12 Facts About Marguerite Agniel

Marguerite Agniel was a Broadway actress and dancer, who then became a health and beauty guru in New York in the early 20th century.

Marguerite Agniel is known for her 1931 book The Art of the Body: Rhythmic Exercise for Health and Beauty, one of the first to combine yoga and nudism.

Marguerite Agniel was born on January 21,1891, one of the six children of George Agniel and Ada Lescher Flowers.

Marguerite Agniel's father, who had worked as a farmer in Indiana, died in 1893 while she was an infant, leaving her mother to raise the children alone.

The Marguerite Agniel family was French-Jewish; her mother's family was English.

Marguerite Agniel was married in New York on March 21,1917.

Marguerite Agniel performed in Broadway plays including The Amber Empress with music by Zoel Parenteau in 1916, and Raymond Hitchcock's Pin Wheel in 1922.

Marguerite Agniel appeared in the November 15,1926, issue of Vogue, demonstrating slimming exercises in the form of floor stretches, with postures close to the yoga asanas Salabhasana, Supta Virasana, Sarvangasana and Halasana.

Marguerite Agniel wrote for Physical Culture magazine in 1927 and 1928.

Marguerite Agniel wrote a piece titled "The Mental Element in Our Physical Well-Being" for The Nudist, an American magazine, in 1938; it showed nude women practising yoga, accompanied by a text on attention to the breath.

Marguerite Agniel was depicted in an "elegant, though sharply ironic" Palladium photographic print by the Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, titled "Head and Hand".

The scholars Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie comment that Watkins's portraits of Marguerite Agniel were circulated sometimes as artistic "nudes", sometimes as portraits, and sometimes as instances of "a regime of exercise and body modification".