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Sargent Painted Madame X With a Falling Strap and Had to Repaint It
John Singer Sargent was twenty-six when he began Madame X in summer 1883. He was already a successful portrait painter in Paris, and he wanted a picture that would do for him at the 1884 Salon what Manet's Olympia had done for Manet in 1865: provide a single sensational image that would settle his reputation as an artist of the modern moment. The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans-born American who had married a French banker, Pierre Gautreau, and become a fixture of Paris society. She was famously beautiful, famously vain, and famously available for portrait commissions only on her own terms. Sargent had to negotiate access through a mutual acquaintance and was eventually granted thirty sittings over the summer at the Gautreau family château in Brittany. The First Version The portrait Sargent submitted to the 1884 Salon showed Gautreau standing in profile, one hand resting on a small table, the other holding the back of her dress in a half-turn toward the viewer. She wore a black satin gown with a sharply cut décolletage. The right shoulder strap, jewelled and thin, had fallen off her shoulder and lay against her upper arm. Her skin, painted in cool blue-white pigment that intensified the effect, was the most exposed thing in the picture. Sargent submitted the picture with the title Portrait de Mme. The Salon catalogue printed it as Madame ***. He had asked for anonymity, on the assumption that anonymity would protect the sitter from any controversy the painting might cause. The protection did not hold. Within an hour of the Salon's opening, Paris society had identified the sitter. The Reaction The reception was hostile. Reviewers attacked the painting's colour (the sitter's skin was described as cadaverous), its composition (her shoulder was held at an anatomically impossible angle), and its subject (the falling strap). Madame Gautreau's mother visited Sargent at his studio in tears and asked him to withdraw the picture. He refused. The painting hung in the Salon for the full run. The Gautreau family considered the portrait socially ruinous. The marriage, already troubled, did not recover. Madame Gautreau never sat for another portrait by Sargent and never publicly acknowledged the painting again. The Repaint Sometime in the weeks after the Salon closed, Sargent took the picture back to his studio and repainted the right shoulder strap so that it lay properly across the shoulder rather than fallen against the arm. He did not repaint anything else. The visible alteration is the only structural change to the painting in its history. The repaint did not rescue the picture's standing. The portrait remained in Sargent's possession, rolled up in his studio. He moved it from Paris to London when he relocated in 1886. He did not exhibit it publicly again for almost twenty years. John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting Sargent showed at the 1883 Salon to good reviews — the year before Madame X destroyed his Paris career. What Sargent Painted Next The Madame X scandal pushed Sargent out of Paris and into London. He arrived in 1886 with very few commissions and no settled studio. Within two years he had built a portrait practice serving the British upper class, the wealthy Americans who passed through London, and a smaller circle of aesthetes and writers. By 1890 he was painting forty or fifty portraits a year at fees that made him the highest-paid portraitist in Europe. The portraits from this period are now what Sargent is most famous for: Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, the Wertheimer family series, Madame Edouard Pailleron, dozens of others. The painting style had not changed fundamentally from Madame X. The same fluency in cloth, the same icy palette, the same understanding of how a single piece of jewellery could anchor a composition. What had changed was the cultural context. London society wanted to be painted by Sargent. Paris society had decided in 1884 that he was dangerous. The Resurrection Sargent kept Madame X for thirty-two years. He showed it occasionally at private studio viewings, lent it to one or two exhibitions, but did not sell it. In 1905 the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director, Roger Fry, approached him about acquiring it. Sargent refused. By 1915, the painting's reputation had begun to rebuild. Sargent told a friend that Madame X was "the best thing I have done." Madame Gautreau had died in 1915, and the social scandal that the painting represented was now a story about a vanished Belle Époque rather than a current society scandal. In 1916, the Metropolitan Museum approached him again. This time he agreed. He sold the picture for $1,000 — far less than he was paid for ordinary portraits during the same period — on the condition that the sitter be identified only as Madame X. The Met paid in cash. The picture has hung in the museum since. What the Painting Shows The painting now reads differently than it read in 1884. Audiences are no longer scandalised by an exposed shoulder, and the question of whether the falling strap was lewd has stopped being an interesting question. What the picture shows now is a painter at the height of his technical capacities working out a problem in cool tones and sharp profile. The chemistry of the skin is what stays surprising. Sargent built it from layers of underpaint with a final wash of zinc white tinted slightly blue. The effect, on a sitter who was famously powdered with rice powder and lavender water, is a kind of luminescence that no other portraitist of the period managed. The painting's claim to greatness rests on this technical achievement more than on the controversy that defined it for thirty years. Sargent never painted another portrait at that pitch. After 1884 he settled into a more conservative manner that delivered for his sitters what they expected: flattering likeness, technical fluency, and propriety. The portrait that destroyed his Paris career was also the last one in which he was willing to risk anything.
