Faces from the past

Evening Dress of V.V. Karakhan

c. 1911-1912

Callot Soeurs

Jacob Fransz. van der Merck - Joannes Abrahamsz. Heydanus (1661) and Cornelia Schilperoort (1660)

1660s Abraham van den Tempel - Portrait of Jacquemijna Le Pla

1680 Eglon van der Neer - A Young Woman and her Maid in an Interior

 Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, 1891

When Princess Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, known informally as May of Teck, became engaged to Prince Eddy in December 1891, she was twenty-four and staring spinsterhood in the face. She was not photogenic, which makes it hard for us to judge her looks, but few considered her striking. As one of her friends remarked, 'I suppose she really was very pretty, but one somehow never thought of her as so'. Less charitably, others thought that as a young woman she was 'German-looking and frumpish'. She wore an artificial fringe over her forehead and her abundant gold/light-brown hair was tightly scraped up high at the sides. Some thought this hairstyle disfiguring, but May had no illusions about her appearance. 'I am afraid I am too much like Queen Charlotte ever to be good-looking,' she once remarked. The reference to Charlotte, the heavy-jawed Mecklenburg princess, the wife of George III and May's great-grandmother, tells us as much about May's sense of self as it does about her looks. Legitimacy and royal status matered more to her than the narrative of romantic love.

1756 Sir Joshua Reynolds - Admiral Francis Holburne and his son, Sir Francis, 4th Baronet

Combinations ca. 1890-1900 via The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giovanni Boldini

Cléo de Mérode, 1901, oil on canvas, 97,8 x 88,9 cm, private collection.

Cléo de Mérode (1875-1966), an international sensation, one of the the most photographed woman in the world in her time, was a French ballerina, who achieved fame with her face, not her feet. Cléo was a good dancer but above all her beauty caught the public’s eye - by 13, she already had posed for Jean-Louis Forain and Edgar Degas, who often sketched her. In 1895, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did her portrait, as would Charles Puyo and Alfredo Muller.

Evening Dress

c. 1850

Silk satin with silk and metallic-thread supplementary patterning and silk net with metallic-thread embroidery

La Mode, Pl. 315, 20 juillet 1833, Paris. Chapeaux en poux de soie, ornés de giroflée rouge et de lianthes par Me. Lepetit. Robe en poux de soie chiné de M. Narey, rue Grammonts. Mantelet bordé de dentelles. Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library