Fine full-length original photograph of the noted ballroom dancer in costume, posed on a pedestal holding flowers in each hand linked by a single floral strand. Signed in ink at lower right: "Internationally yours Irene Castle," with "Campbell Studio NY." in pencil below
[ca. 1915].
Image size 225 x 175 mm., overall size 265 x 209 mm.
Very slightly worn; small chip to lower left corner, not affecting image; edges very slightly uneven.
Irene and Vernon Castle (1887-1918) were noted American ballroom and exhibition dancers. "The Castles (married in 1911) began to appear as a dance team in New York clubs in 1912. They danced in the musical The Sunshine Girl (1913), gaining wide appeal partly because of the enthusiasm among the upper classes in New York for the new steps of vernacular dance. By 1914 they had become the city’s most popular social dance team, appearing in Broadway shows and silent films, and they enjoyed great success with their book Modern Dancing (1914/R 1980). The Castles owned several entertainment centers where they performed and taught social dancing; the dances that they popularized, including the Castle Walk (a variant of the one-step, danced on the toes with stiff knees), hesitation waltz, and foxtrot, merged patrician sophistication with sexual suggestiveness and lack of restraint. Their special brand of social dancing, accompanied by the syncopated rhythms of their music director, James Reese Europe, and his orchestra, helped to popularize black urban music and paved the way for the dance styles and social life of the 1920s. A film of their lives, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, was released in 1939." Ronald M. Radano in Grove Music Online.
A rare image.
"Campbell Studios was founded by Alfred S. Campbell (1840-1912) in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Campbell, an early English proponent of art photography, was invited to the United States in 1867 by Napolean Sarony to form a business partnership under the Sarony name. Sarony particularly desired access to Campbell's patented photographic processes... The New York branch of Campbell Studios was one of the active celebrity portrait studios in the 1900s to early 1920s. Its forte was the half length portrait photo of stage or screen stars in fashionable modern dress. It regularly supplied photographs to The Theatre and to movie magazines." Website of Campbell Studios.
Item #29400
Price: $650.00 other currencies