What women looked like in real life from famous portraits, or How much the authors flattered their models

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Any good artist in his work does not so much reflect reality as he tries to share his inner world, so the author's vision can sometimes differ from photography. Women in the paintings most often look like real beauties, but were they the same in life? We will no longer be able to find out about famous ladies from remote antiquity, but the portraits painted in the age of photography make it possible to conduct a similar "test".

"Portrait of Jeanne Samary", Auguste Renoir

This girl would forever remain a third-rate actress, whom the audience would remember mainly in the role of maids and sabrets, if not for the work of the great French impressionist. In total, Renoir painted four of her portraits, and each differs from the other in size, composition, and color. It is believed that in the canvas stored in Moscow, in the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin, the artist was especially vividly able to emphasize the lively charm of his model. The picture was created in 1877, when the young actress was just beginning her career at the Comédie Francaise theater. In the surviving photographs, the girl appears before us as charming, spontaneous, but perhaps a little less mysterious.

"Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne in a big hat", Amedeo Modigliani

The French artist and model became the last muse and unofficial wife of the artist Amedeo Modigliani. When they met, she was not even twenty-two years old. The couple lived together for three years, and during this time Modigliani painted more than twenty portraits of Jeanne. Friends described her as gentle, shy, calm and delicate. It was such a woman that the artist painted. How much the surviving photographic portrait corresponds to this image is up to everyone to judge for himself. The end of Jeanne's life was tragic. She could not survive the death of her beloved and threw herself out of the window the day after the death of Modigliani. The two-year-old daughter and the fact that the woman was pregnant did not stop her. Jeanne's relatives blamed the great artist for the fact that his common-law wife had reached such a state and did not even agree to bury her in the same cemetery. Only ten years later, they gave permission for reburial, and Modigliani's last muse was next to him.

"Golden Adele", Gustav Klimt

The Austrian Mona Lisa is considered one of the most significant paintings by Klimt. - Adele Bloch-Bauer was one of the representatives of a select layer of the big Jewish bourgeoisie. Her husband, a wealthy industrialist, having ordered a portrait of his wife in 1903, of course, did not think that it would result in a whole series of paintings. Moreover, judging by the canvases of Judith, which followed the Golden Adele, the first and especially the second, the relationship between the artist and his model ceased to be platonic. Due to the frank, undisguised sensuality of these masterpieces, the model's name was hidden from society, however, the layman can see that all the canvases depict the same woman.

"Elizabeth of Austria", Franz Winterhalter

The Bavarian princess, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress of Austria, is one of the most famous figures in European history. A romantic love story, not a very happy family life and a tragic death made her a favorite heroine of novels, and later films. The portrait of the famous artist Franz Winterhalter, painted in 1865, clearly shows the Empress's hairstyle - Elizabeth's hair was indeed her main decoration. By tradition, the most beautiful actresses play this girl in the cinema, because, judging by the surviving ceremonial photographs, the court painter did not flatter her at all.

"Portrait of Princess Z. N. Yusupova", Valentin Serov

Another recognized beauty, who at the beginning of the 20th century was called "The Shining" for her incredible beauty and inner strength at court, was the most enviable bride in Russia. In the portrait, which later became one of her most famous images, the princess is already 35 years old, she is in the prime of beauty and female attractiveness. It is interesting that the painting aroused many critical remarks among contemporaries: both the composition and the pose of the lady were called weak in it. However, today this canvas, like no other, brings to us the incredible inner strength of this amazing woman, who until old age aroused the admiration of everyone who knew her personally.

Unfortunately, Zinaida became the last of her kind. They said it was the result the ancient ancestral curse that persecuted more than one generation of the Yusupovs.