Around the time of that horror beyond horror that was the Second World War, an English artist called David Jagger painted a series of portraits of unidentified persons who may or may not have lived through it.
Like this Jewish girl, a refugee in Vienna, 1938. I love the scarf, but it is her hands which say the most.
An unidentified officer of the RAF, during World War 2. I wonder if he survived the war?
An officer of the Welsh Guards, also unknown.
What all these people have in common is that they look scared. I’m not surprised, given what they were facing into. I hope they made it through.
Sometimes the essence of a subject eludes an artist, no matter how good, and so it was with Jagger and Vivien Leigh, his lovely portrait of her just narrowly failing to capture her vixen allure. Perhaps Viv, the chameleon so many different things to so many different people that she never discovered quite what she was herself, hid her rapacious gaze during sittings all the better to unleash it to devastatingly upstaging effect in the photograph below?
But even if he couldn’t see the steel behind their sweetly submissive gaze, Jagger certainly did his female subjects’ clothes justice. His portraits of society women contain some of the most beautiful depictions of between-the-wars clothing to be seen in any paintings of that era.
Love the feather, the hat, the fur and the gloves and how they balance one another out.
Another scarf. Jagger loved his scarves.
An elegant lady indeed. What gorgeous teal green!
And this orange dress. Erm. Fascinating. If rather blocky. It was the era of masculine tailoring and flat chests, after all. But still.
Was this Jagger related to that other androgynous scarf-wearing one? Quite possibly. Mick’s father came from Morley in Yorkshire. This Jagger was from Rotherham, not too far away. And they shared the same first name (not that prevalent a first name, David, in the Yorkshire of that era). So quite possibly related, though I can’t say for sure. They certainly both had an eye for colour. And androgyny. And scarves.
Read more about Mick’s ancestry, and David’s paintings, here and here.
The lady in green looks like Isabella Rosselini. BTW she is certainly going for asexual these days…looking so much like a dude.
Good catch with the Leigh portrait. I don’t know what is missing, but you can see that something is. What stands out most is obviously the change to a more prim and proper do, and the side part does not suit her as much as the middle part she often wore. Her real face is also more wide (child-like) as well as her eyes more hooded, which gave her that sexy bedroom look. The widows peak is too pronounced and the mouth to pursed- her real face has an air of a smirk. It might have been better to draw from a picture than real life, perhaps. Not sure….Honestly, the more I look at it, the worse I think it is. He got the lips ALL wrong.
I think her personality (spoilt, self and sex-obsessed, a little mad) comes across in the photo in a way it doesn’t in the portrait. It’s all down to the eyes. Always is in portraits really. The eyes and the hands are what make the difference.
Also:- this proves my point that a mad woman is always more irresistibly compelling than a sane one, even if as beautiful! and even to other women. At least until you’ve lived with a mad one, and maybe not even then. Which is why we women are getting more and more bonkers with each generation…
ps. I completely agree with you about the lips too! It looks like he’s given her some botox/fillers… thin lips were key to Vivien’s beauty, if she had had an Angelina pout her face wouldn’t have been half as compelling. This is why people should be very careful about messing with their faces…
Yes, like her face was kind of put in a vice and squished a tiny bit.
Maybe men prefer mad women because they have no inhibitions. That’s also why they dump them to marry a non mad woman (usually).
I have a friend who is mad and irresistible to guys, but then again, she is 30 next month and not married (although she has tried to get the last 3 guys to propose….all whilst still actively dating, lol, i love her).
Possibly all women are slightly mad? Though there are degrees of madness… I think madness has a really strong initial appeal and then gets wearing. But equally so does sanity. Perhaps it’s just a question of getting the right balance?
Maybe PMS has an evolutionary advantage after all………….
Perhaps! You may be on to something there
*puts tongue in cheek*
In the past, all that would have be done to cease PMS-related madness would be to get the woman pregnant, which obviously a strong initial attraction would help achieve. No more PMS. Repeat every nine months or so. After numerous kids she’d be too exhausted to cause any trouble.
*takes tongue out of cheek*
Though to be honest most mad women I have known have been mad the whole month round..
I think it’s *unpredictability* that is (sometimes dangerously) appealing, and this applies to both sexes.
The human eye tends to notice moving objects more than stationary ones, and this is true also of many animal species. Some radar systems work the same way.
Similarly, a person is likely to spend more time thinking about the behavior of a romantic partner who is unpredictable. This is good if it steers him/her to someone who is genuinely exciting, bad if it steers toward a creator of pointless drama and chaos.
I suspect that people who don’t have enough excitement in *other* aspects of their life are probably more attracted drama-creators in relationships. However, this might be completely wrong, it might be the same guy who is a motorcycle rider, fighter pilot, and gambler who prefers the drama-creating woman. There is probably research on this somewhere…
There’s a variation, largely genetic I think, in the human need for sensation-seeking – possibly linked to that.
I think this is the first portrait-painter featured on this blog in a long time who could really paint hands properly.
Glad you approve! Thought hands rather good myself but worried they wouldn’t be up to your exacting standards!
dear Sibling, what a super post, I’d not come across David Jagger before so thank you just for that, as well as the amusing & erudite commentary. Although, even though you & Flavia are right about the limitations of the Vivienne Leigh portrait, I feel bound to defend the artist- with such a mobile & elusive spirit, it must have been almost an impossible task. The points about the fatal attractions of mad & beautiful women, (those destructive creators of pointless drama & chaos) are also well taken, as I, alas, can unfortunately attest. Almost irresistible unfortunately, and no, I don’t think that’s because life was otherwise too dull. The conversation comments are as interesting as the post. Re mr Photoncourier’s observations, I suppose one could equally argue that a man who rides motorbike, flies a fighter plane and gambles everything at the roulette or poker table each weekend is already fending off some existential dread of boredom. So perhaps his fatal attraction, to our notional deranged beauty, is simply of a piece?
Arran, every man I know has a story about a mad and beautiful woman. Are they more beautiful, because they are mad, or madder, because they are beautiful? Who knows… I think there’s truth in both your points of view – the question is whether or not in any particular case the subject needs an extra little dose of madness to satisfy their particular risk quota, some of us have a higher risk requirement than others…
Yes, agreed on all counts, all very true. As for the eternal “mad because beautiful, or vice versa?”- question, its hard to say. There’s no doubt that very attractive people can & do “get away with” a lot more, so in that sense I suppose being beautiful effective gives a certain kind of woman “permission” to be mad. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there. Since the admiration of her beauty not only reduces or removes the risks of disapproval, it also suspends the normal framework of limits (social, ethical, behavioral) most of us learn from early on to exist within. I suppose what i mean is, if people are too busy doting on you and furiously competing for your attention, and find your every foible, eccentricity, strop or tantrum captivating & utterly beguiling, it’s inevitably going to warp ones sense of a behavioral framework. (At least, as a highly beautiful person, thats what I’ve always found) I wish…
Quite honestly, Arran, I think many non-beautiful women are mad too (Mary Todd Lincoln was no stunnah), it is just that, like the clothes they are wearing, you notice the madness more in the beautiful ones, and if you’re a straight man or, presumably, a gay woman, the beauty lets them get to you more… there is probably is a bit of getting away with things if you are a cracker, but I know many non-beautiful women who are terrible divas too…
Arguably all women are mad, anyway, and some of us are just better at hiding it than others, or maybe our saving grace (or get-off clause) is that we admit it…