The very best society, in the most vivid color - photographs by Madame Yevonde, 1932-38

 

Joan Maude, 1932.

 Eileen Ward Jackson (née Hunter) as Dido, 1935.

 Lady Bridget Poulett as Arethusa, 1935. Two images.

 Madeleine Mayer as Medusa, 1935.

Corise Helen Margaret Cherry (née Rankin, later Shaw), 1937.

Diane Hallé, 1935.

"The Bride" (Inez Masters), 1937.

Shell, 1937.

Lady Edwina Cynthia Annette Mountbatten (née Ashley), later Countess Mountbatten of Burma, 1937.

Isabel Jeans, 1932.

 John Gielgud as Richard II in "Richard of Bordeaux", 1933.

Phyllis May Digby-Morton (née Panting, pen name "Anne Seymour'), 1937.

Dorothy Etta Warrender (née Rawson), Lady Bruntisfield as Ceres, 1935.

 Catherine Bromley, 1938.

Rosemary Chance (née Gregory-Hood), 1937.

 Edith Hart-Davis (née Teichman, later Lady Brougham and Vaux) as Ariel, 1935.

Lady Milbanke as The Dying Amazon, 1935.

 Dorothy Gisborne (née Pratt), 1935.

Beatrice Eden as Clio, 1935.

Irene Clarice Dunn (née Richards, formerly Marchioness of Queensberry, future Mrs. O'Brien), Lady Dunn, 1937.

Hammond & Griffiths Firelight Study (Joan Mather, later Baroness Shawcross), 1936.

Lobster, 1934.

Dobo Campbell, 1933.

 Eileen Hawthorne, 1932.

Begum Om Habibeh Aga Khan III (née Yvonne Blanche "Yvette" Labrousse), 1935.

Gertrude Lawrence, 1936.

"Mask" (Rosemary Chance, née Gregory-Hood)), 1938.

Aileen Freda Balcon (née Leatherman), Lady Balcon as Minerva, 1935. Two images.

Shell, 1937.

"A Day in the Life of a Debutante - An Hour's Serious Reading" (Elizabeth "Betty" Cowell), 1932.

Mrs. Anny, 1936.

Margaret Hunnam Harmsworth (née Redhead, future Mrs. Hussey, future Lady Blunt) and son Vere Harold Esmond Harmsworth, (3rd Viscount Rothermere), 1932.

"Shelling Peas" (Rosemary Chance, née Gregory-Hood)), 1937.

Ann Todd, 1933.

Fashion study (Elizabeth "Betty" Cowell), 1933.

 Lady Anne Rhys as Flora, 1935.

Margaret Sweeny (née Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll), 1938.

Margaret Sweeny (née Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll) as Helen of Troy, 1935.

Maud, Duchess of Wellington as Hecate, 1935.

Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Haig as Circe, 1935.

Nefertiti, 1938.

 Lady Pamela Smith (later Pamela Berry, Lady Hartwell), 1934. Two images.

Jill Scott, 1938.

Violet, Baroness von Gagern as Europa, 1935.

Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, 1935.

Beatrix Thomson, circa 1936-37.

Belle Chrystall, 1932.

Anne Paget, 1938.

Jacqueline Paravicini, 1934.

 Dorothy Gisborne (née Pratt) as Psyche, 1935.

 Frederick Bligh and Betty Wright, 1937.

 Eileen Ward Jackson (née Hunter) as Dido, 1935.

Lord Louis Mountbatten and Lady Edwina Cynthia Annette Mountbatten (née Ashley), later Earl and Countess Mountbatten of Burma, 1937.

Molly Connolly, 1935.

Gertrude Lawrence as, possibly, the Muse of Comedy, 1936.

Lady Bridget Poulett as Arethusa, 1935. Two images.

Primrose Osborne (née Salt), 1935.

Bubbles, circa 1931-32.

