In 1884 John Singer Sargent, eager to make his mark in Paris, finally convinced Virginie Gautreau, one of the Edith Wharton-esque American expat beauties who had also made her way in France in a marriage to a wealthy banker, to sit for him. She was already semi notorious for her beauty and her affairs. All this was catnip to Sargent who understood she would be the ideal subject to catapult him from well regarded to famous. His painting, eventually known at Madame X, did indeed do the trick.

Her white skin (reportedly enhanced by lavender powder), her black slip of an evening gown in one early version slipping off her shoulder, her retrousse nose and her dynamic standing pose combined to make this portrait dominate any room in which it resided. Sargent kept it for many years before he allow dealer Pierre Rosenberg to take it off his hands.

A half-century later, Marsden Hartley, the spiritual, largely closeted gay painter of colorful landscapes and abstracted coded German symbolism returned from Europe to his native Maine where he finally found a measure of peace in nature and a love relationship with a young fisherman.

His painting in 1941 of the Black Duck No 1 may not have had the same sensational reception as Sargent's Madame X, but it feels equally erotic, and side by side they form an intriguing, separated-at-birth pair.

Madame X, John Singer Sargent, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Black Duck No 1, Detroit Institute of the Arts