Fratelli Vianelli
Ralph Wormeley Curtis, about 1884
Albumen print, 16.2 x 10.5 cm (6 3/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
This albumen print in shades of grey and black depicts a seated male with his legs crossed to our left. He is fashionably dressed and looks intently at the viewer. This light-skinned male has light brown hair parted on one side, a waxed handlebar mustache, brown eyebrows and light colored eyes. His dark jacket is edged in a light gray piping with large round buttons up the front. The corner of a handkerchief peeks out of his breast pocket. He wears a white collared shirt and a medium colored tie is just barely visible at his neck. His pants are made of a light pinstripe material. His arm to our right is bent across his body, holding a walking stick. He wears a pinky ring on that hand. His arm to our left is bent upward toward his face with his elbow resting on an ornamental pedestal. He holds a lighted cigarette loosely in that hand. A bowler hat rests atop a stack of books that lie on the pedestal. He is seated in a chair that has an upholstered seat with carved wood below.
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Commentary
Ralph Curtis, the painter and friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner's, poses for this photographer with studied informality, his waxed mustache a testament to intensive grooming, a cigarette burning in his hand as he leans on the ornamental pedestal holding his bowler hat. His fashionable attitudes did not always impress his friends. Henry James privately expressed his skepticism of Curtis in a letter to Isabella, writing that “the fragrance of his frivolity & the flushed rose pink of his image seem always to reach me from afar.” Despite James’s ambivalence, Gardner acquired several of Curtis’s paintings and periodically relied on his advice when building her remarkable collection of fine art.