The Portraits of George Sand
GEORGE SAND
In 1832
From a lithograph by Jullien
and as she was very accessible to draughtsmen, sketchers, and photographers, her icons multiplied indefinitely for a period of over fifty years. We do not profess to treat of these exhaustively, but they certainly exceed some three hundred in number, if we may judge by such as are still in the hands of the printsellers, or such as have found a place in the national collections. Those of the Romantic period, the most interesting, because of the androgynous aspect the young Baroness Dudevant then delighted to affect, form in themselves a series of relatively important lithographs. In these we see the author of Lélia, either in the guise of a mediæval page, her cropped hair falling in close curls on her neck, a silk handkerchief tied negligently over a bodice cut like a spencer, or in masculine garb, in a fashionable riding-coat, which vainly essays to give her the air of a Brummell. The portraits in masculine costume of the romantic mistress of Alfred de Musset, of Mérimée, of Pierre Leroux, of Chopin, and sundry others, who all left so apparent a trace of their influence on the works of the author of Valentine and of Consuelo, those curious portraits in which the woman, whom her intimates habitually called Georges, is represented sometimes even in a workman's blouse, a cigarette between her teeth,
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