Whistler Won His Libel Trial Against Ruskin and Was Awarded One Farthing
In July 1877, the Grosvenor Gallery in London opened with a show that included eight paintings by James McNeill Whistler. One of them was a small dark canvas called Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. It depicted the night sky over the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens in Chelsea during a fireworks display, the falling sparks rendered as small dots of light against an almost-black ground. The critic John Ruskin, then the most influential art writer in Britain, reviewed the show for his monthly publication Fors Clavigera. He compared the Falling Rocket unfavourably to coxcomb impudence and concluded with the sentence that became famous: "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued for libel. The trial took place over two days in November 1878 in the Court of Queen's Bench. The jury found for Whistler. They awarded him one farthing in damages, and split the costs between the parties. What Whistler Was Doing Whistler was an American painter who had moved to Paris in 1855 and then to London in 1859. He had studied with Charles Gleyre in Paris, fallen in with the Realist circle around Courbet, and developed an art that fused Realist observation with the formal seriousness he had picked up from Japanese woodblock prints. By the 1870s he was painting what he called Nocturnes: small dark studies of the Thames at night, of the Cremorne Gardens, of Chelsea. The paintings were thinly applied, almost monochrome, and refused the narrative content Victorian audiences expected from a finished picture. Whistler claimed they were "an arrangement of line, form, and colour first" and "an anecdote second or not at all." James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c. 1875. Detroit Institute of Arts. The painting Ruskin attacked. Ruskin John Ruskin in 1877 was sixty-three. He had been the leading defender of the Pre-Raphaelites a generation earlier, but his moral framework for art was anchored in patient observation of nature and what he called "the duty of truth." A painter who finished a canvas in two days and called it Nocturne in Black and Gold offended every principle Ruskin held about labour, attention, and the worth of finished work. The "pot of paint" line was not a slip. Ruskin's review was a deliberate attempt to use the moral authority of his critical position to drive Whistler out of the Grosvenor Gallery's roster and, by extension, out of the serious British art market. The Trial The case was heard by Baron Huddleston with a special jury of four. Whistler's counsel called him as the first witness. Under cross-examination by Sir John Holker, the Attorney-General, Whistler was asked whether the price he charged (two hundred guineas) reflected "the labour of two days." Whistler replied with what became the trial's most-quoted exchange: "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime." Ruskin did not appear. He was unwell and his counsel argued the case on his behalf. The witnesses called for Ruskin included the artists Edward Burne-Jones and W. P. Frith, both of whom testified that the Falling Rocket was not a finished work. The jury retired and returned with a verdict for Whistler. The damages they awarded — one farthing, the smallest coin in circulation — were a clear signal: yes, Ruskin had libelled him; no, the painting itself was not worth defending. Each side was to pay its own costs. The Bankruptcy Whistler's legal fees came to nearly £400 (the equivalent of around £40,000 today). He had no income reserves. Within seven months of the verdict he had filed for bankruptcy. His house on Tite Street in Chelsea, the White House, was sold along with his etching plates, his furniture, and most of his collection of Japanese prints. The collapse forced him out of London. He went to Venice on a commission from the Fine Art Society to produce twelve etchings of the city. He stayed fourteen months, made fifty etchings and around a hundred pastels, and returned in 1880 with the work that would re-establish his financial position over the next decade. What the Trial Decided The legal point was small. Ruskin had committed libel, but the painting at issue was held by the jury to be of minimal worth. The cultural point was larger. The trial publicly tested the question of whether a critic's moral authority could be used to suppress a kind of painting the critic disliked. The verdict was ambiguous, but the principle the trial established (that artists could sue critics, that critics could be made to answer for their attacks) shifted the balance of power between artists and the press for the rest of the nineteenth century. The other thing the trial established, which mattered to Whistler more, was the term Aestheticism. The defence Whistler ran (that a painting could be valued for its formal arrangement of line, form, and colour, independent of any narrative or moral content) became the founding argument of the movement. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the Symbolists who followed in the 1880s all drew on the framework Whistler had defended in court. Ten O'Clock In February 1885, Whistler delivered a public lecture at Prince's Hall in Piccadilly. It began at ten in the evening, an unusually late hour, and was called Ten O'Clock. It was his formal statement of the Aestheticist position. Art, he argued, is "selfishly occupied with her own perfection only" and "the master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs." Beauty was not a function of moral worth, or of social usefulness, or of careful labour. It was a thing the artist made and the audience either saw or did not see. The lecture was a culmination of the argument Whistler had spent the previous decade defending against Ruskin. It was attacked at the time. It is now considered one of the founding texts of modernist aesthetics. What the Farthing Bought Whistler wore the farthing on his watch chain for the rest of his life. He died in 1903, having spent his last twenty years rebuilding the position the bankruptcy had cost him. He had become a kind of patron saint to the Aesthetes, was elected president of the Society of British Artists, and saw his paintings enter major museum collections. Ruskin died in 1900, mentally ill in the last decade of his life and having largely withdrawn from public writing. The pot-of-paint review was not what he wanted to be remembered for. It is what he is mostly remembered for. The trial cost both men. The painting Ruskin attacked is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts and is reproduced in every history of nineteenth-century art. The farthing is in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow with the rest of Whistler's effects. The argument Whistler defended in court won in the long run. The argument Ruskin made about labour and seriousness still wins on most days at most easels, but it lost in 1878 and never quite recovered the authority it had before.
