Once the Stuff of Scandal, John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X’ Draws a Prominent Place in the Met’s ‘Sargent and Paris’

A soon-to-open exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Sargent and Paris,” is centered on a hometown perennial, John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” (1884). New Yorkers have come to well know the portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the sinuous contours of whom have been in the museum’s permanent collection since 1916. If the image doesn’t have the iconographic heft of another staple of the Met’s collection, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851) by Emmanuel Leutze, “Madame X” has gained its own peculiar ubiquity.