Countess of Cambaceres (1895)

William Bouguereau: Countess of Cambaceres

Portrait of Princess Zinaida Yusupova (1894)

François Flameng: Portrait of Princess Zinaida Yusupova 

with Two Sons at Arkhangelskoe

Self-portrait of the Artist in His Studio (1891)

Henri Ferdinand Bellan: Self-portrait of the Artist in His Studio

Portrait of a Lady (1890)

Jules Joseph Lefebvre: Portrait of a Lady

Portrait of Jane Hading (1890)

Alfred Roll: Portrait of Jane Hading

Jane Hading (25 November 1859 – 28 February 1941) was a French actress. Her real name was Jeanne-Alfrédine Tréfouret.

She was born in Marseille, where her father was an actor at the Gymnase. She has said that her first appearance on the stage came when she was three years old.

She was trained at the local Conservatoire and was engaged in 1873 for the theatre at Algiers, and afterwards for the Khedivial theatre at Cairo, where she played, in turn, coquette, soubrette and ingenue parts. Expectations had been raised by her voice, and when she returned to Marseille she sang in operetta, besides acting in Ruy Blas.

She first appeared in Paris in 1879 in La chaste Suzanne at the Palais Royal, and she was again heard in operetta at the Renaissance. She sang in La petite mariée and La belle Lurette. In 1883 she had a great success at the Gymnase in Le maître de forges. In 1884 she married Victor Koning (1842-1894), the manager of that theatre, but divorced him in 1887.

In 1888 and 1894, she toured America with Benoît Constant Coquelin. She helped to give success to Henri Lavedan's Le Prince d'Aurec at the Vaudeville in 1892, and afterwards joined the Comédie Française. Her reputation as one of the leading actresses of the day was established not only in France but in America and England. She also toured South America. Victorien Sardou chose her for the title role of his Marcelle in 1896. [Wikipedia]

Portrait of Col. William F. Cody (1889)

Rosa Bonheur: Portrait of Col. William F. Cody

Buffalo Bill enthralled Europeans with his Wild West exhibition when he took it to Paris in 1889. Bonheur visited the grounds of Cody's Wild West to sketch the exotic American animals and the Indian warriors with their families. Cody, in turn, accepted the invitation of Rosa Bonheur to visit her chateau in Fontainebleau where she painted this portrait. For Rosa Bonheur, Buffalo Bill embodied the freedom and independence of the United States. [Wikimedia Commons]

Portrait of Donna Olga Caracciolo (1889)

Jacques Emile Blanche: Portrait of Donna Olga Caracciolo dei Duchi di Castelluccio

Maria Beatrice Olga Alberta Caracciolo (born in London 8 August 1871) was the daughter of the Duchess of Castelluccio, and rumored to be the natural daughter of Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII, a onetime lover of the Duchess. Olga, given the name Alberta in honor of the Prince who was also her godfather, was the only daughter and heiress to her father’s title of Duke of Castelluccio. Circumstantial evidence and the many favors later shown her and her second husband, the brilliant society photographer Baron Adolphe de Meyer, by the King (whose goddaughter she was), were thought by some to support the rumors regarding her paternity, which were never disproved.

Olga first married at Naples 11 May 1892 an Italian nobleman, Nobile Marino Brancaccio, younger son of Carlo Brancaccio, Prince of Triggiano and Duke of Lustra, but this marriage ended in divorce (7 June 1899) and she remarried to Adolphe de Meyer. Her beauty and elegance inspired not only Blanche, but also Whistler, Boldini, Sickert, Sargent, Conder, and Helleu to paint or draw her. The artist, reminiscing about Olga in his memoirs, wrote: she “has such a wealth of dresses, fans, and jewelry as befitted one who put in an appearance at all important social functions. When Olga enters the Orchestra stalls, the opera glasses of everyone were focused on her, the most elegant woman in the audience, the most thoroughbred of cosmopolitan society: Here is the Baroness de Meyer, they whisper spellbound.”

Jacques Emile Blanche, ten years her senior, first met Olga in Dieppe where his parents had a house and where Olga’s mother, the Duchess, had taken refuge from society in a villa presented to her by the Prince of Wales. Bianca Sampajo (who died in 1891) had married Gennaro Caracciolo-Pisquizi, Duke of Castelluccio, in Paris in 1869 but separated soon after the birth of their daughter two years later. Dieppe, at the time, was a fashionable seaside resort inhabited by a large English colony and the incognito visits of the Prince of Wales to the Duchess and his goddaughter only fuelled rumors and gossip. The villa, described by Blanche as the “Villa of Mystery,” was viewed with a mix of envy and disapproval by those excluded from the Prince’s circle. Olga herself was said by Blanche to be the model for Proust’s Odette (although the author more likely referred to her mother), in À la recherche du temps perdu; Blanche himself was the original of the painter Elstir. Blanche describes how he “painted her in a dress of rose cambric, upright, impassive, a sort of infanta in the style of Velazquez, already wearing the longer skirts in which girls who were to come out used to be dressed.” [Matthiesen Gallery]

Portrait of Monsieur Alphand (1888)

Alfred Roll: Portrait of Monsieur Alphand

Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817-1891) was a French engineer of the Corps of Bridges and Roads. Under Napoléon III, Alphand participated in the renovation of Paris directed by Baron Haussmann between 1852 and 1870, in the company of another engineer Eugène Belgrand and the landscape architect Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps. After the retirement of Baron Haussmann, his successor, Léon Say, entrusted to Alphand the position of Director of Public Works of Paris. Under this title, Alphand continued Haussmann's works. [Wikipedia]

