Each month or so, Vintage Voice features a notable Babe du Jour. In this case, the jour in question is May of 1884; the babe is Madame Virginie Gautreau, the Virginia-born wife of a prominent French banker; a "professional beauty", and the subject of much Parisian scandal. The painter John Singer Sargent asked permission to paint her portrait; and after much difficulty in getting his sitter to cooperate, referring in letters to his friends to Mme. Gautreau's "unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness", he exhibited the results at the Paris Salon. The morals of the day were not equal to the audaciously sexual nature of the portrait, and a scandal blew up. (It bears mentioning that the original painting depicted the right shoulder strap as having slipped off the shoulder; Sargent hitched it back up for her later.) "Monstrous!" squealed the society matrons. "One more struggle," leered Le Figaro, "and the lady will be free." Legend has it that Mme. Gautreau overheard someone in the street saying that her beauty had faded; she is said to have closed up her carriage and disappeared from society from that moment. The painting is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a gorgeous emblem of fin-de-siecle decadence. |
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