Romaine Brooks
Her grey-toned portraits of women in top hats and tailored coats are icons of 1920s lesbian Paris – where she loved Natalie Barney for fifty years.
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, came from a very wealthy American family, but had a miserable childhood: her father left, her mother was emotionally abusive and her brother mentally ill. For years she lived as a poor art student in Italy and France, until she inherited a fortune on her mother’s death in 1902.
She married the English writer John Ellingham Brooks, who was gay, but left him after a year. In Paris she developed her own style of portraiture in shades of grey, white and black, uninfluenced by Cubism or other contemporary trends. She painted the dancer Ida Rubinstein, with whom she had a passionate affair, and the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Her best-known works are portraits of women in masculine dress: her self-portrait in a top hat (1923), and the portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge with a monocle and dachshunds (1924). They have become icons of lesbian visibility.
For some fifty years, until the 1960s, she was the partner of the writer Natalie Clifford Barney, though they never lived together in the same house. In her later years Brooks stopped painting and lived in seclusion. She died in Nice in 1970, aged 96.