I am Madame X, by Gioia Diliberto

I love John Singer Sargent’s portrait, “Doctor Pozzi at Home” at the Hammer museum, which led me to read Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat last month. This book is a fictionalized biography of Virginie Gautreau, the subject of another of Sargent’s portraits, “Portrait of Madame X”. Samuel Pozzi and Virginie Gautreau knew each other and may have been lovers. Both were married to other people. We know that Pozzi owned another Sargent painting featuring Gautreau, a picture of her giving a toast over a dinner table. I felt a little thrill when Dr. Pozzi first appears in Diliberto’s book (p. 90). Unfortunately, Diliberto’s character of Dr. Pozzi makes him out to be a cad, not the way Barnes describes him, so that rankled a bit. The book is not great literature, but it has the fizzy fun of a romance novel. In this case the facts are well researched, but Diliberto lacks a novelist’s ability to invent a convincing interior life for her character (Beckett is the opposite – only an interior life). I really only care about Virginie Gautreau because Sargent painted her, so after Dr. Pozzi appeared and was abandoned I grew impatient for the portrait painting to start. Sargent doesn’t appear until page 172. But as a complement to Julian Barnes’ book, and to the two Sargent portraits that are the reason for it all, I enjoyed it.