The portrait of his wife - paintings by Robert Fagan

The artist's first wife, Anna Maria Ferri, circa 1790-92. (One of his first portraits, and not actually entirely finished; note the hands.)

Robert Fagan (circa 1761, London - 26 August 1816, Rome), English artist, archeologist, and art dealer, resident in Italy. The son of an Irish banker, in 1781 he was enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools. But he soon left England for the continent, traveling to France and Italy, before settling in Rome in 1784. In 1790 he married seventeen-year-old Anna Maria Aloisia Rosa Ferri, whose father was in the employ of a Roman cardinal; Fagan, always known for his extravagance and ill-mannered behavior, was apparently very "hard up" at the time of his marriage. The couple's daughter, Esther Maria, or Estina, was born two years later, but the marriage was evidently an unhappy one. Fagan worked as a portraitist, mostly for those on the "Grand Tour", but also as a dealer, illegally exporting large numbers of antiquities and Old Masters, while building up his own personal collection. The French occupation of Rome in 1798 imposed an immense strain upon his family life, a strain which is believed to have been the cause of his wife's increasing ill health; she died in August 1800.

The artist with his second wife, Maria Flajani, 1803.

Six months later Fagan remarried, to another young Italian woman, Maria Ludovica Flajani, daughter of the Pope's physician, with whom he had two further children. In 1809, while residing in Palermo, he was appointed consul general for Sicily and Malta. But over the next few years he was dogged by increasing financial problems. In 1815 he returned briefly to England, before moving back to Rome the following year where, at the age of fifty-five, he committed suicide by jumping from a window. His young widow sold off his collection of antiquities to the Vatican museums.

*

This unfinished sketch, circa 1794, depicts the artist's daughter, Esther Maria/Estina (1792-1859), the child of his first marriage, held by her nurse before an Italianate landscape. In August of 1809, Estina married William Baker, heir to the estate of Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire.

Substantial beauty - paintings of women by Paris Bordone

Strong, healthy, Titian-haired white women, mostly with their breasts out.

Allegory: Venus, Flora, Mars, and Cupid, circa 1560.

Venetian Women at their Toilette, circa 1545.

Lady in a Green Cloak, circa 1550.

Venus and Cupid, circa 1550-55.

Venus, Cupid, Bacchus, and Diana, circa 1550.

Young Woman, circa 1545.

Venus and Cupid, circa 1545-1550.

Venus and Mars with Cupid, circa 1559-60.

Jupiter and Io, circa 1550s.

Young Woman, circa 1540.

Portrait of a Lady, Possibly of the Fugger Family, circa 1545.

Allegory: Mars, Venus, Flora, and Cupid, circa 1560.

Young Woman, circa 1543-50.

Young Woman, circa 1550.

Sleeping Venus with Cupid, circa 1540.

Young Woman at her Toilette, circa 1550s.

Vertumnus and Pomona, circa 1540.

Flora, circa 1540.

Allegory: Venus, Mars, and Cupid Crowned by Victory, circa 1560.

***

Paris Bordone (or Bordon; May or July? 1500, Treviso – 19 January 1571, Venice), Venetian painter who, though having trained with Titian, displayed strong Mannerist qualities in his work. He is probably best known for his mythological and allegorical subjects, thinly disguised paintings of beautiful, statuesque, and luxuriously adorned blonde courtesans, arranged in groups or singly - in the tradition of the Venetian belle donne portraits - which greatly appealed to his wealthy clients. Most of the paintings I've shared above are examples of this frankly and lavishly erotic genre.

After the death of his father, he and his mother moved to Venice where, at the age of sixteen, he entered the studio of Titian. His apprenticeship there was short-lived - less than two years - as the elder artist was apparently angered at his pupil's ease in reproducing the master's style; even several years later, Titian was stealing commissions from the younger artist. Despite this, Bordone would spend most of his working life in Venice. During the 1540s and '50s, he also traveled to and worked in Milan, Augsburg, Fontainbleau, and his native Treviso. Besides his portraiture and religious and mythological subjects, he executed many important mural paintings in Venice, Treviso, and Vicenza, all of which have been lost.

Actor in a can - Hollywood dons armor

Dick Powell as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935.

Ross Alexander as Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935.

Powell and Alexander with Olivia de Havilland and Jean Muir in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935.

Desi Arnaz in the "Hollywood at Last" episode of I Love Lucy, 1954/55. With William Holden and Dayton Lummis.

Danny Kaye on the set of The Court Jester, 1955.

Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight, 1965.

Richard Burton in The Robe, 1953.

Harold Lloyd in Ask Father, 1919. With Wallace Howe.

With Bebe Daniels.

Errol Flynn in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1939.

With Robert Warwick and Ralph Forbes.

Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile, 1947.

Gary Cooper as the White Night in Alice in Wonderland, 1933. With Charlotte Henry as Alice.

Cary Grant in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, 1947.

With Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple.

With Shirley Temple.

Orson Welles, again. On the set of Othello, 1951. With Suzanne Cloutier.

Laurence Olivier in Henry V, 1944.  (Alright, no, this wasn't made in Hollywood....)

James Cagney as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935.

With Joe E. Brown as Flute/Thisbe.

With Hugh Herbert as Snout.

*

But, then, who wore it best...? 

Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, 1948.

*

Or maybe...?