I’ve also relied on the help of many people. First of all, I would like to thank Charles L. Crawford, a tireless researcher who is a descendant of Virginie Gautreau’s paternal uncle Jean Bernard Avegno. Charlie has spent more than a decade researching the history of his family, and he generously shared his files with me. During the past two years, Charlie and I spoke on the phone frequently, trading information and theories about Madame X, our mutual obsession. Those conversations provided one of the many pleasures of working on this book.
The art historian Trevor Fairbrother, who has written brilliantly about Sargent in articles and books, patiently answered my queries, steered me to sources I would otherwise not have discovered, and corrected errors in the manuscript. Trevor was the first person to write about the real woman behind Sargent’s Madame X, in a 1981 article in Arts Magazine, which also published for the first time since the nineteenth century a photograph of the painting in its original one-strap-off-the-shoulder state.
My debt to Richard Ormond, Sargent’s great-nephew, is considerable. Richard is the author of several books about Sargent, including, with Elaine Kilmurray, the definitive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. Richard told me about the existence of Sargent’s Landscape: A Dale in the Neighborhood of Château des Chênes, graciously shared his insights about Sargent’s art, answered my queries, and corrected errors in the manuscript.
My wonderful researchers—in Paris: Camille Goujon and Régine Cavallaro; in Paramé, France: Marie-Christine Ruellan—turned up a wealth of information I never could have found on my own. My son’s French teacher, Fannie Clonch, corrected the spelling of French words and phrases in the manuscript.
I would also like to thank Christina Vella, for getting me started on my research in New Orleans; Lucy Parlange, for giving me a tour of her family’s plantation; and the librarians at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane University, the University of New Orleans, the New Orleans Public Library, and the New Orleans Notarial Archives Research Center, for guiding me through their collections.
My dear friend, the journalist and novelist Dinitia Smith, read the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions. Another dear friend, Sara Stern, was my cheerleader on blue Mondays.
Everyone at Scribner has been a delight to work with. I am especially thankful to Lisa Drew for helping me make the transition from nonfiction to fiction, and for so carefully shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. Over the course of twenty years, my agent, Rhoda Weyr, has provided encouragement and unfailingly astute advice.
As always, my husband, Richard Babcock, was there at every stage of the project, spending long hours and days discussing the material with me, helping me shape it, and editing the manuscript during its various revisions. I am eternally grateful to him for his intelligence, his hard work, his skill with a red pencil, and, of course, his all-enabling love.
Selected Bibliography
BOOKS ABOUT SARGENT
Birnbaum, Martin. John Singer Sargent. New York: William E. Rudge’s Sons, 1941.
Charteris, Evan. John Sargent. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972.
Eshleman, Mettha Westfeldt. Madame Gautreau. Unpublished 1984 manuscript on file in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Fairbrother, Trevor. John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. New Haven and London: Yale University Press (published in conjunction with the exhibition “John Singer Sargent,” organized by the Seattle Art Museum), 2001.
Hills, Patricia, editor. John Singer Sargent. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1986.
Hoopes, Donelson F. The Private World of John Singer Sargent. Washington, D.C.: Shorewood Publishers, 1964.
Kilmurray, Elaine, and Richard Ormond. John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
———, editors. John Singer Sargent. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Meynell, Alice. The Work of John Singer Sargent, R.A. New York: Scribner’s, 1903.
Mount, Charles Merrill. John Singer Sargent: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1955.
Olson, Stanley. John Singer Sargent: His Portrait. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Ormond, Richard. John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors. London: Phaidon Press, 1970.
Ratcliff, Carter. Sargent. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982.
Simpson, Marc, with Richard Ormond and H. Barbara Weinberg. Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
OTHER
Baldick, Robert, editor and translator. Pages from the Goncourt Journal. London: The Folio Society, 1980.
Bashkirtseff, Marie. Hall, A. D., and G. G. Heckel, translators. Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally, 1890.
Bierman, John. Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes. New York: Penguin, 1988.
———. Strange, True Stores of Louisiana. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1994.
Carson, Gerald. The Dentist and the Empress: The Adventures of Dr. Tom Evans in Gas-Lit Paris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
Christiansen, Rupert. Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Coleman, Elizabeth Ann. The Opulent Era: Fashions of Worth, Doucet, and Pingat. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989.
Dumas, F. G. Catalogue Illustré du Salon 1884. Paris: Libraire d’Art L. Baschet, 1884.
