Madame X speaks

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Deborah Davis, Elizabeth Oustinoff

Beautifully costumed and coiffed, young Amelie made the rounds of balls and dinner parties; captivating the men and women in her own milieu and winning the attention of the public as well. She soon became a celebrity whose every action was Zealously followed. Upon seeing her at a ball, at the opera, or even in a carriage in the park, crowds would cause traffic jams on the boulevards, standing on benches frantically pushing and shoving to see the woman called "La Belle Gautreau." Her fame was such that in 1880, a reporter for the New York Herald saw her while he was visiting France and filed a flowery story about her entitled "La Belle Americaine: A New Star of Occidental Loveliness Swims into the Sea of Parisian Society. (6)

"During this time," wrote the nineteenth-century social historian, Gabriel Louis Pringue, "women wore high coiffures with false curls. They also padded their breasts, wore balloon sleeves, ample dresses, with endless trains being caught between doors, upsetting armchairs and footstools." (7) But Amelie was different. When she made her debut in society, Pringue described her as an antique statue, auburn hair with gold reflections, thrown back and tied in a Grecian knot, freeing a proud forehead, and admirable face of absolute regularity of feature, without the slightest defect, with the transparency of alabaster, set on a long neck, magnificently placed on perfectly rounded shoulders ... dressed in a white, Grecian cloth which molded her superb figure. (8)

Amelie became internationally famous for her pale, luminous skin, a constant subject of debate among admirers and detractors who wondered if she ingested small does of ansenic to maintain her ghostly pallor. She did not. Her beauty secret was discovered in a musty old financial ledger in an archive in Brittany. Maintained by her meticulous and disapproving mother-in-law, Louise La Chambre Gautreau, the ledger itemizes the young bride's monthly bills, including one for rice powder, a popular skin-whitening cosmetic at the time (Fig. 3).

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As a young man in his mid-twenties, Sargent succumbed to infatuations with intriguing celebrities of both sexes. (9) But Amelie was the most captivating celebrity of all. As a fellow American who shared his goal of fame in Paris, Sargent found her personally bewitching and was enthralled by her sculptured profile, sinuous form, and ineffable elegance. (10) He surely speculated that, once his portrait of the famous society beauty had been seen at the Salon, dozens of fashionable and wealthy Parisians would be pounding on his studio door.

Sargent mounted an elaborate campaign to win Amelie's permission to paint her. He appealed to his closest childhood friend, Ben del Castillo, pressing him to exert his influence with Amelie, who was his distant relative by marriage on the Avegno side. Sargent also enlisted the help of one of his early portrait subjects, Emma Marie Cadiot Allouard-Jouan (Pl. II), a writer and translator who lived in Paris and also owned a summer villa in Dinard in Brittany, not far from the Chateau les Chenes (see Pl. IV), the Gautreaus' walled estate in Parame. (11)