Nice american actress Adah Isaacs Menken, Sarony CDV photograph
Rare CDV published by Sarony & Co. of the famous American actress, Adah Isaacs Menken. "Born in the spring of 1835, in Milneburg, Louisiana, to Auguste and Marie Theodore, Adah Isaacs Menken’s origins are ambiguous largely because she told different stories of her life to different audiences. Internationally famous for her starring role in the equestrian melodrama Mazeppa, in which she was stripped on stage to a flesh-colored body stocking, lashed to the back of the “wild horse of Tartary,” and sent flying on a narrow ramp above the theater, Adah Isaacs Menken consistently defied social mores. She cropped her black hair and smoked cigarettes, and publicly disparaged conventional married life. Menken represented an early example of the cult of personality, blurring her private life with her public persona. Whether riding in a gaudy carriage through Central Park or exploiting the incipient art of photography to place her face in every shop window, Menken was expert at self-promotion and publicity. She married four times in the course of seven years. Her second marriage, in 1859, was to the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, John C. Heenan, with whom she had a son, who died in infancy. Menken had one other child, a son by her fourth husband, who also died in infancy in 1867. One of the most glamorous celebrities of the 1860s, Menken also cultivated a literary following. She wrote poetry and developed relationships with the likes of Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alexandre Dumas, and Algernon Swinburne. George Sand was a close friend to the actor and was godmother to Menken’s second child, whom Sand convinced Menken to have baptized. Pictures of the actor with Dumas, circulated in Paris where Menken was performing The Pirates of the Savannah, enflamed rumors that she was having an affair with the author, and shortly before her death a similar scandal erupted in London when pictures were circulated of her with Swinburne." Condition of view is good with some soiling on image