Portrait photograph of Maud Gonne.

"... she was a fin-de-siecle beauty in Valkyrie mode".

335 x 265 mm within oval mount. Undated, probably

W.B. Yeats' own copy of the extra large cabinet portrait of the great muse and inspiration of his life, of whom he wrote in his Memoirs "I have never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossoms of apples and yet her face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race". 

This remarkable and huge portrait of Maud Gonne was in the possession of the Yeats family until 2017. As found, it was unframed, having been crudely cut to the oval shape shown, and only shows traces of the original photographer's branding on the back. Although we haven't found another copy of this image, there is a close match in a cabinet photograph by the Prince Studios of New York, which would date this photograph to 1901, when she was travelling in America with the Irish Nationalist John MacBride. Gonne understood the power of big photographs: in 1893 the Dublin photographer Alfred Werner built a camera with a plate size of six feet by 4 (!) to produce a very near life-size portrait of her that won the Premier Gold Prize at the Chicago World's Fair.

 

Stock Code: 228051