16.00USD
The story is told this way: Once there was a poor and humble Georgian named Niko Pirosmani. He was a house painter, a painter of signs, and of simple pictures of people and animals that had in them a spark of magic to touch the hearts of his fellow Georgians.
One day a famous French actress on tour stopped for a bit in Tblisi, the town where Niko lived, and Niko fell in love. It was said that of all things this actress loved flowers, especially red roses, so Niko, being only a simple man, and feeling a desperate kind of passion, took all the money he had in this world, he sold all of his canvases, his brushes, everything he owned he sold, and with this money he bought red roses; thousands, perhaps a million of them, and he filled the public square beneath her hotel window with these brilliant flowers. A few old grandmothers say that they can still remember how throughout Tblisi, on that day, the air was rich with the perfume of those roses.
In the morning when the actress, whose name was Marguerite de Sevre, awakened, she looked out her window to find the morning sun shining down upon the thousands, even a million, scarlet roses in the square below. Watching from a discreet distance, Niko saw her surprised smile, and wept for joy. Marguerite saw the flowers, but she did not see Niko.
Well, Marguerite de Sevre returned to Paris, back to the bright gaiety of her life there, but Niko, poor Niko, utterly ruined by this one impulsive act, slowly died of liver failure and malnutrition.
Ah well, perhaps it is only a story.
This image, though not identifying a photographer, was published by Kunzli Frere, or the Kunzli Brothers, Carl and Max, who from the early 1870's in Zurich, were in the art publishing business, and by the turn of the century had branch houses in both Paris and Barcelona.
The photographer may have been the great Ogerau of Paris, who was identified as the photographer of a portrait of actress Suzanne Derval, during this same period, sitting in what appears to have been this same chair, so possibly the chair was in Ogerau's Paris studio?
The card is in very nice condition. Please examine our high res scans for detail. Postage is for first class shipping in a secure photo mailer, and we happily combine shipping on all paper goods. If you purchase two cards, we will refund the postage on the second card, and beginning today, when you purchase three or more cards from us at the same time, your shipping will be entirely free!