The strap that scandalized Paris, and the one that fixed it
One fallen dress strap in a single portrait wrecked a painter's reputation for a decade — an X-ray shows the exact moment he backed down.
In 1884, John Singer Sargent unveiled a portrait of Virginie Gautreau, a Parisian socialite, with one jeweled strap of her gown slipping loose from her shoulder. Paris read it as an accusation — the painting of a woman caught between engagements, respectable and half-undressed at once. Critics called it indecent. Gautreau's mother begged him to withdraw it. He refused, then quietly repainted the strap back onto her shoulder once the Salon closed, and kept the canvas hidden in his studio for over twenty years.
Today you can see both versions. Infrared and X-ray imaging of paintings routinely surface these buried decisions — called pentimenti, from the Italian for "repenting" — the ghost of a hand an artist moved, a background they scrapped, a strap they lost their nerve on.
We tend to talk about a finished painting as a single fixed choice. It's closer to a transcript of an argument, most of which the artist eventually lost to their own second thoughts.