Harry Austen La Montagne was a French-American horse owner, artist, sculptor, war veteran and sportsman. [1]
Harry Austen La Montagne was a French-American horse owner, artist, sculptor, war veteran and sportsman. [1]
Born to wine merchant Auguste La Montagne and Anne Davis La Montagne, daughter of Thomas E. Davis, Harry estimated he spent half of his life in France and the other half in the United States. [2]
Educated at the Académie Julian in Paris, Harry was the brother-in-law of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nicholas Murray Butler. [3]
La Montagne married Emma Morgan, daughter of Thomas Morgan, in New London, Connecticut on March 2, 1871. She was reported as ill in 1898 and was listed on a joint passport application in 1899, but there is no trace of her when Harry La Montagne held the post of General Manager at the Golden Link Mining Company in Arizona in 1905. [4] [5] [6] [7]
In 1906, he was presumably a widower when he married Beatrice Kinney on April 30, 1906 at St. Patrick's Cathedral presided by Archbishop Farley. [8] “Bea” was the daughter of Francis Sherwood Kinney and Mary Brady. He was one of the founders of Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company, which they merged with American Tobacco Company, the subject of one of the earliest antitrust cases before the Supreme Court requiring the break-up of the company in 1911. His brother, the second co-founder of the company was Abbot Kinney who is most famous for developing the beachfront neighborhood of Venice in Los Angeles.
In 1911 Harry moved his stables to France during the movement to abolish racetrack gambling. [10] Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Harry returned to the United States after his horses were confiscated by the French government for war service. [11] After the couple’s return to the United States, they spent time between Narragansett, New York and Aiken, South Carolina, where the La Montagnes hunted with Frederick Henry Prince and John Harvey Wright Junior, present and past Masters of the Pau Hounds. [12]
In 1917, La Montagne enlisted at the age of 47 and served in France attaining the rank of major and was the recipient of the French Légion of Honor on May 16, 1919. [13]
Between 1920 and 1939, the La Montagnes spent each winter at Pau, France renting the Villa Regina, where Harry La Montagne first commissioned Sir Alfred Munnings to paint Beatrice La Montagne's portrait in 1921 and then his own. [14] The La Montagnes were active in Pau’s Anglo-American colony, being members of the English Club, the Golf Club and the Société de Encouragement. They were also subscribers to the Pau Hunt. [12]
Harry La Montagne was the owner of Conniver, namesake of the Conniver Stakes. Beatrice La Montagne died at their apartment in the Plaza Hotel on December 22, 1948. [15] Harry died at the apartment on June 15, 1959.
Harry La Montagne was an amateur artist. The majority of his works were presented to family and friends as gifts. Harry painted with watercolors, gouache, ink and oil. He sculpted in terra cotta and bronze. The majority of his works are still in the possession of those families, several of which were members of the English Club at Pau. A recent donation of over 200 of his works was recently made by the family of Odette Dewavrin. This collection consists of two sketchbook albums and 82 postcard Pau Hunt Meet notices with watercolor, gouache and ink designs Harry La Montagne offered to Miss Dewavrin.
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, which are based on his experiences in New York and Paris. He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and painted watercolors.
Gustave Moreau was a French artist and an important figure in the Symbolist movement. Jean Cassou called him "the Symbolist painter par excellence". He was an influential forerunner of symbolism in the visual arts in the 1860s, and at the height of the symbolist movement in the 1890s, he was among the most significant painters. Art historian Robert Delevoy wrote that Moreau "brought symbolist polyvalence to its highest point in Jupiter and Semele." He was a prolific artist who produced over 15,000 paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Moreau painted allegories and traditional biblical and mythological subjects favored by the fine art academies. J. K. Huysmans wrote, "Gustave Moreau has given new freshness to dreary old subjects by a talent both subtle and ample: he has taken myths worn out by the repetitions of centuries and expressed them in a language that is persuasive and lofty, mysterious and new." The female characters from the Bible and mythology that he so frequently depicted came to be regarded by many as the archetypical symbolist woman. His art fell from favor and received little attention in the early 20th century but, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, he has come to be considered among the most paramount of symbolist painters.
