Gioia Diliberto became enthralled with the John Singer Sargent portrait Madame X when she was living in New York and working on her first book, Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier (1987). On the way home from doing research at the New York Society Library, she’d often stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the painting. “I just loved it,” she says. “It has a brilliant design. It’s very classical and very Old Master-ish in tone and color.”
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The work seems tame now, but it caused an uproar when it debuted at the Paris Salon of 1884. The subject, Paris socialite Virginie Avegno Gautreau, was an American-born 23-year-old beauty known for her daring fashion sense and sexual dalliances; the portrait of her with hennaed hair, rouged ears, and decadently pale skin, wearing a black dress whose diamond-encrusted strap had slid down her right shoulder, “upset people who knew what her reputation was,” says Diliberto. “It gave them an excuse to jeer.” It didn’t help that both the painter and the sitter were American. Critics hated the painting and newspapers were full of editorials denouncing it; Gautreau was humiliated, and Sargent’s reputation was ruined in France.
Diliberto was looking for new ideas when she went to see the Sargent portrait again on a visit to New York. “It just sort of hit me,” she says, noting that Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier’s novel about the Vermeer subject, had not yet been published. “I thought, I’m going to try to write a novel about it.”
Diliberto will give a slide show and talk on Thursday, March 13, at noon in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fullerton Hall, Michigan and Adams. It’s free with museum admission ($10 for adults; $6 for students, seniors, and children); call 312-443-3680 for more information. At 7 PM on Wednesday, March 19, she’ll appear at Borders Books & Music, 830 N. Michigan. It’s free; call 312-573-0564.
