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Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau

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Nationality
  
American

Name
  
Virginie Avegno

Spouse(s)
  
Pierre Gautreau

Religion
  
Roman Catholic

Ethnicity
  
French, Italian


Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau

Full Name
  
Virginie Amelie Avegno

Born
  
29 January 1859

Died
  
25 July 1915 (aged 56)Cannes, France

Known for
  

August 7, 2016


Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (née Avegno, 29 January 1859 – 25 July 1915) was born in New Orleans but grew up from the age of eight in France, where she became a Parisian socialite known for her beauty. She occasionally posed as a model for notable artists. She is most widely known as the subject of John Singer Sargent's painting Portrait of Madame X (1884). It created a social scandal when shown at the Paris Salon.

Contents

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Virginie Amelie Mimi Avegno Gautreau 1859 1915 Find A Grave

Of European Creole ancestry, Virginie was taken at the age of eight by her widowed mother to France in 1867 following the American Civil War. She was educated in Paris and married Pierre Gautreau, a wealthy businessman.

Early life and education

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau The Ark of Grace

Gautreau was born Virginie Amélie Avegno in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 29 January 1859, the daughter of Anatole Placide Avegno (3 July 1835 – 7 April 1862) and Marie Virginie de Ternant of Parlange Plantation, a descendant of French nobility. She had a sister, Valentine Marie, who died as a young child of yellow fever. Their parents were white Creoles; their father Anatole was the son of Philippe Avegno (originally Italian) and Catherine Genois.

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau John Singer Sargent and Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau my daily

Her father Anatole Avegno served as a major in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War; he died in 1862 in the Battle of Shiloh. He was the commander of the Avegno Zouaves of New Orleans, a cosmopolitan battalion which had soldiers from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds including French, Spanish, Mexican, Irish, Italian, Chinese, German, Dutch, and Filipino.

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau John Singer Sargent and Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau my daily

In 1867, when Virginia was eight years old, her widowed mother moved with her to France. The girl was educated in Paris and introduced to high French society.

Parisienne

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Marie Virginie Ternant Avegno 1838 1910 Find A Grave Memorial

Virginie Avegno became one of Paris's conspicuous beauties, as she was a pale-skinned brunette with fine, cameo-like features and an hourglass figure. She was known to use lavender-colored face and body powder to enhance her complexion, to dye her hair with henna, and to color her eyebrows. She attracted much admiration due to her elegance and style. She also attracted much amorous attention that she did not discourage, and her extramarital affairs were so well known that they became the subject of tabloid scandal sheets and gossip handbills. One of her lovers was a Dr. Pozzi, whose portrait had been painted by the young aspiring portraitist John Singer Sargent, a former pupil of French master Carolus Duran. Sargent, anxious to popularize himself by capitalizing on Virginie's notorious reputation, asked Dr. Pozzi (whom he had painted in a papal-red robe) to introduce him to Virginie, which the doctor did, resulting in Sargent's being invited to the Gautreaus' Brittany chateau, Les Chènes, where Sargent produced some 30 studies of her in pencil, watercolor and oil.

Marriage and family

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Remembering Virginie Gautreau Madame X Photo Restoration

She married Pierre Gautreau, a French banker and shipping magnate. She had a daughter named Louise Gautreau (1879–1911).

Madame X

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Madame X Gemlde Wikiwand

She posed for paintings by several noted 19th-century painters, including Gustave Courtois (1891) and Antonio de La Gándara. (1898).

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau Alchetron the free social

But it was Sargent's 1884 portrait of her that he had entered in the Paris Salon of that year under the title "Portrait of Madame ***" that would become by far the most famous. This was because the woman's suggestively coquettish pose and revealing costume so offended French sensibility as indiscreetly suggesting the woman's reputation that it provoked a firestorm of outrage and was regarded as scandalous. One French critic wrote that if one stood before the portrait during its exhibition in the Salon, one "would hear every curseword in the French language"—the French will tolerate adultery but shudder at admitting it openly, as this portrait seemed to brazenly do. It was not that a woman of Virginie's station in society would not pose as a model (after all, no scandal attached to her posing afterwards for both Courtois and de la Gándara), it was that Sargent was seen as having openly defied convention by flaunting the woman's immoral lifestyle. Mme. Gautreau's mother implored Sargent to remove the portrait from the Salon, but the most he would do was change the title to "Portrait of Madame X," by which it has ever since been known. The scandal guaranteed that Sargent would receive no more portrait commissions in France, and he decamped for London for good, where he became one of history's most famous portraitists, of the upper classes in Britain and America. And the scandal caused Gautreau to retire from society for some time.

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau my daily art display Page 16 A daily dip into the world of art

Antonio de La Gándara painted a full-length portrait of her, entitled Madame Gautreau (1898). In tonality of colors, privacy of her face, and style of her dress, it was more conservative than Sargent's painting.

Death

Gautreau died in Cannes on 25 July 1915. She was buried in the Gautreau family crypt at their Chateau des Chênes in Saint-Malo, Brittany.

Representation in other media

  • Gautreau's and Sargent's intertwined stories are the subject of Strapless (2004) by Deborah Davis.
  • Gautreau is also the subject of I Am Madame X: A Novel (2004) by Gioia Diliberto.
  • References

    Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau Wikipedia