Gouache, body color, or opaque watercolor is a water-medium paint consisting of natural pigment, water, a binding agent, and sometimes additional inert material. Gouache is designed to be opaque. Gouache has a considerable history, having been used for at least twelve centuries. It is used most consistently by commercial artists for posters, illustrations, comics, and other design work.
Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.
Picasso's Rose Period represents an important epoch in the life and work of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso which had a great impact on the developments of modern art. It began in 1904 at a time when Picasso settled in Montmartre at the Bateau-Lavoir among bohemian poets and writers. Following Picasso's Blue Period – which depicted themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair in somber, blue tones – Picasso's Rose Period represents more pleasant themes of clowns, harlequins and carnival performers, depicted in cheerful vivid hues of red, orange, pink and earth tones.
Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym among the many used by Raymundus Joannes de Kremer, a prolific Belgian (Flemish) writer. Although he wrote journalism, stories for young readers in Dutch by the name John Flanders, and scenarios for comic strips and detective stories, he is best known for his tales of the fantastique written in French under the name Jean Ray. Among speakers of English, he is famous for his macabre novel Malpertuis (1943), which was filmed by Harry Kümel in 1971. He also used the pseudonyms King Ray, Alix R. Bantam and Sailor John, among others.
Bernard Binlin Dadié was an Ivorian novelist, playwright, poet, and administrator. Among many other senior positions, starting in 1957, he held the post of Minister of Culture in the government of Côte d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1986.
Armand LaMontagne is an American sculptor of celebrated personalities.
Charles-Louis Clérisseau was a French architect, draughtsman, antiquary, and artist who became a leading authority on ancient Roman architecture and Roman ruins in Italy and France. With his influence extending to Russia, England, and the United States, and clients including Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson, Clérisseau played a key role in the genesis of neoclassical architecture during the second half of the 18th century.
Frederick Henry Prince was an American stockbroker, investment banker and financier.
Luca Penni (c.1500/1504–1556) was an Italian painter of the 16th century best known for his work in France as part of the First School of Fontainebleau. He was nicknamed Le Romain.
The French writer and folklore collector Henri Pourrat was born in 1887 in Ambert, a town in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France. He died near Ambert in 1959.
Ray Kinney was a singer, musician, composer, orchestra leader, and performer on radio, stage and screen.
Ofelia Márquez Huitzil is a Mexican artist and member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. She is best known for her abstract art with figurative elements, which has made her work somewhat controversial and excluded from Mexico abstract art movement.
Thomas Edward Davis or Davies was a prolific real estate developer who built residential properties in New York between 1830 and 1860.
Portrait of an Army Doctor is an oil-on-canvas painting created during 1914–15 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the painting's abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism. The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870–1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though Portrait of an Army Doctor is one of Gleizes's only major oil paintings of the period.
Jacques Lassaigne was a French art historian, an art critic who served as president of the International Association of Art Critics from 1966 to 1969, and a museum curator acting as chief curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 1971 to 1978. He was a prolific author who wrote numerous volumes of scholarly books on the subject art history, notably in collaboration with the publisher Albert Skira and his publishing house Editions D'Art Albert Skira in the 1950s and 1960s, many of which have been translated into English, Italian, German, and Spanish and published internationally. Jacques Lassaigne's books and museum exhibitions, with accompanying catalogues and essays, constitute a significant contribution to art history and have consistently been reference and cited by innumerable subsequent researchers and historians for decades.
The English Club of Pau is a private social club in Pau, France. It owns and conserves a decorative arts and book collection listed as a French monument historique (ISMH). The English Club’s mission includes an annual open house during the Journées de Patrimoine and for reserved non-profit group tours, conferences, member publications and club member activities, all concentrated on the education and promotion of Pau’s former Anglo-American Colony. It is housed at the Villa Lawrance by the City of Pau.
Erwin Stolz was a Czech painter and draughtsman.
Frédéric Dubois was a French miniature painter and painter.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help){{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)