John Singer Sargent: Painting Madame X

Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City is among the most famous portraits of all time. Sargent – a child of expatriate Americans – was a rising young star of the Parisian art world at the age of 27 when he began the painting that would become the center of a scandal at the annual Salon of 1884. Deeply wounded by the criticism, he moved to London at the urging of Henry James. Sargent went on to become the most famous portrait painter of his time, and the once scandalous “Portrait of Madame X” became, in the end, his most famous and enduring image. Directed for the stage by Tony Award-winning playwright Mark Medoff (Children of a Lesser God), and written and performed by Bob Diven, this is a densely packed 40 minutes of theater that transports us to Sargent’s London studio on a January evening in 1916, where an older Sargent makes the decision to sell this portrait that he has kept from public view for over 20 years. Revealing, for the first time, the little-known story of his “Portrait of Madame X”.