"jeff" wrote in message
news:VenBg.2334$W01.903@dukeread08...
rw wrote:


The Madam X is a versatile generic terrestrial pattern. It's also an
easy tie. I used to think that the "X" came from the way the rubber legs
were tied in, but now I have another theory.

I think Doug Swisher, the inventor, might have had, in the back of his
mind, the famous John Singer Sargeant painting, Madame X:

http://www.jssgallery.org/Paintings/Madame_X.htm

The painting was shocking at the time -- evocatively, alluringly erotic.
Sargeant was effectively banned from the Paris Salon because of the
controversy.

Sargeant was a masterful painter of oil portraits -- he commanded small
fortunes from high society types. I think he was a great and
underappreciated painter who was frustrated in his artistic career,
largely because of the reaction to Madame X. He did a few watercolor
paintings of moving water that are the best I've ever seen, and they
were only a small diversion for him.


i don't know squat about swisher, or the back of his mind, but if a jss
painting inspired his naming of the fly, i'm impressed. any theory on
how the "humpy" got its name? g

jeff

The actual name of the mysterious Madame X was Amelie (Virginie) Gautreau.
It was the original version of the painting that "shocked" the 1884 Paris
Salon. The original had the strap (her right) of her gown, down on her arm.
The version we see today was the original, repainted with the strap up. As
Deborah Davis says in her book, "Strapless," Sargent kept the portrait in
his studio for the next 32 years, finally selling it to the Metropolitan a
short time after Gautreau's death. "Today the painting is considered to be
Sargent's masterpiece."

During the first half of the 20th century Sargent was overtaken like many
others by impressionism and modernism. He was considered old fashioned and
irrelevant. By the 1970s he was again gaining interest and now is very
popular. His emotional life was complicated in that he was at least
bisexual and most probably gay, and subject for years to fear of the same
English laws that were used to persecute Oscar W.

I really like his architectural drawings from Italy. He was a master of the
male figure with charcoal, and his brushwork in oil can be as expressive and
economical as that of Rembrant. Although he lived mostly in Europe, he is a
wonderful American realist painter. I believe Scotland has his drawings, but
the Gardner in Boston, and the Met have multiple Sargents and others are
scattered throughout the US.

Dave