Portrait by Philipp Kester
A photograph by Philipp Kester (1873–1958), one of the busiest German photojournalists of the day — a sign in itself of how much of a public figure she was.
She is in late middle age here, an ornament in her hair, wrapped in a fur-trimmed coat over a heavily embroidered jacket, seated in front of a wall of framed pictures and looking away from the lens. It is the same costume-conscious self-staging visible in the American press photographs taken on her 1909–10 tour — she dressed, always, like the subject of a painting.
