14.00 USD
Odette Valery, Bangled and Bejeweled, by Bassano Ltd. of London. Posted in 1908
Wonderful Rotary Photo card of Odette Valery in costume as (we think) Cleopatra. The photograph was made at Bassano Ltd. of London, a firm originally established by the famed "high society" portraitist Alexander Bassano in 1850. Mr. Bassano had retired in 1903, however, so this portrait was probably not made by him personally.
Born Helene Vasilardi in 1883, Odette Valery was an Italian dancer of Greek parentage who made her début at La Scala (the one in Milan, not the music hall in Paris), in 1898, at the age of fifteen. She was known as a great beauty, with emerald eyes that broke many hearts. Moving to Paris, she danced at the Folies Bergere, and also at the Casino de Paris.
Like the lovely Cleo de Merode, who was also primarily an interpretive soloist, and did very well performing her versions of classical Cambodian dance in traditional costume, Mlle. Valery sought to recreate dances of classical Greece (the homeland of her mother and father) in her bare feet, rather than dancing en pointe with a ballet troupe, which she felt was too "old fashioned" as a performance art.
She played Cleopatra (probably the part for which she was costumed here) with a living asp (de-fanged), and at the height of her fame, in 1910, was earning a thousand dollars a week (a great deal of money at that time, translating today into about 25,000.00 per week, according to some available sources).
She toured in style, with servants. Even her snakes had a personal groom named Robert, who traveled with them on international tours. She also gave the snakes names! Hector was the asp, and her two giant cobras were named Sarah and Helene. She also traveled with a tiny green lizard, whom she allowed to crawl, with apparent affection, all over her face during interviews with the press. It was the groom Robert's job, she said, to go out into the woods and find a particular variety of red ant this lizard liked to eat.
We find plenty of news articles about her and her snakes, from around 1908-1910, but in 1912, she was found in a terribly impoverished state, dangerously ill, and being watched over by her seven year old son Gaeton, in a cheap London boarding house.
A friend managed to get her back to Paris, but by 1914, at the beginning of the war, she was still destitute. At that point the trail all but disappears. Millions of people in Europe were displaced in the war, and apparently she was one of them. There is not even a record of her death that we can locate, which is odd for so famous a dancer.
We found only one more mention of her, an editorial, quite sympathetic and poetically written, which appeared in La Renaissance Politique in May of 1914. "Pauvre Femme," or Poor Woman, it was called. The author described her as a fine woman, a talented artist, and as having gone mad from the abuse of morphine and ether. They went on to describe how she wandered beneath the trees of Sainte Anne's, an asylum for the insane on the outskirts of Paris. So very sad, and terrible for her child. Clearly fame and fortune were no more easily handled then, than now.
So, a relatively short career, but by all accounts a brilliant one, and certainly a colorful life. We would like to hope that she found peace and recovered eventually. This image was made when she was at the height of her fame.
There is a nasty crease in the lower right corner of this card, but thanks to the card format, the crease barely intrudes into this uncommon image.
Many thanks to Wikipedia, as always, and to the New York Times, and La Renaissance Politique by way of lecti-ecriture.com.
Please examine our high res scans for detail.
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