Lola portrait an attractive proposition
Ireland’s Fine Arts, antiques and collectables column
‘When you met Lola Montez, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms,” said Aldous Huxley. In the 19th century, it was almost impossible for a woman to have a lot of sex with many different people without that coming to dominate the way her story was told.
Accounts of the life of Lola Montez (1821 to 1861) range from the judgemental to the prurient. Her obituary ran as follows: “Born of an English or Irish family of respectable rank, at a very early age, the unhappy girl was found to be possessed of the fatal gift of beauty.
She appeared for a short time on the stage as a dancer (for which degradation her sorrowing relatives put on mourning, and issued undertakers’ cards to signify that she was now dead to them) and then blazed forth as the most notorious Paphian in Europe.” Paphian, in this context, means pertaining to illicit sexual desire.
Lola Montez was from Sligo, an intelligent and energetic woman who engaged with the world in a profoundly unusual way. She was oblivious to social boundaries. I doubt she was neurotypical. There was a lot more to
Montez than sexual adventure, although she never missed a chance. She had at least three husbands (some of them overlapping) and many lovers (some of them famous). Montez slept with the celebrity composer and pianist Franz Liszt, but so did anyone who got a chance. Liszt’s performances conjured up an atmosphere that became known as ‘Lisztomania’. It was a 19th century version of Beatlemania and sounds like great fun. There are several accounts of her admonishing her detractors with a horse whip. A Portrait Miniature of Lola Montez (aka Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Countess of Landsfeld, is coming up for auction on the second day of Adam’s upcoming Country House Collections Sale.
The portrait (Lot 472: est. €2,000 to €3,000) is a reduced version of a larger oil painting by the Austrian artist Joseph Karl Stieler, best known for his stormy portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven. The miniature (10cm x 14cm) is signed “Steiler” and painted in oil on porcelain, as was the fashion of the time.
Stieler (1781 to 1858) was court artist to the Bavarian kings and painted the portrait of Montez for her lover, King Ludwig I.
The portrait went into the king’s Gallery of Beauties (Schönheitengalerie), a collection of 36 portraits of the most beautiful women of the time. Montez, a bright-eyed brunette with magnificent breasts and a mischievous glint in her eye, was portrayed as the Spanish performer that she was then pretending to be. The affair ended, as so many of her affairs ended, with her being run out of town.
Being both lovely and notorious, Montez was much painted. The Steiler portrait is the most famous, but in 2005, A Portrait Of Lola Montez by Conrad Kiesel (1846-1921) sold for €15,600 at Christies. Her carte de visite sold at HA Auctions for $148 (€126) in 2009, but expect to pay between €3,000 and €4,000 for a signed letter such as the one that came up at Sotheby’s Livres et Manuscripts auction in France in 2013.
There are many books and films about her life, notably Lola Montès (1955) directed by Max Ophüls, and these too have associated memorabilia: an unrestored poster of the film sold at HA Auctions for $382 (€325) in 2015.
And then there are her books.
She published several and lectured extensively, her writing revealing her as an intelligent person of practical good sense.
“It is the penalty of nature that young girls must fade and become as wizened as their grandmothers,” she wrote. “I am unaware of any quality that can atone for the absence of an unpolished mind and an unlovely heart.”
Her most famous book The Arts Of Beauty (1858) warns against cosmetics that “are not only destructive to the skin, but… ruinous to the health”, but extols the virtues of a beautiful bosom: “Why should not a woman be suitably instructed in the right management of such extraordinary charms?”
Adam’s Country House Collections sale will be on view at Townley Hall, Drogheda, from October 10-12. The first part of the sale is a Timed Online Auction, which will begin to close at 3pm on Monday, October 12; the second part will take place at Adam’s auction house, St Stephen’s Green, on Tuesday, October 13 at 11am.