61 Facts About Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray.

Romaine Brooks's subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats.

Romaine Brooks is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.

Romaine Brooks spent several years in Italy and France as a poor art student, then inherited a fortune upon her mother's death in 1902.

Romaine Brooks often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.

Romaine Brooks made a series of drawings during the 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" techniques predating automatic drawing.

Beatrice Romaine Brooks Goddard was born in Rome, the youngest of three children of the wealthy American Ella Goddard and her husband Major Henry Goddard who was American.

Romaine Brooks's parents divorced when she was small, and her father abandoned the family.

Romaine Brooks did not tell them where her grandfather lived for fear of being returned to her mother.

Romaine Brooks extracted a meager allowance from her mother, took voice lessons, and for a time sang in a cabaret, before finding out she was pregnant and delivering a baby girl on February 17,1897.

Romaine Brooks placed the infant in a convent for care, then travelled to Rome to study art.

Romaine Brooks fled to Capri after he tried to force her to marry him.

Romaine Brooks was an unsuccessful pianist and translator who was in deep financial difficulty.

Romaine Brooks was homosexual as well, and Goddard never revealed exactly why she married him.

Romaine Brooks's repeated references to "our" money frightened her, as the money was her inheritance and none of it his.

In 1904, Romaine Brooks became dissatisfied with her work, and in particular with the bright color schemes that she had used in her early paintings.

Romaine Brooks travelled to St Ives on the Cornish coast, rented a small studio, and began learning to create finer gradations of gray.

In contrast, Romaine Brooks took an apartment in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, mingled in elite social circles, and painted portraits of wealthy and titled women.

In 1910, Romaine Brooks had her first solo show at the prestigious Gallery Durand-Ruel, displaying thirteen paintings, almost all of women or young girls.

Romaine Brooks became increasingly disillusioned with Parisian high society, finding the conversation dull, and feeling that people were whispering about her.

In 1909, Romaine Brooks met Gabriele D'Annunzio, an Italian writer and politician who had come to France to escape his debts.

Romaine Brooks saw him as a martyred artist, another lapide; he wrote poems based on her works and called her "the most profound and wise orchestrator of grays in modern painting".

In 1911, Romaine Brooks became romantically involved with the Ukrainian-Jewish actress and dancer Ida Rubinstein.

At the beginning of World War I, Romaine Brooks painted The Cross of France, a symbolic image of France at war, showing a Red Cross nurse looking off to the side with a resolute expression while Ypres burns in the distance behind her.

Romaine Brooks used this romantic image of a figure in heroic isolation in both the 1912 portrait of D'Annunzio and her 1914 self-portrait; the subjects are wrapped in dark cloaks and isolated against seascapes.

Romaine Brooks briefly set up a government, the Italian Regency of Carnaro, with himself as Duce.

Romaine Brooks had copied Perugino's Portrait of a Young Man at the Uffizi when she was a penniless art student in Rome.

Romaine Brooks painted the man because she thought he resembled herself as a girl.

Romaine Brooks later gave the painting to D'Annunzio as a joke when she refused to become his lover.

D'Annunzio and Romaine Brooks had spent the summer of 1910 in a villa on the coast of France until D'Annunzio was disrupted by one of his jealous ex-mistresses.

Romaine Brooks came to the gates of Brooks' villa with pistol in hand, demanding entry.

Romaine Brooks painted Rubinstein one last time in The Weeping Venus, a nude based on a photographs that Romaine Brooks took during their relationship; she needed them because Rubinstein was such a restless and unreliable model.

Romaine Brooks formed a trio with them that lasted the rest of their lives.

Romaine Brooks met Barney in 1916, at a time when the writer had already been involved for about seven years with Duchess Elisabeth de Gramont, known as Lily or Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre.

Romaine Brooks was married and the mother of two daughters.

Romaine Brooks tolerated Barney's casual affairs well enough to tease her about them, and had a few of her own over the years.

Romaine Brooks could become jealous when a new love became serious.

Romaine Brooks disliked Paris, disdained Barney's friends, and hated the constant socializing on which Barney thrived.

Romaine Brooks spent part of each year in Italy or traveling elsewhere in Europe, away from Barney.

Romaine Brooks often included animals or models of animals in her compositions to represent the personalities of her sitters; she painted Barney with a small sculpture of a horse, alluding to the love of riding that had led Remy de Gourmont to nickname her "the Amazon".

From 1920 to 1924, most of Romaine Brooks's subjects were women who were in Barney's social circle or who visited her salon.

Gluck, an English artist whom Romaine Brooks painted around 1923, was noted in the contemporary press as much for her style of dress as for her art.

Romaine Brooks pushed the masculine style further than most by wearing trousers on all occasions, which was not considered acceptable in the 1920s.

Romaine Brooks painted these masculine accoutrements with the same attention she had once given to the parasols and ostrich plumes of La Belle Epoque.

In 1925, Romaine Brooks had solo exhibitions in Paris, London, and New York.

Romaine Brooks was the model for the painter Venetia Ford in Radclyffe Hall's first novel The Forge.

Romaine Brooks appeared in Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women, a novel about a group of lesbians on Capri during World War I, as the composer Olympia Leigh.

In 1930, while laid up with a sprained leg, Romaine Brooks began a series of more than 100 drawings of humans, angels, demons, animals, and monsters, all formed out of continuous curved lines.

Romaine Brooks is thought to have stopped painting by several writers, but she herself tells us that she drew all her life.

Romaine Brooks became increasingly reclusive, and while Barney continued to visit her frequently, by the mid-1950s she had to stay in a hotel, meeting Brooks only for lunch.

Romaine Brooks spent weeks at a time in a darkened room, believing she was losing her eyesight.

Romaine Brooks died in Nice, France in 1970 at the age of 96.

Romaine Brooks is buried in the old English Cemetery in Nice, in a family plot with her mother and her brother St Mar.

The most widely observed influence on Romaine Brooks's painting is that of James McNeill Whistler, whose subdued palette probably inspired her to adopt a monotone color scheme with accents of tinted pigments because through this technique she could suggest a classical restraint and create tensions that were modulated by shape, texture, and variations of shading throughout her canvases.

Romaine Brooks may have been introduced to Whistler's work by the art collector Charles Lang Freer, whom she met on Capri around 1899, and who bought one of her early works.

Romaine Brooks said she "wondered at the magic subtlety of [Whistler's] tones" but thought his 'symphonies' lacked the corresponding subtlety of expression.

Romaine Brooks is seen as a precursor of present-day artists whose works depict gender variance and transgender themes.

Romaine Brooks's portraits starting with her 1914 self-portrait extending through The Cross of France have been interpreted as creating new images of strong women.

Romaine Brooks seems to have seen her portraits in this light.

Romaine Brooks painted de Wolfe porcelain-pale, in an off-white dress and a bonnet resembling a shower cap; a white ceramic goat placed on a table at her elbow seems to mimic her simpering expression.

One of Romaine Brooks's more analyzed paintings, a 1924 portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge, has been seen as everything from an image of female self-empowerment to a caricature.