Lot 69: PIERRE-LOUIS PIERSON

(French, 1822-1913) la COMTESSE DE CASTIGLIONE (THE EYES) "No. 57" inscribed in pencil on verso vintage albumen print 71/2 x 71/8 in. (19.1 x 18.1 cm) circa 1863-1866 PROVENANCE Private Collection, PARIS Private Collection, NEW YORK LITERATURE Pierre Apraxine and Xavier Demange, LA DIVINE COMTESSE: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE COUNTESS DE CASTIGLIONE, NEW YORK, 2000, cat. no. 75 (3 variants illustrated, cat. no. 56 and 78 are portraits from the same sitting) The Comtesse de Castiglione arrived in France from Italy in 1855 as a spy for the cause of the unification of Italy. She quickly became known as the most beautiful woman of her day, and within weeks became the mistress of Napoleon III. Throughout her life she transformed herself into a mysterious persona, notorious for her many love affairs, but eventually ended her life poor, mentally ill and alone. In the mid-1850s the innovation of the carte de visite made society portraiture extremely popular in both London and Paris. Photographic studios opened continually, with the political, social and artistic elite of Paris favoring Mayer and Pierson, the most prominent studio of the Second Empire. In 1856 and 1857, La Comtesse, mistress to the Emperor and at the height of her fame, visited Mayer & Pierson's studio and commissioned several portraits. It was in 1860, however, when she moved to the fashionable neighborhood of Passy, after a period of self imposed exile to Italy, that she became a neighbor and private client to Pierre Louis Pierson, who had split from the Mayer brothers and opened his own studio. Upon her return, even though she was still accepted in society and written about in the press, La Comtesse "was forced to acknowledge that she could not recapture the exceptional position in society that had been hers. For a personality so dominated by narcissism, this was a crushing defeat. Her beauty, with which she identified her whole being, was all that could reassure her. It was no coincidence then, that photography assumed such importance for her at this time. It was a means of imposing a fiction on the reality of her life" (Apraxine and Demange, pp. 30-31). It was at this time that she began a six-year collaboration with Pierson, resulting in their most productive and creative time together, completing 188 portraits. Their relationship evolved into an artistic collaboration, and Pierson was instrumental in the construction of the Comtesse's fictional scenes and stories played out in front of the camera. "Their photographs betray an erotic tension as obvious as it is ambiguous. Who is this woman trying to seduce with her disarming beauty? Is it the universal male, embodied in the photographer? Is it Pierson, watching attentively from behind the lens? Or is it in fact her own image reflected in...mirrors" (Apraxine and Demange, p. 27).