Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt
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Mucha’s Muses: Sarah Bernhardt and the Spirit of Art Nouveau, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, January 31, 2026–January 17, 2027, no cat.
Bernhardt’s profile dominates this intimate watercolor. Her velvety black gloves and acid-green bows flash against soft pastel hues, giving the portrait a theatrical charge befitting the actress. Artist Henry Somm first sketched her in pencil before applying translucent washes of color. Fascinated by the “New Woman,” an Art Nouveau emblem of independence and modernity, he portrayed Bernhardt as a fashionable woman used to the spotlight.
With Richard Owen, Paris, by September 26–December 1, 1932 [1];
Purchased from Owen, through Harold Woodbury Parsons, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1932.
NOTES:
[1] See letter from Harold Woodbury Parsons, art advisor to NAMA, to J. C. Nichols, NAMA Trustee, September 26, 1932.
Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (1937), 31:272, as Bildnis Sarah Bernhardt.
Jeanne Stump, Howard Collinson, and Katherine Giele, Paris: A Collage, exh. cat. (Lawrence, KS: Kansas Union Gallery, 1976), unpaginated, as Sarah Bernhardt.
“Somm, Henry or Henri pseudonym of François Clément Sommier,” Benezit Dictionary of Artists: Oxford Art Online (October 31, 2011): https://doi.org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.B00172120.
