Molti Ritratti: Ambroise Vollard

Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) was an art dealer and writer who championed key Modernists during their emergence in the early 20th century.

In return, a number of artists painted his portrait. Below are some examples arranged in rough chronological order.

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Photographs of Vollard

By Paul Cézanne

By Jean Puy

By Pierre-Auguste Renoir - 1908

By Pablo Picasso - 1910

By Renoir - 1911

By Renoir - 1917

By Pierre Bonnard - 1924

By Maria Mela Muter

Molti Ritratti: Diego Martelli

He's an obscure figure to non-Italians, but Diego Martelli (1838-1896) was an important art critic who championed the pre-Impressionist Macchiaioli group. Some of them, in turn, favored him by painting his portrait.

Below are examples.

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By Giovanni Boldini, c.1865
Boldini gained fame for his flashy society portraits made after leaving Italy for Paris. The painting above is basically a small sketch that can be seen in Florence's Pitti Palace.

By Giovanni Fattori. c.1867
Fattori painted Martelli and his wife (in a separate work) while at Castiglioncello, a seaside town popular with some of the Macchiaioli.

Frederico Zandomeneghi, 1870
This too is in the Pitti collection.

By Edgar Degas, 1879
Degas had family connections in Italy and also found time to portray Martelli.

Photo of Martelli taken late in life

I find it interesting to see how different artists portray the same subject. In the case of Martelli, there could be a little disagreement regarding his nose, and his hair color also varies (it seems brown in the earlier two portraits; might he have dyed it black a few years later?).

Molti Ritratti: Misia Sert

A favorite muse for painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was pianist and arts facilitator Misia Sert (1872-1950). She was born Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska and also known as Misia Natanson, Misia Edwards and Misia Sert -- depending upon who her current husband was.

The rather brief Wikipedia entry for Misia is here and a link dealing with music and the ballet is here. But the most detailed background information I could locate on a fairly brief Google search was in this book review.

Her husbands were Thadée Natanson (Wikipedia entry is in French) who founded and ran the arts publication Revue Blanche, newspaper tycoon Alfred Edwards and painter Jose Maria Sert, best known in America for his Rockefeller Center RCA Building lobby murals. Oddly, given how much she was painted by others, I can find no portrait of Misia by Sert.

Here is a sampling. If your computer and browser allow, click on images for larger views.

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Photos of Misia
Even though she was touted as a beauty and attracted portrait painters like the proverbial flies to honey, Misia didn't seem to be camera-friendly. According to the third link above, she had good legs and an impressive bosom. Probably had an attractive personality as well.

By Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1895, 1897, c.1897)

By Pierre Bonnard (both 1908)

By Pierre-August Renoir (1904, c.1906)

By Félix Vallotton - 1898

By Édouard Vuillard (1899, 1897)
The upper painting shows Misia with Vallotton.

Molti Ritratti: Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova, born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (1889-1966) was a Russian poet who failed to flee the country following the Bolshevik takeover and suffered for that mistake. The sorry details are summarized in the Wikipedia entry here.

Anna's appearance was -- how shall I say it -- distinctive, her face dominated by a beak of a nose. According to Wikipedia, this did not prevent her from accumulating a small host of admirers including the likes of Boris Pasternak the writer and Amedeo Modigliani the painter. Little doubt that intelligence, charm and a tall, willowy figure compensated for appearance defects.

Moreover, Anna was portrayed, as can be seen below. I wanted to include a Modigliani depiction, but failed to find anything that is known for sure to have been Anna. Whereas some of his paintings of nudes incorporated tall, slender figures, those paintings omitted the Akhmatova nose. Might Amedeo have discretely camouflaged his subject? Given that Anna was newly married at the time, perhaps he did.

Please set me straight in Comments if my conjecture is off the track.

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Photo of Anna Akhmatova

A more flattering photo

Drawing, unknown artist
The Internet has this image flipped both ways. I have no clue whether the original had Anna facing to our left or our right. For what it's worth, Wikipedia has her facing to the left. Not that this really matters....

By Nikolai Tyrsa

By Olga Della Vos Kardovskaya - 1914

By Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin - 1922

By Yiri Annenkov - 1924

By M. Sarian - 1946

By Nathan Altman - 1914
This is the best-known portrait of Anna -- the merest whiff of Cubism to catch the spirit of her angular features.

