Long lost Letty - in celebration of the reappearance of Joan Crawford's "Letty Lynton," portraits by Hurrell, 1932

 

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Letty Lynton is a 1932 American pre-Code drama film starring Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery, and Nils Asther. Directed by Clarence Brown, the film was based on the 1931 novel of the same name by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, the novel being based on a historical murder case. The film has since become remembered for two divergent reasons. The first relates to the major fashion trend it inspired: Adrian's "Letty Lynton dress" - a white cotton organdy gown with large ruffled sleeves, puffed at the shoulder - was copied by Macy's department store and was said to have sold over 50,000 replicas nationwide. 

The second reason is that the film has been unavailable for ninety years. Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes, co-authors of 1930 play Dishonored Lady had sued MGM claiming plagiarism, and a federal district court ruled in 1936 that MGM's script had too closely followed that of the plaintiff's play. The legal battle continued, with the case eventually going all the way to U.S. Supreme Court who ruled in playwrights' favor, finding MGM guilty of copyright violation. The result was that the studio had to pay the plaintiffs one-fifth of the film's profit, while MGM was forbidden from exhibiting the film until Dishonored Lady fell out of copyright... on 1 January 2026. In April 2026, Warner Bros. - who now owns the film - announced that a 4K restoration of Letty Lynton had been completed and would be premiered - again - at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles in May.

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These images - taken by Hurrell as publicity for Letty Lynton - are shared from Instagram posters realdavidstenn and jcjoancrawford

Simply precious - still-lifes by Blaise-Alexandre Desgoffe

 

1868. Nearly all of the titles for these paintings are nothing more than descriptive of the objects portrayed, so I'm only listing the dates, where known.

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1893.

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1868.

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1857.

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1887.

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Les Bijoux de la couronne, 1887.

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1878.

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1889.

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Circa 1900.

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1885.

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1897.

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La Table du collectionneur, 1869.

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1896.

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Œuvres d'art de la collection de Sir Richard Wallace, 1880.

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1896.

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1866.

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1869.

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Blaise-Alexandre Desgoffe (17 January 1830, Paris - 2 May 1901, Paris), French painter who specialized in highly finished, frequently very elaborate, still-life paintings. He was the nephew of the painter Alexandre Desgoffe and the father of the painter Jules Desgoffe. He studied under Hippolyte Flandrin and exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1857 to 1882; he was awarded a third-class medal in 1861 and a second-class medal in 1863. In 1878 he was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He was awarded a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the year before his death.

Inspiration and the pose - preparatory photographs by Jacques de Lalaing, circa 1884-1914

 

Jacques de Lalaing was a painter and, even more, a sculptor. These preparatory photographs, all now in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, were taken during different sessions but using the same model. I have no idea what works the studies may have contributed to; perhaps a scholar of de Lalaing's work could match photographs with finished pieces. And, unsurprisingly, I have no idea who the model was. But he's graceful and beautifully proportioned, and it's easy to see why he would be a favorite of the artist.

But to me the real "art" here, the real artist, is time and decay. Along with the original careless printing, the spots and smudges, the rough and skewed edges, are all the random and exquisite changes that time has wrought on the fragile paper. The subtle and shifting variations of color and tone, shadow and light. And then the images that have faded to almost nothing, the vivid figure, the flesh and blood man gone to ghost. But isn't it somehow become more, now, become the beauty of ruin, of time and impermanence.