Cleo De Merode, NPG Portrait Postcard, Ballet Dancer, Hand Tinted.

Cleo De Merode, Photo Portrait Postcard, Ballet Dancer, Wearing Hat and White Shawl, Hand Tinted, NPG Series, Printed In Germany, Back Of Card Reads, Wishing Never That For any Thing To Cross Your Path To Hurt You. My Prayer For You Is to Live For Him, Who Died For You.

Cléo de Mérode was born in Paris on 27 September 1875. She was the illegitimate daughter of the Viennese baroness Vincentia Maria Cäcilia Catharina de Mérode, Empress Elisabeth’s lady-in-waiting. Vincentia had been abandoned by Cléo’s father, the Austrian judge, lawyer and tourism pioneer Theodor Christomannos. Affectionately called ‘Lulu’ by her family, at the age of eight she was sent to study dance and made her professional debut at the Paris Opera at the age of eleven. Her dancing skills and her image began to appear on postcards and playing cards. Cléo posed as a model for several painters, some of them very famous. In 1895 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed her, as did Charles Puyo, Alfredo Müller, Edgar Degas, Manuel Benedito, Georges Clairin, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, József Rippl-Rónai, François Flameng, Carlos Vázquez Úbeda, Einar Nerman, Paul-Eugène Mesplès, Henri Gervex and Giovanni Boldini. And, was sculpted by artists such as Alexandre Falguière, Mariano Benlliure, Alphonse Mucha, Ernst Seger and Eugène-Denis Arrondelle. Georges Goursat also drew several caricatures of de Mérode during the 1900s. Her images were taken by some of the most illustrious photographers of the time, including Felix Nadar and his son and successor Paul Nadar, Léopold-Émile Reutlinger and his son Jean Reutlinger, Charles Ogerau, Henri Manuel and Otto Sarony. De Mérode never married or had children, which has led some biographers to classify her as a lesbian. Paul Klee, who knew de Mérode personally, called her “probably the most beautiful living woman” and said she “seemed asexual” in a 1902 diary entry. In her autobiography ‘Le ballet de ma vie‘, de Mérode stated that she had only had relationships with two men in her life. She was engaged to a French aristocrat for almost ten years before he died of typhoid fever in 1904 and was the companion of Spanish sculptor and diplomat Luis de Périnat, Marquis of Périnat, from 1906 to 1919. Suffering from dementia, Cléo de Mérode died on 17 October 1966 in her Parisian flat at 15 Rue de Téhéran and was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery.