“It caught Sargent completely by surprise,” says Mary Crawford Volk, a scholar at the Museum Studies Program of Harvard Extension School who is currently writing a book on Sargent.

“As far as I can tell, he was not himself anti-Semitic,” she says, instead suggesting that he was “calling attention to the power of religious imagery across time.”

Where Sargent can be faulted, she says, is in “not personally responding to the protests with sufficient attention and generosity.”

Sargent’s synagogue is “best understood as forming part of the entire ensemble,” according to Volk. Many scholars have noted that Sargent intended the paired figures to be seen as only the outer trappings of a truer inner spirituality–and so that both church and synagogue were outmoded.

Nevertheless, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill to remove the synagogue panel a few years after its installation, only to repeal it soon later on constitutional grounds. With the reversal pending, an anonymous visitor splashed the image with ink, leaving Sargent the first to restore his own murals.

In the end he failed even to begin the final and central panel, which was to be of the Sermon on the Mount, before his death in 1925. It has since been argued that World War I shattered the faith in progress at the heart of his idea, and that the synagogue scandal destroyed his interest in the project. In 1890, Sargent had shunted aside his portraiture in order to relocate himself in the mural tradition, which was seen at the time as more dignified.

But the conspicuous blank space at center remains, a pale token of the scandal that revisited Sargent half a lifetime after “Madame X.”