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The newly discovered masterpiece has drawn comparisons to Madame X, and is having its public debut in a new blockbuster Sargent exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay.
This is a painting of a pale woman waring a black dress from the waiste up with her head turned so she is in profile against a brown ground, the painting is in a gold frame and hangs on a red wall
John Singer Sargent’s Madame O’Connor (1882) installed in “Sargent: Dazzling Paris” at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, 2025. Photo: L. Striffling, © Musée d’Orsay.
A newly discovered painting by John Singer Sargent has stunned scholars for its remarkable similarity to Madame X, which scandalized critics at the Paris Salon in 1884. The striking 1882 portrait of Madame O’Connor reveals how Sargent was already experimenting with some of the same styling ideas that would to go on to define his most notorious work.
Unlike many of the paintings that would earn Sargent widespread acclaim, Madame O’Connor was not exhibited at the time of its creation, or later on. It belongs to a private collection in France and has long remained unknown even to leading Sargent scholars, who only verified the work in 2022. Last week, the painting had its public debut in “Sargent: Dazzling Paris,” a sweeping survey at the Musée d’Orsay through January 11, 2026.
Here’s a portrait of a woman with swept up auburn hair and incredibly pale white skin seen in profile wearing a plunging black evening gown. John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau), 1883–84. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / image Art Resource.
Madame O’Connor was painted less than two years before Madame X, Sargent’s legendary portrait of Virginie Gautreau, which he began in 1883. Though Madame O’Connor is much smaller and half-length, the similarities between the two paintings are numerous. In both, the woman’s body faces forward while her head is turned so that her delicate features can be admired in profile. She wears a black dress and, with her bright pale skin and dark hair swept up in a bun, makes for a striking contrast against a muted brown background.
In 1884, both portraits also showed their sitter with one exposed shoulder. In the case of Madame X, however, this would be the source of huge controversy in polite Parisian society.
Sargent painted Gautreau in a figure-hugging dress with a plunging neckline and, in one final flourish, he had one of the straps fall off her shoulder. The effect was elegant but undeniably seductive, with one critic describing “the indecency of her dress that looks like it is about to fall off.” At the behest of Gautreau’s distraught mother, Sargent later repainted the strap. For the sitter’s damaged reputation, however, there was no such easy fix.
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