Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks painted portraits almost entirely in greys, was Natalie Barney's partner for more than fifty years, and destroyed her own reputation by outliving the world she painted. Her childhood was appalling by any account: her mother was violent and unstable, her brother mentally ill, and she was left with a laundress in New York for a period as a child and forgotten about. She studied in Rome, was the only woman in her class and was harassed out of it, and lived in poverty in Capri until her mother died in 1902 and left her a fortune. She married briefly and disastrously, kept the name, and thereafter did as she liked. Her palette was deliberately restricted to greys, blacks and whites, and her subjects were the women of her own circle - Barney, Una Troubridge in monocle and stiff collar, the dancer Ida Rubinstein, herself in a top hat - painted with a directness that made them portraits of a way of living rather than society pictures. She met Barney in 1915 and the relationship lasted until 1969, conducted mostly in separate houses, with Barney's other affairs tolerated until one finally was not. She also drew hundreds of strange continuous-line drawings that she said came from somewhere else. She stopped exhibiting for decades, refused to sell, and died at ninety-six in Nice, having outlived nearly everyone in her paintings. The Smithsonian holds the largest collection of her work, given in 1966. Her autobiography was written and never published in her lifetime. She painted very little after 1935.

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