I Am Madame X

The woman in the title is Virginie Gatreau, the alluring real-life subject of John Singer Sargent’s scandalous 1884 painting Portrait of Madame X. In her first novel, biographer Gioia Diliberto presents the Louisiana-born beauty in all her sensuality and aloofness. Sargent’s bare-shouldered siren is transformed into a flesh-and-blood woman whose life shredded up by gossip and innuendo; a woman who is victimized by the very painting that immortalizes her. A stunning historical novel about a willful icon.