The Painter in 1893
The face the German press attached to her name in the 1890s: a steel engraving worked up from a photograph in 1893 — the year her Elaine hung in Chicago, six years after the Mors Imperator scandal made her famous.
She is turned three-quarters away, hair swept up and falling in a heavy braid, in a deep lace collar and a jewelled choker. It is a conventional format for an unconventional sitter, and it is how most readers of the period would have pictured her: not at an easel, but posed like any well-born lady of letters.
(The scan carries the digitising archive’s watermark. If a clean impression turns up, we will swap it.)