Molti Ritratti: Suzy Solidor

Some people have lots of portraits painted of themselves. Occasionaly, these portraits might be done mostly by one artist. For instance, Velázquez painted a number of portraits of Spain's king and family thanks to his court duties.

Then there's the usual case, where many artists paint the same sitter. To me, that's also interesting because it offers insight regarding artists as well as subjects.

I already posted about multiple views of Ottoline Morrell and Empress Josephine. Now I'd like to carry this into an occasional series that I'm calling Molti Ritratti -- that's my amateur Italian for "Many Portraits."

First off is Suzy Solidor (1900-83) a Lesbian chanteuse who ran a Paris night club and publicized it by asking many artists to do her portrait. Suzy was popular in her day, appearing in movies and cutting records. However, she did get into some post-war trouble because her club was frequented by German officers during the Occupation.

Below are some photos of Solidor to set the scene. My take is that she had a plain face and a fantastically good shape. To appreciate the latter, I suggest you Google on something like "suzy solidor man ray" to bring up images by Man Ray, the famous photographer of both Surrealism and high fashion. (Warning: some of those photos are not safe for work, which is why I won't display them here. I do post images of paintings showing nudity because those are more justifiable as "art.")

Here is Suzy with aesthete Jean Cocteau in 1938. Cocteau also wasn't bothered by dealing with Germans during the Occupation.

This is a studio portrait of Solidor.

Now for non-photographic images of Suzy. Although she was painted by artists as diverse as Foujita, Dufy and Vlaminck, I couldn't find as many good images on the Web as I had hoped. Nevertheless, the ones below should indicate the variety of ways Solidor was depicted.

Solidor is shown in her cabaret with some of those portraits. This was probably taken in the 1960s or later. The painting to the left of her face is by Foujita.

Solidor lived the later part of her life in Cagnes-sur-Mer and left some of the paintings to the city. Shown is part of a display of them. The painting on the left with a blue background is by Picabia; another Picabia painting is below. Click on the image above to enlarge.

Not a formal portrait, but this poster for Pathé records seems worth including.

Not all those who Painted Suzy were famous. This is by someone called Pierre Sigel.

Slightly less obscure is Roger Toulouse, who painted this when Solidor was past 60.

This 1946 portrait is by Suzanne van Damme, a Belgian contemporary of Solidor who also painted Surrealistic works.

Better known yet (but still far from famous) was Austrian Willy Eisenschitz who portrayed Solidor in 1938.

This Francis Picabia portrait of Suzy is from 1933.

Kees van Dongen, one-time Fauve and later society painter captured a matelot-clad Suzy in 1927.

Probably the most famous portrait of Solidor is this 1933 painting by Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka.

Subjects and Portraits: Ottoline Morrell

Not long ago I wrote a post speculating what French empress Josephine might have looked like, based on evidence from paintings and sculptures. Josephine lived before photography, so we have no evidence from that source.

Let's look at the matter of painted likenesses from another perspective. In an occasional series of posts, I'll present both photos and paintings (along with drawings where paintings are scarce) and we can have fun comparing them. I won't be giving out points for accuracy, however. That's because post-Daguerre artists have more freedom to interpret their subjects than might have been the case in the days where portraits were intended as documentation.

My first subject is Lady Ottoline Morrell, a colorful character, as this Wikipedia link indicates. There are a fair number of photos of Ottoline, but virtually no portraits by artists. A Google search turned up only three -- two of which (by Lamb and John) were done by artists who also were among her lovers.

This photo was taken about 1900 when she was in her late 20s.

This circa-1911 photo shows her with her daughter Julian.

By Simon Bussy, c.1920.

Drawing by Henry Lamb, c.1912.

By Augustus John, 1919.


The pictorial evidence suggests that Ottoline was hardly a "flash" female. But she had gobs of aristocratic family connections and might well have had a compelling personality; the link above mentions Bertrand Russell as one of those lovers, so she clearly was able to distract him from philosophy and mathematics.

Lamb's drawing was made when she was nearly 40 and strikes me as being being affectionate and perhaps a bit flattering. The paintings depict her in her late 40s and seem not at all flattering. Perhaps some day I'll get around to reading a biography of John where I might find out whether the portrait was painted before, during or after his fling with Ottoline.