"Perge modo et qua te ducit via dirige gressum," said Venus to Aeneas.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Madame X
And because Kitchenbeard is too polite to hijack a blog (although I have given him license because of where he would take it), here is what yesterday's snippet about Sargent recalled. The arm/hand arrangement/weight are exactly right. Was her name Gautreau? No time to google. It's a sparkling Manhattan morning and my husband is hustling me out the door.
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6 comments:
You flatter me kind Sir. Thank you.
The painting destroyed her reputation and Sargent's as the darling of the Paris Salon. We see it now in its "clean ed up" form--the original had the right strap fallen off her shoulder and resting across her upper arm.
Madame G. had been painted and would be painted many times, but Sargent's is by far the most powerful and famous of all them all. Sargent let it hang in the Paris exhibition and become the object of scandal--the Kaiser urgently wanted it to be brought to Berlin--and removed it from the show himself to repaint the arm and put the strap in place before it was seen again. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
Boston did a wonderful show of Sargent's work a couple of years ago. Hanging next to Mme Gautreau was this portrait. http://jssgallery.org/Paintings/Dr_Samuel_Jean_Pozzi_at_Home.htm Dr. Pozzi was rumored to be one of Mme. Guatreau's lovers. If he was, can you blame her?
I'm crushed. I saw that exhibit in which The Dr. Pozzi painting was hung in the perfect place to make a spectacular impression, and my gaydar went ballistic and pegged him as gay. Perhaps it was all just wishful thinking--the man's a looker.
From what I can gather, Dr. Pozzi was something of a womanizer.
He was murdered. Though by an irate patient and surprisingly not by a jealous husband
I may need to do a version of the good dead red doctor..
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