Émile Friant (1887)

Émile Friant: Portrait of the artist's mother peeling a turnip, in front of a window

 

Émile Friant: Young Woman of Nancy in a Winter Landscape

Girl in a Red Dress (1887)

Emile Levy: Portrait of a Girl in a Red Dress

Portrait of Madame Constantin (1885)

Émile Friant: Portrait of Madame Constantin

Portrait of Gabrielle Réjane (1884)

Theobald Chartran: Portrait of Gabrielle Réjane as a Young Actress

Portrait of Madame Marie Toulmouche (1884)

Jules Elie Delaunay: Portrait of Madame Marie Toulmouche

Marie Lecadre, daughter of a magistrate of Nantes, seems to possess all the qualities of beauty and intelligence. She married the painter Toulmouche and became, when they stay in their property in the Nantes countryside, the host of a coterie of friends, including the painters Gustave Doré, Puvis, Eugene Picou, Jules-Elie Delaunay himself, and the poet Jose Maria Heredia. We see in the background of the painting the place of these meetings, the Abbey of White Crown.

They talk about art and literature, and she sings and plays music. Numerous art critics enthusiastically commented upon this exhibited portrait at the Salon of 1885 in Paris, then in Nantes next year. It is considered one of the masterpieces of the artist. [jules-elie-delaunay.fr]

Portrait of Lucy Lee Robbins (1884)

Emile Carolus-Duran: Portrait of Lucy Lee Robbins

Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran was a painter, teacher, and member of several French arts organizations. In 1872, he opened a studio in Paris, France.  His studio welcomed James McNeil Whistler, a young John Singer Sargent, and aspiring female artists through workshops, or ateliers. One promising artist of the women’s atelier was Lucy Lee-Robbins. Dressed in a fine black cloth, Lucy Lee-Robbins gingerly leans and rests her right arm on the chair. A favorite student and model of Carolus-Duran, she began painting around 1884 and debuted at the Salon of the Société de Artistes Français in 1887. She wanted the same artistic opportunities that were available to her peers in the male dominated French art world. [Chrysler Museum]

Portrait of Madame Petitjean (1883)

Émile Friant: Portrait of Madame Petitjean

Madame Dubufe née Cécile Woog (1881)

Guillaume Dubufe: Madame Dubufe née Cécile Woog

Portrait of Anne-Marie Dagnan (1880)

Gustave Courtois: Portrait of Anne-Marie Dagnan

Portrait of a Lady (1879)

Pierre-Auguste Cot: Portrait of a Lady. Mme H.S.

La Parisienne—the Parisian woman—was celebrated worldwide as the quintessence of feminine beauty, fashion, and taste. Consider the regal sitter here. Formally posed against a richly patterned, painted leather backdrop, she wears an elaborate, Elizabethan-style evening dress with a standing lace collar and quilted, pearl-studded sleeves. Coolly surveying the viewer, she is the ultimate French fashionista—the essence of high-style contemporary chic. [Chrysler Museum of Art]

Sarah Bernhardt (1876)

Georges Jules Victor Clairin: Sarah Bernhardt

Born in Paris in 1843, Georges Clairin received his artist education at the École des Beaux-Arts under the tutelage of Isidore Pils and François Edouard Picot beginning in 1861. He accompanied Henri Regnault on his travels throughout Spain and Morocco, and went to Italy with François Flameng and Jean Léon Gérôme. During his stay in Morocco, Clairin met the Catalan artist Mariano Fortuny and together they visited Tetuan. In 1895, Clairin traveled to Egypt with the composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Clairin was awarded the Silver Medal at the Exposition universelle in 1889 and was made an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1897.

Clairin is best known for his portraits of Sarah Bernhardt, with whom he had an enduring friendship, and he painted her in a number of roles, such as the Queen in Ruys Blas (1879), Melisande in La Princesse lointain (1895 and 1899), Cleopatra (1900) Theodora (1902 and Saint Teresa of Avila. In addition to these stage portraits, Clairin painted her several times in more intimate surroundings. His 1876 portrait of the famous actress made the artist's reputation and was very well received at the Salon of that year. 'Le portrait de Madame Sara Bernhardt est assurément une des oeuvres les plus saillantes du Salon, tant par l'originalit de la composition que par la splendeur du coloris.' [The portrait of Madame Sarah Bernhardt is certainly one of the most prominent works of the show, both by the originality of the composition by the splendor of colors.] (Théodore Véron, Le salon de 1876: mémorial de l'art et des artistes de mon temps, Poitiers, 1876). [Christie’s]

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1876)

Alexandre Cabanel: Catharine Lorillard Wolfe

In the mid-1870s, both Catharine and John Wolfe commissioned works from Cabanel, who had made his reputation as a painter of genre scenes and portraits of Second Empire aristocrats. He ordered a variant of Cabanel’s most famous composition, The Birth of Venus, while she commissioned a Biblical figure painting and the present portrait. She sat for Cabanel in Paris, wearing a white satin evening dress that was the height of French fashion in 1876. Contemporary viewers admired the sitter’s elegant hands and her stance as that of "a hostess receiving guests…full of flexibility and pliant, willowy grace, entirely American in its distinction and sensitive responsiveness." [Metropolitan Museum of Art]