Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau

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Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau (ne Avegno, 29 January

1859[1] 25 July 1915) was born in New Orleans but grew up Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau
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.

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.

Contents
1 Early life and education
2 Parisienne
3 Marriage and family
4 Madame X
5 Death
6 Representation in other media John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X
7 References (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1884, oil on canvas,
8 External links
234.95 x 109.86 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Born Virginie Amlie Avegno
29 January 1859
Early life and education New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.

Gautreau was born Virginie Amlie Avegno in New Orleans, Died 25 July 1915 (aged 56)
Louisiana, on 29 January 1859, the daughter of Anatole Placide Cannes, France
Avegno (3 July 1835 7 April 1862) and Marie Virginie de Nationality American
Ternant of Parlange Plantation, a descendant of French nobility.
Known for Subject of John Singer Sargent's
She had a sister, Valentine Marie, who died as a young child of
yellow fever. Their parents were white Creoles; their father painting Portrait of Madame X
Anatole was the son of Philippe Avegno (originally Italian) and Spouse(s) Pierre Gautreau
Catherine Genois.

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.

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 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 Chnes, where
Sargent produced some 30 studies of her in pencil, watercolor and oil.

Marriage and family

 She married Pierre Gautreau, a French banker and shipping magnate. She had a
daughter named Louise Gautreau (18791911).

Madame X
She posed for paintings by several noted 19th-century painters, including Gustave
Courtois (1891) and Antonio de La Gndara.[2] (1898).

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
Antonio de La Gandara, tolerate adultery but shudder at admitting it openly, as this portrait seemed to brazenly
Madame Pierre do. It was not that a woman of Virginie's station in society would not pose as a model
Gautreau, 1898 (after all, no scandal attached to her posing afterwards for both Courtois and de la
Gndara), 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.

Antonio de La Gndara 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 Chnes
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
1. New Orleans parish Birth Records 1859
2. "La Gandara Timeline" (http://www.lagandara.fr/siteanglais/chronanglais/chrona.htm). Retrieved 31 January 2015.

External links
Virginie Amlie Avegno Gautreau (https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=38977354)
at Find a Grave

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media related to Virginie
title=Virginie_Amlie_Avegno_Gautreau&oldid=783388082"
Amlie Avegno Gautreau.
Categories: American socialites American expatriates in France
American artists' models American people of French descent American people of Italian descent
Louisiana Creole people People from New Orleans 1859 births 1915 deaths

This page was last edited on 1 June 2017, at 23:45.

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