Brooks, Romaine

Brooks, Romaine (1874–1970). American painter, active mainly in Paris. She was born Romaine Goddard in Rome to wealthy American parents, and in her early life she lived variously in England, France, Italy, and Switzerland, her main training as a painter being in Rome, 1899–1900. In 1903 she made a marriage of convenience to John Ellingham Brooks, an English homosexual, believing that she would have greater freedom as a married woman. She separated from her husband the following year and thereafter was part of a close circle of lesbian friends; they included Radclyffe Hall, whose novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) was banned because of its frank treatment of love between women. Brooks's main work was done in Paris between 1905 and 1936, after which she virtually abandoned painting. She was a successful society portraitist, her work being glamorous in an unconventionally strong and sombre way; she said she was in love with ‘the mystery of greys', and her friend the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio described her as ‘the most profound and wise orchestrator of greys in modern painting'. There is often a decadent, slightly morbid quality in her portraits, and this is seen more fully in her eerily erotic, almost necrophiliac portrayal of the dancer Ida Rubinstein in The Voyage (National Museum of American Art, Washington, c. 1911): Rubinstein (with whom Brooks had an affair) is shown lying naked on a mysterious white shape seemingly floating in a dark void (the Russian painter Valentin Serov also did a remarkable nude portrait of her). Brooks lived in Florence, 1940–67, then moved to Nice, where she died. For many years her work was generally forgotten or dismissed as corrupt, but in the year of her death she came back into the limelight with an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, entitled ‘Romaine Brooks: Thief of Souls'. The sub-title comes from a remark of the poet Robert de Montesquiou—a reference to the probing nature of her portraits, which sometimes perhaps disclosed more than the subjects wished.