On Tour in America
Photographed in New York by the Bain News Service, the wire agency that supplied portraits to the American papers — which is how a German painter came to be photographed at all on this side of the Atlantic. This is the tour that produced the interview reprinted as far away as Australia, in which she told reporters what she made of modern America.
The hat is the point. She arrived as a celebrity and dressed like one: an enormous plumed hat, a fur-trimmed velvet coat, one hand laid along the back of a sofa in a panelled room hung with pictures. The German Ambassador, that same season, called her “the greatest woman painter in the world.”
The agency shot a short series at this sitting — plates 1015-2 through 1015-5, numbered on the glass, all four held by the Library of Congress; this is 1015-2. The record for 1015-4 dates the sitting to March 1910, and the Washington Times printed a Bain photograph of her on 4 April 1910. The seated portrait from the same afternoon is here; two further plates (1015-3, 1015-5) are near-variants.
