Left: my tracing, Monday 12 October. Right: John Singer Sargent, Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast , 1882–83 — oil on panel, 32 × 41 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, P3w41. Public domain.
This is Sargent, and that is, of course, Madame Gautreau. It’s a very interesting disposition. He did a few different works of her, watercolour too, and obviously the famous one. He was familiarizing himself with her. Her arms, for instance, are important in Madame X.
This one has some flowers, but I’d love to see how to trace this outstretched arm. It’s in a somewhat unusual place in terms of paintings by masters. It looks like it’s outdoors, some kind of a patio or something like that. It’s just an interesting pose, and the command he shows of her forearm is much higher than I was even able to trace well.
The forehead, the way he renders her forehead, is very, very distinctive, and I think clearly something that he wanted to capture about her. She is in profile. The variation of the nose and lips is maximal at the side, and they are more distinctive than the cheekbone, brow ridge and eye socket that form the edge of the three-quarter view.
And this one also, I think, I’ll try to see if I can do something minimal with a brush pen. There are no outlines in the painting, so where does the line go? It’s just the boundary of the light and dark. Here again, because he was working directly with white versus black contrast, the brush pen has a different line sense, so I had to make up what it meant.
I think that might be it. But I think the arm was just very simple, but it’s just good proportionally, and the face orientation. And I think I was a little too thick with the lines.
Auction
Sargent’s auction record is Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1905), sold at Sotheby’s New York in December 2004. The estimate was $12 million, and it sold for US$23.5 million.
Background
Sargent painted this oil in 1882–83, on a panel 32 × 41 cm. It is in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), accession P3w41.
Virginie Amélie Avegno (1859–1915) was born in New Orleans to a French Creole family and came to France with her widowed mother in 1867. In 1878 she married Pierre Gautreau, a banker and shipping magnate about twenty years older. She was known in Paris for her pale skin, heightened with lavender powder, and for her henna-dyed hair.
The portrait was Sargent’s idea, not a commission. She had refused many painters, and accepted him in February 1883. In June he went to her estate in Brittany and made about thirty studies in pencil, watercolour and oil. In September he wrote that he was “still at Paramé, basking in the sunshine of my beautiful model’s countenance.”
The famous Portrait de Mme *** went to the Salon of 1884. One strap of her gown was painted slipping off the shoulder, and the reaction was so hostile that Sargent repainted it upright. Her mother asked him to withdraw the picture, and he refused. French commissions dried up, and by 1886 he had settled in London. He sold it to the Met in 1916, a year after her death, calling it “the best thing I’ve done.”
Links
- Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast — Wikimedia Commons, the master image (public domain), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
- Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast — Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the catalogue entry and provenance
- Portrait of Madame X — Wikipedia, the Brittany sittings and the 1884 Salon
- Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau — Wikipedia, the sitter
- John Singer Sargent — Wikipedia, the move to London and his auction record
- Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the finished portrait
- How Madame X Came to the Met — The Met, Sargent’s 1916 letter to Edward Robinson
- Virginie Amélie Avegno, about 1878 — Wikimedia Commons, the photograph (public domain)
- Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent (Tate Gallery, 1999), p. 101 — the Paramé letter
- Process video — Monday 12 October — the tracing session on YouTube
