Long before social media, a New Orleans-born socialite powdered her skin an eerie lavender and walked into Parisian ballrooms so striking that painters stalked her through the city. This episode examines Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, an American outsider married to a banker twice her age, who turned herself into a professional beauty with a personal brand, and John Singer Sargent, a fellow expatriate who pursued her not for a commission but for the cultural capital her portrait could bring.

We recount the chaotic 1883 summer in Brittany where a restless subject and a frustrated painter fought over sittings until Sargent abandoned natural poses for a coiled, tension-filled profile. The conversation breaks down the chemistry of lead white, bone black, and rose madder that made her skin look uncanny, the crescent tiara and siren-legged tabl ...