Originally Posted by
john_tullamarine
I never cease to be amazed - utterly - by the wealth of knowledge and capability within the PPRuNe sandpit.
I couldn't agree more - but this story has far from ended yet...
Having been much involved in the world of art, that sculpture appears to me to be a very impressive bit of work from someone who must have been so young.
Isabelle Princesse Roussadana Mdivani (1905 - 1938). I wondered rather how it might be that she would be commissioned to make such a trophy but reading about her family background it is perhaps now less surprising. Celebrities of an earlier age and a good example of how temporary such fame can be.
Isabelle Roussadana, known as “Roussy,” was the more conniving of the sisters, “insuring herself against poverty,” wrote an acquaintance, “by methods that would have shocked even Becky Sharp,” Thackeray’s quintessential social climber in Vanity Fair. Roussy had drawn attention in Paris with her looks—she was tall, sleek, and stunning, with streaked ash blond hair—but also by cultivating an image as an eccentric, always accompanied “by two monkeys dressed in rich Oriental brocades and aglow with diamonds and emeralds and other jewels,” wrote her onetime sister-in-law Pola Negri. It was an artist’s affectation. She was a sculptor who specialized in busts of famous individuals—including, during a trip to Boston, former president Calvin Coolidge and former Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes—and in trophies awarded for aeronautic competitions. “I am wedded to my art,” she told a reporter during her Boston foray, “but any suitor may have his monument made.”
From
https://lamag.com/celebrity/how-an-e...al-kardashians
And what a stunning looking woman....