Adolphe de Meyer
Baron Adolphe Edward Sigismund de Meyer (* 1868 in Paris , † 1946 in Los Angeles ) was an art collector , painter and important photographer of the 20th century.
Life
Adolphe de Meyer's biography is incomplete and contradictory. He had different forms of name, his nationality at his birth was German or French, his elevation to the Saxon nobility is not documented.
Adolphe was the son of the German-Jewish Parisian banker Adolf Meyer and his Scottish wife Adele Watson and grandson of the merchant and honorary citizen of Dresden Johann Meyer . He took private painting and drawing lessons from the painter Claude Monet . His early works were mainly influenced by Pictorialism . In the following years he specialized more and more in portrait photography and in 1910 took the first fashion photos for Vogue magazine in Paris. Thus, Adolphe de Meyer was a pioneer in the field of later fashion photography, since before the First World War fashion magazines were still dependent on sketched drawings for technical reasons . He has worked mainly in England and America for Vogue , Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar .
Among the celebrities he portrayed were Mary Pickford , John Barrymore , Lillian Gish , Charles Chaplin , Josephine Baker , Claude Monet, and King George V and Queen Mary .
Adolphe Meyer married the divorced high society Lady Olga di Brancaccio (1871–1930), daughter of the Italian Marchesa di Castelluccio, and rumored to be the natural daughter of the Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII in London in 1900. Due to his homosexuality , the marriage was considered separate Bed marriage . Shortly after the marriage, Meyer was taken over by the Saxon King Friedrich August III. ennobled Baron de Meyer through the efforts of the Prince of Wales .
literature
- Boris von Brauchitsch: Adolphe de Meyer. Encounter with the Faun , Edition Braus, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3862281084 .
- Adolphe de Meyer and Anne Ehrenkranz: A Singular Elegance, The Photographs of Baron Adolph de Meyer: The Photographs of Baron Adolph De Meyer , Edition Stemmle (1994) ISBN 0-8118-0830-0 .
Web links
- Adolphe de Meyer - Short biography on Broadway Photographs (English)
- The History of Modeling ( Memento from July 4, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ariella Budick: An age of elegance past . Review of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum 2017/2018, in: Financial Times, January 6, 2018, p. L & A14
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Meyer, Adolphe de |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Meyer, Adolphe Edward Sigismund de (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French painter and photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1868 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1946 |
| Place of death | los Angeles |