741. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), American,

Madame x (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883-1884.

Oil on canvas, 208.6 x 109.9 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

 

The American painter John Singer Sargent visited the States on short trips during the thirty years he lived in Paris, as he retained his American parents’ loyalty to their native land. He sees appearance more than character. Madame Gautreau is presented in what was a risqué gown, shockingly low-cut for the times. For this and his other unorthodox portraits, he was criticised for being improper. Historian German Bazin referred to him as “a painter of superficial fashionable portraits in a facile and dazzling technique that went far to disguise their empty ideality”.