Madame X's shoulder strap was first painted slipping off

In 1883 John Singer Sargent, an American painter working in Paris, decided he wanted to paint Virginie Gautreau. She was a banker's wife from New Orleans, known in Paris society as a "professional beauty," and she had turned down other painters. The portrait was his idea, not a commission. He wrote to a friend who knew her, suggesting the friend tell her he was "a man of prodigious talent." She agreed.

She was a difficult sitter. In Paris she was busy with social engagements, and at her estate in Brittany she was bored. Sargent complained of her "hopeless laziness." He made about thirty drawings of different poses, then painted her in one that appears in none of them: body facing forward, head turned away in profile, one hand resting on a low table. Gautreau was pleased and believed he was painting a masterpiece.

The portrait went to the Paris Salon of 1884 under a title that left out her name, though nearly everyone knew who she was. In it, the right strap of her black gown had slipped down her shoulder. "One more struggle," a critic wrote in Le Figaro, "and the lady will be free." Ralph Curtis, a friend who went to the opening with Sargent, wrote that a crowd stood in front of it all day and that "All the women jeer."

Reviews called the figure vulgar and her powdered skin corpse-like. Gautreau and her mother came to Sargent's studio in tears, and her mother asked him to withdraw the painting from the exhibition. He refused, saying he had painted her exactly as she was dressed.

Later he painted the strap back up onto her shoulder, which is how it looks today. An unfinished second version, now at the Tate in London, leaves that strap unresolved. By 1886 Sargent had moved to London. He had considered the move since 1882, and the scandal likely pushed him to make it.

Seven years later another painter, Gustave Courtois, painted Gautreau in profile, in the same style of dress, with the strap again hanging off her shoulder. This time the public liked the portrait.

Sargent kept Madame X in his studio, first in Paris and then in London. In 1916, a few months after Gautreau died, he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Around then he wrote that he supposed it was the best thing he had done. That May a New York Herald headline read: "Sargent Masterpiece Rejected by Subject Now Acquired by Museum."