At the Renaissance: Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre
Medium
Lithograph on grayish-cream wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 34.6 × 23.5 cm (13 5/8 × 9 5/16 in.); Sheet: 38.2 × 28.3 cm (15 1/16 × 11 3/16 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
50993
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Known as “the Divine Sarah,” Sarah Bernhardt was probably the most famous actress in the world in the late 19th century. Her stage and film acting career spanned six decades and multiple continents. She also produced and directed plays, and from 1893 to 1899 she helmed the Paris Renaissance Theater, where she starred in a production of Jean Racine’s Phèdre, as pictured here. Her personal life was hardly less dramatic. One of her trademarks was sleeping (and reportedly, receiving suitors) in a sa...
About the Artist
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1864–1901
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa (1864-1901) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, printmaker, and illustrator whose innovative poster designs revolutionized graphic art and advertising in late 19th-century Paris. Born into an aristocratic family at Albi in southern France, Toulouse-Lautrec's privileged lineage traced back to the Counts of Toulouse and extended uninterrupted to th...