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Yevonde Philone Middleton (née Cumbers; 5 January 1893, Streatham – 22 December 1975, London), English photographer, a pioneer in the use of color in portrait photography. She used the professional name Madame Yevonde or simply Yevonde in a career lasting over sixty years. The eldest of two sisters, she was initially educated by a governess and a at local day school, then at the liberal and progressive Lingholt Boarding School in Hindhead and subsequently at the Guilde Internationale in Paris, as well as boarding schools in Belgium and France. Displaying an independent attitude from an early age, she joined the Suffragette movement at the age of only seventeen. Developing an interest in photography, she sought, and was given, a three-year apprenticeship with the portrait photographer Lallie Charles. In 1914, at the age of twenty-one, with the technical grounding she received from working with Charles, and some money from her father, she set up her own studio in London, and began to make a name for herself by inviting the celebrities of the day to sit for free; before long her pictures were appearing in society magazines such as the Tatler and The Sketch. By 1921, she'd become a well-known and respected portrait photographer, and moved to larger premises where she began taking advertising commissions while continuing to photograph many of society's leading personalities. In the early 1930s, she began experimenting with color photography, using the new Vivex color process from Colour Photography Ltd. The introduction of color photography was not universally popular. Yevonde, however, was hugely enthusiastic about it and spent countless hours in her studio experimenting with how to get the best results. In 1933, she moved her studio once again, and began using color in her advertising work as well as her portraits. Probably her best remembered work was inspired by a high-society costume party that was held in March of 1935. The guests dressed as Roman and Greek gods and goddesses, and Yevonde subsequently took studio portraits of many of the participants - as well as others - taking great advantage of costumes, props, lighting, and vivid color to create arresting and fantastical images. In that same year she took the official wedding portrait of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, creating the earliest surviving color print of a member of the British royal family. Another major coup was being invited to take portraits of leading peers to mark the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937. She had joined the Royal Photographic Society briefly in 1921 and then again in 1933, and became a Fellow in 1940. This highly creative period of her career would only last a few years; at the end of 1939, Colour Photographs Ltd closed, and the Vivex process was lost. It was a second great blow that year as her husband, the playwright Edgar Middleton, had died in April. She returned to working in black and white and continued to produce work up until her death, just two weeks short of her eighty-third birthday. The importance of her oeuvre and that of other experimental British photographers of the 1920s and 1930s had largely been forgotten at the time of her death. But there was a revival of interest in her work - chiefly her color photography of the 1930s - after this was the subject of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1990. Downplaying her own artistry, but aligning with her early work as a Suffragette, in her 1940 memoir, In Camera, she had written, "I took up photography with the definite purpose of making myself independent. I wanted to earn money of my own."

"Madame Yevonde" with the Vivex One-Shot Camera, 1937.

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Vivex was an early color photography process invented by the research chemist Dr. Douglas Arthur Spencer (1901 - 1979). It was produced by the British company Colour Photography Ltd of Willesden, which operated the first professional color printing service. The company was in business from 1928 until the start of World War II in 1939. Up until the war, the Vivex process accounted for ninety percent of Britain's color print photography. Vivex was a wash-off relief process using three negatives on waxed cellophane, one for each primary color. It was a subtractive process, using cyan, magenta, and yellow primaries. The three negative plates could be exposed in sequence using a special automated camera back designed for plate cameras or, simultaneously, via the company's own VIVEX Tri-Colour Camera. After processing, the three negatives were printed on top of one another by hand to obtain the final print. Although the fact that the image was built up from three exposures had disadvantages - such as getting the image in register; inexactitude in that regard is evident in some of the images shared here - it also created the possibility of all manner of color manipulation. Of course the subject of this post was a noted proponent of the Vivex process, making great use of it's creative possibilities and becoming one of the first great champions of the use of color in portrait photography: "If we are going to have colour photography for heaven’s sake let’s have a riot of colour, and none of your wishy-washy hand-tinted effects."