Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, was an American painter, author and lesbian icon, who specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the colour gray and lived mostly in Paris.
Background
Beatrice Romaine Goddard was born in a hotel in Rome on 1 May 1874, the third of three children of Major Harry Goddard, army officer, and his wife, Ella Waterman, who were both American citizens. Her father was reputed to be an alcoholic, and her parents divorced not long after her birth. Her mother was very rich, having a number of residences in various European countries.
Beatrice was raised by her mother, who was unstable and abused her emotionally while doting on her mentally ill brother, St. Mar. They lived mostly in New York, where from an early age Goddard had to tend to St. Mar because he attacked anyone else who came near him. According to her memoir, when she was seven, her mother fostered her to a poor family living in a New York City tenement, then disappeared and stopped making the agreed-upon payments. The family continued to care for Beatrice, although they sank further into poverty.
Education
In 1898, Brooks left America for Europe. A small allowance from her mother allowed her to study art at La Scuola Nazionale and at Circolo Artistico in Rome. A few years later Brooks attended Academic Colarossi, and studied in the studio of Gustave Courtois in 1905.
Career
In 1904 Romaine Brooks travelled to St. Ives on the Cornish coast, where she rented a small studio and began learning to create finer gradations of grey. Her talent for music, art, and interior design brought her the patronage of important people. Brooks became infatuated with Princess Edmond de Polignac (Winnaretta Singer) and her wonderful salon of musicians, artists, dancers, and writers. Around 1909, Brooks and an Italian proto-fascist and a man of action Gabriele d’Annunzio met at a dinner given by an artist friend who was famous for his colourful posters and paintings. D’Annunzio commented that much more can be expressed without any colour at all, and this prompted Brooks to invite him to see her work. Thus began a complicated friendship that lasted for nearly three decades and had a profound impact on Brooks’s art.
Brooks’s first one-woman exhibition was held at Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1910. As a result of its success, the show (with the addition of three new paintings) travelled to the Goupil Gallery. That summer, Romaine rented a villa in Le Moulleau near Arcachon in the Aquitaine region on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux.
In 1913, she was invited to send her paintings of Gabriele Annunzio, Le Poète en Exile (1912), Princesse Lucien Marat (1910), The Balcony (1911), and La Jaquette Rouge (1910) to the Prima Exposizione Internationale d’arte della Secessione in Rome.
In 1915, she met Natalie Barney at a tea party given by Lady Anglesey. The centre of a coterie of artists and lesbians, Barney was to become Brooks’s primary partner in life and love until 1969.
From the 1920s through the late 1930s, Brooks continued painting portraits of the women in her circle, including Natalie and Lily, Radclyffe Hall’s lover Una Troubridge, decorator Elsie de Wolfe, pianist Renata Borgatti, and the painter Gluck. Brooks’s career reached its height in 1925 with exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York City. From the 1930s onward, her work was largely forgotten.
World War II broke out when Brooks was in her 60s, and she rushed home to Paris from New York, where she had taken a studio and was attending to family business. After the war ended, Brooks spent her time trying to rediscover her painter self, becoming more and more reclusive. In 1961 at the age of 87, Brooks painted one last great portrait of Duke Uberto Strozzi and then stopped painting. She became increasingly reclusive and isolated.
Achievements
Romaine Brooks, primarily known as a visual artist, contributed to gay and lesbian literature as an illustrator and a portraitist. Her talent as a painter and her fifty-year association with her friend and lover Natalie Barney brought her into the heart of the Paris literary and artistic community.
In 1971, a year after Brooks' death, the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art) staged an exhibition of her work. The exhibition rekindled interest in Brooks and led to several other exhibitions during the 1980s.
In 2016 The Smithsonian magazine featured an exhibition of the art of Romaine Brooks, declaring, "The world is finally ready to understand Romaine Brooks."
After some period of working as a singer in cabaret, on February 17, 1897, Brooks gave a birth to a baby girl, she then placed in a convent for care. She married John Ellingham Brooks on 13 June 1903 but dismissed him after a few months.
In 1911 Brooks became romantically involved with Ida Rubinstein, the White Russian Jewish actress and dancer who was the rock star of her day. However, in 1914, they broke up, continuing their relationship as friends.
In 1915, Brooks met Natalie Clifford Barney, an American-born writer, and Lily de Gramont, a French aristocrat, with whom she had the longest and most important relationship that lasted the rest of her life.
Ex-husband:
John Ellingham Brooks
ex-partner:
Ida Rubinstein
Partner:
Natalie Clifford Barney
Partner:
Lily de Gramont
References
Romaine Brooks: A Life
The artistic achievements of Romaine Brooks (1874–1970), both as a major expatriate American painter and as a formative innovator in the decorative arts, have long been overshadowed by her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney and a reputation as a fiercely independent, aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s. In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks's aesthetics and experimentation as an artist―and of her entire life, from her chaotic, traumatic childhood to the enigmatic decades after World War II, when she produced very little art. This provocative, lively biography takes aim at many myths about Brooks and her friends, lovers, and the subjects of her portraits, revealing a woman of wit and passion who overcame enormous personal and societal challenges to become an extraordinary artist and create a life on her own terms. Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture. The artistic achievements of Romaine Brooks (1874–1970), both as a major expatriate American painter and as a formative innovator in the decorative arts, have long been overshadowed by her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney and a reputation as a fiercely independent, aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s. In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks's aesthetics and experimentation as an artist―and of her entire life, from her chaotic, traumatic childhood to the enigmatic decades after World War II, when she produced very little art. This provocative, lively biography takes aim at many myths about Brooks and her friends, lovers, and the subjects of her portraits, revealing a woman of wit and passion who overcame enormous personal and societal challenges to become an extraordinary artist and create a life on her own terms. Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks
A dual portrait of the poet and artist couple sets their lesbian relationship against a cultural backdrop of 1920s and 1930s Paris, describing Romaine's unhappy childhood, the patronage of Natalie's salon by several famous figures, and their fifty-year romance that endured in spite of numerous challenges. By the author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter.
