"La Perse" - evening coat, a collaboration between Paul Poiret and Raoul Dufy, 1911

 

Adapted from the website of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute:

In his memoir The King of Fashion (1931), Poiret wrote, "Am I a fool when I dream of putting art into my dresses, a fool when I say dressmaking is an art? For I have always loved painters, and felt on an equal footing with them. It seems to me that we practice the same craft, and that they are my fellow workers." Dismissing the sibling rivalries that have always dogged the fine and applied arts, Poiret believed that art and fashion were not simply involved but indivisible. This belief was central to Poiret's vision of modernity, which, to a large extent, was achieved through his deployment of art discourse.

Two portraits of Olga de Meyer wearing Poiret's La Perse, photographed by her husband Baron de Meyer.

As well as presenting himself as an artist and patron of the arts, Poiret promoted his fashions as unique and original works of art in and of themselves. He did this by marshaling the visual and performing arts, and by working with artists associated with avant-garde modernism. Among Poiret's various collaborations, the most enduring was with Raoul Dufy, whose career as a textile designer he helped launch. 

Dufy's boldly graphic designs reflected Poiret's preference for the artisanal. The postwar embrace of an industrial and mechanical modernity was antithetical to Poiret. However, in the years before the war, the art of the "workman", such as Dufy, was seen as modern in the repudiation of Belle Époque decadence and sophistication. And Dufy's flat, graphic patterns were ideally suited to Poiret's planar, abstract designs, a fact that is palpable in a signature creation such as La Perse, which is made from a fabric - a block-printed velvet - that Dufy designed in conjunction with the silk manufacturer Bianchini-Férier.

La Perse, projet de tissu pour Paul Poiret, 1911. Dufy’s original design - in ink wash on paper - which was used to create the textile.⁣

Señorial / relajado - two images of José Martínez de Roda, later marqués de Vistabella

 

Portrait by Salvador Martínez Cubells, 1895.

José Martínez de Roda (30 October 1855, Motril - 18 December 1899, Madrid?), Spanish aristocrat and senator. He married in 1892, in New York, as the second husband of Francisca Aparicio y Mérida, widow of Justo Rufino Barrios, president of Guatemala. He was granted the marquisate in 1898, a year before his death at the age of only forty-four. In the portrait, he wears the uniform and badge of a knight of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda - the Royal Cavalry Academy of Ronda in Málaga.

Circa 1870s-80s.

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Salvador Martínez Cubells (9 November 1845, Valencia - 21 January 1914, Madrid), Spanish painter and art restorer and conservator, who specialized in history painting, portraiture, and Costumbrismo.

Miss West, coming and going, 1947-48

Arriving in England on the Queen Mary in the fall of 1947 to begin a successful revival of Diamond Lil.

Again on the Queen Mary, arriving home in the spring of 1948; she would revive Diamond Lil on Broadway the following year.

Brotherly - Portrait de deux frères, by Édouard Pingret, 1830

 

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Édouard-Henri-Théophile Pingret (30 December 1788, Saint-Quentin - 3 July 1869 - or 1875, Paris), French painter and lithographer. Born into a middle-class family, his father was yet related to the highest spheres of the Protestant aristocracy. The son studied under painter Jacques-Louis David as well as Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and also at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. He exhibited in the Paris Salon from 1810 onward, and was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1831. From 1850 to 1855 he lived and worked in Mexico City, exhibiting annually at the Academia de Bellas Artes. His most important works in Mexico were costumbrista genre scenes.

Pour jouer au château de cartes - four paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, circa 1735-37

 

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The last painting was also produced as an engraving. And, as is frequently the case when copying a painting as a print, the resulting image is reversed.

You wrongly mock this adolescent

And his useless work,

Ready to fall at the first wind

You old fogeys, at the very age when one ought to be wise,

From your brains frequently emerge

Far more ridiculous castles

Cor, Vincent's other brother - three photographs of Cornelis van Gogh

 

Cornelis "Cor" van Gogh
(17 May 1867, Zundert, The Netherlands - 14 April 1900, Brandfort, now Winnie Mandela, South Africa), younger brother of Vincent van Gogh, and third son and youngest of his parent's six children. I've been able to find little about his earliest life, but he apprenticed at an engineering factory, and then worked manufacturing steam boilers and locomotives. In 1887 he traveled to Lincoln in England, where he spent two years at the same occupation. 

But in 1889 at the age of twenty-two, he travelled to South Africa to work in the gold-mining industry in the Transvaal Republic and to build locomotives and harvesters for the Netherlands-South African Locomotive Company. In 1899, he joined the Boer forces to fight the British. Six months into the Second Boer War, aka the Anglo-Boer War, he was wounded and, a few weeks later, died in a military hospital at the age of thirty-two. His grave is unmarked.

There are conflicting stories about his death. Some sources say he was killed in action, others claim that he was hospitalized with debilitating bouts of fever. And I've even read that, while in hospital, he took his own life, shooting himself.