Fink, Louis Marie. American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Friedrich, Otto. Olympia: Paris in the Time of Manet. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Garb, Tamar. Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
Gheusi, P. B. Gambetta: Life and Letters. New York: D. Appelton & Co., 1910.
Girouard, Mark. Life in the French Country House. London: Cassell & Co., 2000.
Hambourg, Maria Morris, Françoise Heilbrun, and Philippe Neagu. Nadar. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
Hegerman-Lindencrone, Lillie de. In the Courts of Memory. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1911.
Huber, Leonard V. Creole Collage: A Collection of Columns, Published in “Catholic Action of the South.” Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1980.
Jullian, Philippe. Prince of Aesthetes: Count Robert de Montesquiou, 1855–1921. New York: The Viking Press, 1965.
Laur, Francis. The Heart of Gambetta. New York and London: John Lane, 1908.
Marly, Diana de. Worth: Father of Haute Couture. New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1990.
Marzials, Frank. Life of Léon Gambetta. London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1890.
Moore, George. Modern Painting. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898.
Morgan, Sarah. Charles East, editor. The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman. New York: Touchstone, 1992.
Painter, George E. Chateaubriand: The Longed-for Tempests (1768–93). New York: Knopf, 1977.
———. Marcel Proust. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.
Rice, Ann. The Feast of All Saints. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.
Richardson, Joanna. Princess Mathilde. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969.
———. Judith Gautier. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1986.
Sand, George. Group translation edited by Thelma Jurgrau. Story of My Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
Sitterson, J. Carlyle. Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South 1753–1950). Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953.
Stone, Kate. Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone (1861–1898). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1995.
Tinker, Edward Larocque. Creole City: Its Past and Its People. New York, London, and Toronto: Longman, Green & Co., 1953.
Vanderpooten, Claude. Samuel Pozzi, Chirurgien et ami des femmes. Paris: In Fine Editions, 1992.
Vella, Christina. Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
Wade, Michael G. Sugar Dynasty: M. A. Patout & Son, Ltd., 1791–1993. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1995.
Weinberg, H. Barbara. The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.
Willson, Beckles. John Slidell and the Confederates in Paris (1862–65). New York: AMS Press, 1970.
Winters, John D. The Civil War in Louisiana. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1963.
Zola, Emile. The Masterpiece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
ARTICLES
Audebrand, “Courrier de Paris,” L’llustration, February 15, 1879, p. 98. Bouyer, Raymond, “A. de la Gandara et Son Oeuvre,” special edition of La Plume, 1902.
Bowles, Hamish, “The Madame X Files,” Vogue, January 1999, p. 174ff.
Fairbrother, Trevor, “The Shock of John Singer Sargent’s Madame Gautreau,” Arts Magazine, January 1981, pp. 90–97.
Fourcaud, L., “Le Salon de 1884 (Deuxième Article),” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 29, no. 6 (June 1884): 482–84.
Gautier, Judith, Le Rappel, May 1, 1884, p.1.
Houssaye, Henri, “Le Salon de 1884,” Revue des Deux Mondes 63, no. 3 (June 1, 1884): 589.
Lacan, Ernest, “Photography in France,” The Philadelphia Photographer 11 (1876): 44ff.
Minchin, Hamilton, “Some Early Recollections of Sargent,” Contemporary Review 127 (June 1925): 736.
Olian, Joanne, “Charles Frederick Worth: The Founder of Haute Couture,” The Museum of the City of New York, Costume Collections, July 24, 2000. Available on the Internet at http://www.mcny.org/worth.htm.
Perdican, “Courrier de Paris,” L’llustration: June 18, 1881, p. 412; February 11, 1882, p. 86; May 27, 1882, p. 342–43; June 16, 1883, p. 371; August 11, 1883, p. 83; March 22, 1884, p. 182.
Sharp, William, “The Paris Salon,” Art Journal (1884): 179–80.
Sidlauskas, Susan, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” American Art (Fall 2001): 9–33.
L’Illustration, The Salon Issue, 1884
“In the Studio of Carolus-Duran,” The Art Interchange, July 28, 1888; August 11, 1888; and August 25, 1888.
“La Belle Americaine,” article by the Paris correspondent of London Truth, in The New York Herald, March 30, 1880.
“Eccentricities of French Art,” Art Amateur 11, no. 30 (August 1884): 52.
About the Author
Gioia Diliberto grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, the daughter of a junior high school English and Latin teacher and a NASA engineer. She has worked as a newspaper reporter and a magazine journalist and is the author of three biographies. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the novelist and editor Richard Babcock, and the couple’s teenage son, Joe.
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