"Tyrannized" by the portrait that mocked her fast-fading form, the model obsessively avoided mirrors until her death in 1915. By Davis's compelling report, the artist worked to deflect the ensuing scandal (partially by painting a glowing icon of flowering innocence), while Amelie slid into social obscurity. After months of laboring, Sargent produced the racier version of Madame X. most fascinating woman," he would secure his artistic acclaim. She met young John Singer Sargent, a "fellow upstart American," who imagined that, by painting Paris's "most original. Born to Creole New Orleans aristocrats in 1859, Virginie Amelie Gautreau moved to Paris with her family following her father's death, married an older man made rich by the fertilizer trade and cultivated a beauty that, even in fashion-frenzied Paris, earned her widespread fame. Davis has worked as a story editor and analyst for most of the big film companies, and here seeks the woman behind Sargent's most celebrated, enigmatic profile. John Singer Sargent's portrait Madame X has hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for decades, following its scandalous debut in the Paris Salon in 1884, and subsequent retouching of the work to restore the dangling dress strap to the figure's impossibly white bare shoulder.
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