Youth and Beauty: About Una, Lady Troubridge

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Una, Lady Troubridge by Romaine Brooks; oil on canvas, 1924. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Boy am I excited to see this painting in person! It’s going to be installed in a section of Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties [2]that collectively fits the theme of “Close-Ups: Scrutiny, Perfection and the Twenties Portrait.”

I forget how I first stumbled across the work of female artist Romaine Brooks. According to art historian Frances K. Pohl, who writes about Brooks in , “The painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) …devoted her career to the depiction of the lives and looks of those engaged in same-sex relationships. An American born in Rome into an extremely wealthy family, Brooks inherited the family fortune in 1902, and subsequently moved to Paris… (and) in 1915 became part of a community of women devoted to the production of art.” (p.332) Romaine Brooks painted a self-portrait [3] (now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC) wearing attire similar to that worn by Lady Troubridge- white shirt, dark jacket; essentially, menswear.

When I first saw these images I thought of Marlene Dietrich- the famous image of her wearing a tuxedo and a top-hat [4]- which, whenever I first saw it, did not register to me as “cross-dressing”. I thought of it as confident and attractive (perhaps because menswear has been a staple of American women’s clothing for decades now). But at the time, Marlene Dietrich, Romaine Brooks, and Una, Lady Troubridge, would have been seen as cross-dressing “others”. This was apparently a way to signify one’s sexuality or play with gender orientation in the 1920s.

According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website description [5] of Una, Lady Troubridge, Brooks “intended the portrait to be a caricature of her friend as a headstrong, demanding woman, and noted in a letter that this was “a sign of the age which may amuse future feminists.”” Indeed!

-- Alicia Garr [6]