Baron Adolph de Meyer, A Street in China, Photogravure #12 (from “Camera Work” #XL), 1912 via
Category Archives: Adolph de Meyer
Vintage Photos of Bloomsbury Clique Society Hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell (1873 – 1938) was an English aristocrat and society hostess. She was part of the literary Bloomsbury clique, along with Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster and more.
Perhaps Lady Ottoline’s most interesting literary legacy is the wealth of representations of her that appear in 20th-century literature. She was the inspiration for Mrs Bidlake in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, for Hermione Roddice in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, for Lady Caroline Bury in Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield, and for Lady Sybilline Quarrell in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On. The Coming Back (1933), another novel which portrays her, was written by Constance Malleson, one of Ottoline’s many rivals for the affection of Bertrand Russell. Some critics consider her the inspiration for Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley. Huxley’s roman à clef, Crome Yellow depicts the life at a thinly-veiled Garsington, one of her estates.
Non-literary portraits are also part of this interesting legacy, for example, as seen in the artistic photographs of her by Cecil Beaton. There are portraits by Henry Lamb, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, and others. Carolyn Heilbrun edited Lady Ottoline’s Album (1976), a collection of snapshots and portraits of Morrell and of her famous contemporaries, mostly taken by Morrell herself.
Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell by George Charles Beresford, 4 June 1903 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell by Cavendish Morton platinum print, 1905 via
Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell by Adolf de Meyer, c. 1912 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell by Baron Adolph de Meyer
platinum print, 1912 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell, by Cecil Beaton, 1927 © Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s London via
Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1929 via
Lady Ottoline Morrell in her bedroom at Amerongen, 1925 via
Vintage Photos of Dandy, Muse and Celebrity Luisa Casati
Luisa Casati (1881 – 1957) was an Italian heiress, muse, and patroness of the arts in early 20th-century Europe. A celebrity and femme fatale, the marchesa’s famous eccentricities dominated and delighted European society for nearly three decades. She dramatically altered her appearance to become a bewitchingly beautiful figure from some bizarre fairy tale. She wore live snakes as jewellery and was infamous for her evening strolls; naked beneath her furs whilst parading cheetahs on diamond-studded leads. Nude servants gilded in gold leaf attended her. Bizarre wax mannequins sat as guests at her dining table, some of them rumoured to contain the ashes of past lovers. Without question, the Marchesa was the most scandalous woman of her day.
She became a muse to Italian Futurists , captivated artists and literary figures and had numerous portraits painted and sculpted by various artists. She posed for photographs by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Baron Adolph de Meyer. Many of them she paid for, as a wish to “commission her own immortality”. She is famous for saying “I want to be a living work of art”.
Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati by unknown photographer, (ca. 1903) via
“Luisa Casati” by Alberto Martini ca. 1906. Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati on one of her night strolls along the Grand Canal in Venice
Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati by Adolf Demeyer, 1913
Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati by Man Ray, 1922
Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati by Cecil Beaton, 1954
Collection of Vintage Celebrity Portraits by Baron Adolph de Meyer
Baron Adolph de Meyer (1868 – 1946) was a photographer famed for his elegant photographic portraits in the early 20th century, many of which depicted celebrities such as Mary Pickford, Rita Lydig, Luisa Casati, Billie Burke, Irene Castle, John Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Ruth St. Denis, King George V of the United Kingdom, and Queen Mary. He was also the first official fashion photographer for the American magazine Vogue, appointed to that position in 1913.
Today, few of his prints survive, most were destroyed during World War II
Billie Burke by Baron Adolph de Meyer via
Ruth St. Denis in The Revelation of the Goddess from Omika by Baron Adolph de Meyer via
Lillian Gish by Baron Adolph de Meyer via
Irene Castle 1921 by Baron Adolph de Meyer via
Mary Pickford Wedding Portrait by Baron Adolph de Meyer via
Portrait of Marchesa Luisa Casati by Baron Adolph de Meyer via
A Collection of Photos Feat. Rita de Acosta Lydig
Cuban-American socialite Rita de Acosta Lydig (1875 – 1929) was in her heyday one of the foremost women of high society – photographed by Adolf de Meyer, Edward Steichen and Gertrude Käsebier, she was regarded:
“the most picturesque woman in America.”
She was sculpted in alabaster by Malvina Hoffman and painted by Giovanni Boldini and John Singer Sargent. Isabella Stewart Gardner, the creator of the Gardner museum in Boston, once asked their mutual friend, John Singer Sargent, why Rita had never expressed herself artistically. “Why should she?” Sargent answered, “She herself is art.”
Lydig was famous for her extravagant lifestyle, :
“…Rita was equally welcomed in Paris, where she spent parts of each year. She would arrive at the Ritz with a hairdresser, masseuse, chauffeur, secretary, maid,… and forty Louis Vuitton trunks…”
Saddly her overspending into heavy debt and she was declared bankrupt – shortly afterwards she died of pernicious anaemia at the age of 54.
Later her personal wardrobe became the basis for the start of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rita de Acosta Lydig by Edward Steichen, 1905 via
Rita de Acosta Lydig (1875-1929) photographed by Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934). Illustration in “Camera work”, n° 10, April 1905 via
Rita de Acosta Lydig’ by Adolphe de Meyer, 1913
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Rita de Acosta Lydig’ by Adolphe de Meyer, 1913
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FROM THE BYGONE 