Album dédié à Tamar Karsavina par George Barbier et Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Collections Pierre Corrard, Paris, 1914

L'Oiseau de feu.

Karsavina was something of a legend even during her own lifetime, celebrated for her technique, her intelligence, charm, and wit. In 1914, on the brink of WWI, this album was dedicated to her, in celebration of her career, and highlighting her most important roles. All of those featured in the album were from ballets created and performed under the aegis of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes: Le Pavillon d'Armide, Les Sylphides, Cléopâtre, Carnaval, Shéhérazade, L'Oiseau de feu, Le Spectre de la rose, Narcisse, Petrushka, Daphnis et Chloé, Thamar, Jeux, La Tragédie de Salomé. 

(It should be noted that the apparent nudity in these images only went as far as the artist's imagination; in reality, the dancers were always fully covered.)

Novelist, poet, and art historian Jean-Louis Vaudoyer - the author of the libretto for Le Spectre de la rose - composed the text, each of the seventeen poems inspired by Karsavina's finest roles. And the great illustrator George Barbier designed the twelve color full-page pochoir plates. 512 copies were printed.

The title page, illustrating her rôle in Petrushka.

Carnaval. With Nijinsky and Adolph Bolm.

Narcisse. With Nijinsky.

Jeux. With Nijinsky and Ludmilla Schollar.

Shéhérazade.

Les Sylphides.

Cléopâtre.

Carnaval. With Nijinsky and Adolph Bolm.

La Tragédie de Salomé.

Daphnis et Chloé.

Le Spectre de la rose. With - famously - Nijinsky.

*

Barbier also made another version of La Tragédie de Salomé, I'm not sure for what purpose.

Toujours les hommes

Captain Winfield Burrows Sifton, by Philip de László, 1916.

"Su Majestad el Rey Don Alfonso XIII Contemplando Madrid", circa 1920s.

Rudolph Valentino, circa 1921.

Thomas Taylour, Viscount Headford, later Earl of Bective and 1st Marquess of Headfort, by Pompeo Batoni, 1782.

Memorial card, 1912.

"A Kornilovite" [WWI/Russian Revolution era soldier], by Saida Afonina, 1994.

Soldier, by Giovanni Battista Moroni, circa 1560.

Portrait of Kahn, by Alexander Golovin, 1920.

Unknown, circa late nineteenth-early twentieth century.

Ardalion Petrovich Novosiltsev, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, by Vladimir Lukich Borovikovsky, 1807.

Man with the Cat [Henry Sturgis Drinker], by Cecilia Beaux, 1898.

Actor Martin Harvey in period costume, 1899. (Two images.)

Amaury-François-Guillaume, marquis de la Moussaye, vicomte de Saint-Quetas, Saint-Denoual, etc., by Jean Joseph Vaudechamp, 1830.

Portrait of a Man in Armor, by Paris Bordone, circa  1535-40.

Unknown, courtesy of Ralf De Jonge "Os Jovens Phidias".

Captain Peter Rainier (in India at the age of twenty-one), by Thomas Hickey, 1806.

"Man of science", unknown artist - the damaged signature reads "M[ ]anz", 1839.

William Kissam Vanderbilt Jr. at the age of twenty-four, 1902.

Wilhelm Kettler, Duke of Courland and Semigallia, by Joachim Zivert (?), 1615.

Karl Bernhard, prinz von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, by Rudolf Friedrich Carl Suhrlandt, 1812.

Vaslav Nijinsky, circa 1913.

Portrait of a Bavarian man, by Anton Ažbe, 1889.

Karsavina and Nijinsky - portraits in costume by Jacques-Émile Blanche

Tamara Karsavina in the costume worn as the title role in The Firebird (L'Oiseau de feu), 1910.

Bakst's original design for the role of the Firebird, 1910.

Four studio portraits of Karsavina in the role of the Firebird.

Vaslav Nijinsky in costume for la danse siamoise from Les Orientales, 1910. The costume is also by Bakst.

Two sketches of Nijinsky by Blanche.

Nijinsky posing in the painter's studio, photographed by Blanche.

Four photographs by Eugène Druet, taken in Blanche's garden in Passy.

***

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1 January 1861, Paris – 20 September 1942, Offranville), French painter. The son of a successful and fashionable Parisian psychiatrist, he was brought up in the affluent Passy neighborhood in a house that had once belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe. The product of a cultured upbringing, he became a well-known figure in artistic and society circles. Although he received some instruction from the decidedly second-rate artists Henri Gervex and Ferdinand Humbert, he can be considered, for all intents and purposes, self-taught as a painter. But he became a very popular and prolific portrait painter, and showed very successfully in both France and England, winning important prizes; he was eventually to be made a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur. He had strong connections with England and English society, and was a prominent figure in the Arts community there as well.

With his wide-ranging artistic and literary connections he came to portray most of the important artists and writers of his day, and his best-known works are dashing portraits of those in that milieu. He could count Degas and Whistler, Beardsley and Sargent, Proust, Henry James, Gide, and Cocteau among his friends; as with several of those just mentioned, many of his intimates were homosexual, though I've yet to read anything that infers that he was, himself. He became a respected art critic and was a great supporter of the new avant-garde movements - like Cubism and Surrealism - that sprung up during his later years. He was also the author of two volumes of reminiscences considered, at best, "unreliable". He spent much time at his home in Offranville, near Dieppe in Normandy, where he would die during World War II at the age of eighty-one.