Hopper Painted Loneliness Before America Had a Name For It
Edward Hopper produced about 366 oil paintings in a working life of nearly fifty years. Nighthawks, painted in January 1942 and finished by 21 January, is the one everyone knows. Four figures inside a corner diner late at night. The light inside is fluorescent and harsh. The street outside is empty. The figures do not look at each other. Hopper said, several times across his life, that the painting was not about loneliness. He said this in the kind of weary tone people use when they have been asked the same question for forty years. He may have been telling the truth, and the picture may still be about loneliness anyway. Paintings often outpace the things their painters meant by them. The Slow Career Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, a small town up the Hudson from New York. He studied illustration in New York, then painting, and spent the years 1906 to 1910 making three trips to Paris where he ignored Cubism and Fauvism and looked instead at Manet and Degas. He came home and worked as a commercial illustrator for the next sixteen years. He was nearly forty by the time he sold a single watercolour and began the career people know him for. He married Josephine Nivison in 1924. She was a painter too, kept the household accounts and the studio ledger, and modelled for almost every female figure in Hopper's mature work. The Nighthawks woman is Josephine. So are the women in Office at Night, Morning Sun, Western Motel, Hotel Window, and dozens of others. The Method Hopper painted slowly, and he painted few paintings. The 366 oils represent decades of work; many years produced only three or four pictures. He worked from sketches, then small oil studies, then the canvas. The sketches still exist in the bequest now held at the Whitney Museum, and they show how methodically Hopper built the compositions: the angle of a roofline, the exact position of a window, the line where shadow meets sun. The light was the subject. Hopper was a painter of light first and people second. The morning sun on a brick wall in Early Sunday Morning. The fluorescent flood in Nighthawks. The slanting afternoon shadow across the door in Office at Night. The painters Hopper looked at hardest were not the obvious American precedents but Manet and Vermeer, both painters who understood how a single direction of light could organise a picture. Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930. Whitney Museum of American Art. Nighthawks The Nighthawks diner was based on a real corner in Greenwich Village, possibly on the site of a now-demolished restaurant near the junction of Greenwich Avenue and Eleventh Street. Hopper denied that it was that particular diner. Researchers have not been able to confirm or refute him. What is certain is that the diner in the painting does not exist as built: the front window is impossibly seamless, with no door visible, and the geometry of the interior is squared off in a way no real diner has. The picture was begun shortly after Pearl Harbor. The country was at war, the streets at night were under blackout regulations, and the Bowery cafeterias and Automats Hopper habitually walked past on his evening rounds were the only lit spaces in otherwise dark blocks. Nighthawks shows this without illustrating it: the picture is about the city becoming strange at night, and the harshly lit interior of one bright building amplifying the dark outside. The Art Institute of Chicago bought it in 1942 for $3,000, in the same month Hopper finished it. It has hung there since. It is now the single most reproduced American painting of the twentieth century. What Hopper Was Doing The lazy reading of Hopper is that he painted urban alienation. The more accurate reading is that he painted urban architecture and the way figures look against it. The alienation is a side effect of his real interest, which was light, geometry, and the awkwardness of bodies in rooms designed for other things. The figures in Hopper's interiors are rarely doing what the rooms are for. They sit in cinemas without watching the film, in motels without sleeping, in offices without working. The architecture has a function. The bodies are not using it. The misfit between space and inhabitant is what gives the paintings their charge. Hopper's contemporaries, the Regionalists Benton and Curry and Wood, painted small-town America as a moral landscape. Hopper painted small-town America as a series of empty rooms. His America has been emptied of moral content. It is a country of architecture, weather, and people who happen to be in the architecture. The Long Silence Hopper worked steadily from 1924 until his death in 1967. His prices rose, his reputation grew, and the art world's interest moved through Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism while Hopper kept painting the same kinds of pictures. By the 1960s, he was considered a marginal figure to the avant-garde and a central figure to the public. The reversal began after his death. Hopper became the painter the second wave of American painters (the photo-realists and the New Realists) cited as a precedent. By the 1980s, his pictures were on the covers of Vintage paperbacks, in opening credits of films, on coffee mugs and posters. Wim Wenders cast a still-life version of Nighthawks in a film. Steve Martin and Robin Williams stood inside a recreated diner on stage. The pictures bore all this without collapsing. Most paintings cannot be reproduced ten million times and stay interesting. Hopper's can, because what they show is not a story or a mood but a relationship between light and a brick wall, and that relationship does not wear out with reproduction. The Question Was Nighthawks about loneliness? Hopper said no. The picture says yes anyway. Painters do not always own the meanings of what they paint. The figures in Nighthawks do not look at each other because Hopper was working out a compositional problem about how the diner counter could function as a horizontal anchor, and he needed the figures' heads turned to specific angles to make that anchor read. The fact that the result was also one of the most accurate visual accounts of urban loneliness produced in the twentieth century is a side effect, but a true one. Hopper painted loneliness before America had a vocabulary for it. The word and the cultural concept arrived later, by which time the painting had already shown what it looked like.