In 1911 Greene sat for the commercial photographer Theodore C. Marceau, presumably at his Fifth Avenue studio in New York. She posed in a studio chair before a painted backdrop, engrossed in a book. The image of her reading is not crisp enough to reveal whether it was a studio prop or a treasured volume Greene had brought with her to the sitting. There are four prints from the sitting that she sent to Bernard Berenson; no other prints are known to survive. Photographs from the Marceau series were, along with the De Meyer images, the most frequently reproduced images of Greene used in the mass media.
BG to BB, 5/15/11 (151; probable reference to the Marceau series): “I have been expecting my photographs every day to send you but they have not yet arrived, I hope you will like them. They are not any good but you know it if difficult to get a good picture of me – I have such a “wriggly” face”
BG to BB, 5/22-25/11 (155; probable reference to the Marceau series, as BG dated them May 1911; however, she also sat for White that year): “I am sending you by this mail some photographs I have recently had taken. If you find one you like, keep it and destroy the others. They are none of them very good but I am hard to photograph they all tell me”
BG to BB, 7/17/11 (161; possible reference to Marceau series, but she also sat for White in June 1911): “I am going to send you, in a day or two some photographs I had taken especially for you, and if these don’t please you I shall give up in despair – They are not pretty but I think they are “mine own image””
Theodore C. Marceau (1859–1922)
Belle da Costa Greene (leaning on chair), May 1911
Gelatin silver print; 14 15/16 × 10 7/8 in. (38 × 27.7 cm)
Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers, Personal Photographs: Box 1 Friends (Large Format)
The Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers. Biblioteca Berenson I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
