LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART II  / 

72

PIERRE-LOUIS PIERSON (French, 1822-1913) TI-FILLE BRUNE (LA COMTESSE DE CASTIGLIONE)

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PIERRE-LOUIS PIERSON (French, 1822-1913) TI-FILLE BRUNE (LA COMTESSE DE CASTIGLIONE)
PIERRE-LOUIS PIERSON (French, 1822-1913) TI-FILLE BRUNE (LA COMTESSE DE CASTIGLIONE) "192" inscribed in pencil on verso albumen print from a glass negative 5 5/8 x 4 in. (14.3 x 10.2 cm) 1895 from the PITOU series PROVENANCE Robert Miller Gallery, NEW YORK Private Collection, NEW YORK LITERATURE Pierre Apraxine and Xavier Demange, LA DIVINE COMTESSE: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE COUNTESS DE CASTIGLIONE, New York, 2000, p. 47, fig. 22 (illustrated) Widely considered the most ravishing woman of her day, Virginia Verasis, Countess de Castiglione migrated from Italy to Paris in 1855. Although she became a well-known mistress of Emperor Napoleon III, her historical reputation was cemented by a long series of portraits she created with the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. Far from a passive model, Mme. de Castiglione actively fashioned numerous theatrical identities during her forty-year collaboration with Pierson, playing the roles of flirtatious coquette, pious Madonna, and femme fatale, among many others. These fascinating pictures not only chronicle the deeply narcissistic psychology of Mme. de Castiglione, but also prefigure the photographic achievements of many 20th-century artists, including Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman. The present work belongs to the third and final phase of Mme. de Castiglione's work with Pierson. By the 1890s, the Countess was mourning her faded beauty and rarely left her dark, mirror-less apartment on the place Vendôme. She did, however, continue to visit Pierson's studio at this time, and sat for numerous portraits, including the present work, that betray her mounting anxieties. "The photographs of 1894 and 1895 portray a model whose mental stability is clearly threatened and who seems openly at odds with reality.... The most disturbing portraits date from this period. While she sought to recapture the past in her poses and expressions, she seems also to have wanted to parody herself in grim caricature. What to make of the portrait in which, clad in a peasant dress, her hands joined in a gesture that in the past signified piety, she points directly to her pubis? Staring at the lens, her famous gaze is now tainted with madness" (Pierre Apraxine, "The Model and the Photographer," LA DIVINE COMTESSE: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE COUNTESS DE CASTIGLIONE, exh. cat., New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, pp. 46-47).
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