published copy. Photo: Trevor Fairbrother

A close-up of one shoulder, the chest and the neck of Madame X fills the cover of the Met’s catalogue. Incidentally, this attention-grabbing design tactic allows scrutiny of two areas reworked by the artist: the smoothly brushed skin that occupies the site of the fallen strap and the dabs of thick paint that conjure the “new” strap. Even though parts of the photograph were enhanced in post-production, it is easy to spot traces of the picture’s old cracks. The histories of the Gautreau portrait are convoluted — it is good to know that some of the incidents left resilient ghosts.

Trevor Fairbrother is a curator and writer. He wrote catalogue entries on Sargent’s Madame X, Dr. Pozzi at Home, Lady with the Rose, The Daughters of Edward D. Boit, and La Carmencita for the book that accompanied the Met’s 2003 exhibition Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting.

Trevor Fairbrother © 2025