Dark ladies - an acknowledgement of Halloween, 2021

 

Lady Michelham, by Federico Beltrán Masses, 1920.

Sonja, by Christian Schad, 1928.

Portrait of a Noblewoman Dressed in Mourning, by Jacopo Chimenti, called Jacopo da Empoli, circa 1600.

La Dame sombre, by James Ensor, 1881.

The Young Widow, by Rolland Lefebvre, circa 1665.

Stefanina Primicile Carafa, Marchioness of Cicerale and Duchess of Montejasi, by Edgar Degas, 1875.

The Empress Doña Margarita de Austria in Mourning Dress, by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, 1666.

Portrait of a lady, unknown artist, 1918. The painting is signed, upper right, but I can't make out the name.

A Lady with a Black Veil, by Nikolaos Kantounis, 1819.

 Portrait of a lady, by Alessandro Allori, circa 1590-99.

Olimpia Maidalchini, by Diego Velázquez, 1650.

Portrait of Berthe Morisot with Hat, in Mourning, by Édouard Manet, 1874.

A Lady of the Horton Family, unknown artist, circa 1655.

Portrait of a lady, by Emmeline Deane, 1885.

Anne Dacre, Countess of Arundel, English School, circa first third of the seventeenth century.

Portrait of a woman, unknown artist, circa 1865.

Marie Dihau, by Edgar Degas, circa 1867-68.

Maria Elisabeta Dulliker, née Balthasar, Swiss School, seventeenth century.

 Moonlight, by Edvard Munch, 1893.

Lady in Mourning, by Martin Mendgen, 1930.

Guard of the Harem - two paintings by Frank Duveneck, 1879-80

1879. In the collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

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Circa 1880. In the collection of  the Cincinnati Art Museum.

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Frank Duveneck (né Decker; 9 October 1848, Covington, Kentucky - 3 January 1919, Cincinnati, Ohio), American figure and portrait painter. His father was Bernhard Decker, a German immigrant who died in a cholera epidemic when his son was only a year old. His mother remarried and he took his stepfather's name. By the age of fifteen he'd begun study with a local painter, Johann Schmitt, and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators. Cincinnati, Ohio, was just across the Ohio River from his home town, but because of his Catholic faith and German heritage, he was considered an outsider by the Cincinnati art community. In 1869, at the age of twenty-one, he went abroad to study at the Royal Academy of Munich with Wilhelm von Diez and Wilhelm Leibl, whose work would greatly influenced his own. He subsequently became one of the young American painters - with William Merritt Chase, John Henry Twachtman, and others - who in the 1870s challenged the traditions of the Hudson River School and popularized a new style of painting characterized by a freer brushwork. His work attracted great attention when shown at the Boston Art Club in 1875; Henry James called him "the unsuspected genius." Pupils flocked to him in Germany and Italy, where he made long visits, and in 1878, he opened a school in Munich. In 1886, he married one of his students, Boston-born, Florence-raised Elizabeth Boott. (The two had been engaged off and on since 1881.) They lived at the Villa Castellani in Florence, had a son together, but she died in Paris of pneumonia only two years after their marriage. The artist was devastated by her death, after which there was marked slowing in his productivity. He returned to America where, a wealthy man, he chose to lead a life of relative obscurity. He taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. And in 1905 he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, becoming a full Academician the following year. He died in Cincinnati at the age of seventy.

Male by female - a selection of photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot

 

Étude de nu masculin, 1939.

Louis Jouvet, 1925.

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Jean Cocteau, 1939.

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Michel Lemoine, 1948.

Étude de nu, circa 1930s.

Hubert de Givenchy, 1945. (Two images.)

Nu, circa 1934.

Homme drapé, circa 1925.

Future French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing at seventeen years old, 1943. (Two images.)

 Étude de nu, circa 1930s. (Two images.)

Unknown, 1940.

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*  Circa 1936-7, printed and/or signed in 1954.

 Portrait d'homme, 1942.

 Portrait d'homme, circa 1935.

Le Jeune faune - portrait de G. B., ND.

* Most if not all of these so marked were included in two books, both with texts by Paul Valéry, Narcisse and La Cantate de Narcisse. The former was published in 1936. And the latter, illustrated with twenty photographs, was published in 1941, with a print run of only thirty copies.

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Laure Albin-Guillot (15 February 1879, Paris - 22 February 1962, Paris), French photographer. Née Laure Maffredi (or Meifredy), she attended the Lycée Molière and, at the age of eighteen married Dr. Albin Guillot, a specialist in microscopy. Working from her studio at her home on Rue du Ranelagh, she published her first fashion photographs in the French edition of Vogue in 1922. The same year, she won a gold medal in a contest sponsored by Revue Francaise de Photographie. From 1924 to 1950, she exhibited regularly at the Salon international de photographie and at the Salon des artistes décorateurs. She had her first one-person exhibition with forty prints at the Salon d'Automne in 1925. And in that same year she exhibited to much acclaim at the famous Paris world fair, the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. Her husband died four years later and she moved to the Boulevard de Beauséjour. There she received the artistic celebrities of the day and, in the course of the 1930s, she travelled widely to North Africa, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Her work was frequently published in the press, while she frequently participated in solo and collective exhibitions at home and abroad. In 1931 she became president of the Union féminine des carrières libérales et commerciales, an organization that worked to support the interests of women in professional life. After World War II, she continued to work in her studio, doing mostly portraiture, until she retired in 1956 to the Maison Nationale des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne, where she died, seven days after her eighty-third birthday. Comprising 52,000 negatives and 20,000 prints, her studio archive now belongs to the city of Paris.