Mme. Anerheimer

Troubetzkoy brought to sculpture the bravura effects obtained by the portrait painters of international society. His figures are built up swiftly and seemingly loosely, yet with such accuracy that each morsel of modeling wax has a decisive eloquence akin to that of the brushstroke of a Sargent or a Boldini. He trained in Milan, where he had one of his first successes with Madame Anernheimer. Gertrude Anernheimer won the prize for elegance at a charity ball; the award was her portrait by Troubetzkoy. This cast shows a streamlining of the initial composition through the elimination of the step-platform that is present in bronzes of the subject in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The Metropolitan Museum bought directly from the artist in 1929 a cast of his well-known, high-kicking Dancing Girl (Lady Constance Richardson), of 1914, but this is our first work by Troubetzkoy from the Belle Époque, whose glamour he helped so materially to define.