#Inspired by La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas… *fils* this time!

[ninadove]

Nina reads Dracula 🦇

September 5th

Patient greatly improved. Good appetite; sleeps naturally; good spirits; colour coming back.

It’s La traviata all over again…

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[zebreacadabra]

"Have One On Me" comparison :

-Focus on Sarah Bernardt -

As Joanna said in an interview, a model in a some parisian art studio around 1920 in Paris (France) is one of the inspirations for the HOOM cover photo. Here we have some pictures (and two illustrations) of the famous french actress Sarah Bernhardt in her parisian studio (late 1890's - early 1900). This is not exactly the right year, neither a model in an art studio. But more over the resemblance between the HOOM cover and the luxurious exuberant appartement, there is plenty of others paralels that I will explained in others posts. As a part of the parisian art scean of her time, Sarah Bernhardt was depicted by difrent painters and artist during the years. So, we may consider her as "parisian art model", but you'll see later.

Fun fact: it seems that the images here are not from a set, but the inside of her personal appartement. What a flamboyant and exuberant place to live!

Sarah Bernhardt (Born Henriette-Rosine Bernard; 22 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She played female as well as male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictures.

[lady-corrine]

“What follows is the true story of the young woman whom the world knows as Violetta in La traviata. Marie Duplessis may have been a courtesan but she was as much in touch with grace, beauty, and illness as the heroine of the opera. Her unconventional and tragic existence inspired Alexandre Dumas fils to write his scandalous novelistic memoir. He christened her ‘la dame aux camélias’. The suggestive name stuck: it conjures up a mysterious life, turning a mundane, and at times tawdry, existence into the magical world of a mythical flower girl.

She did, it is true, love camellias in real life as one of her surviving shopping lists proves. An invoice of 9 November 1843 from her supplier of flowers, Ragonot of 14 rue de la Paix, overwhelmingly features different arrangements of camellia, in this particular case white ones, it seems. Camellias were her calling card: a red camellia meant that she was sexually unavailable, while a white one signalled the contrary. Dumas reports that she wore a red one during four days every month and a white one during the other twenty-four: no-one, he remarks with goading disingenuousness, ever grasped what this meant.”

René Weis — The Real Traviata. The song of Marie Duplessis