Misia Sert

Misia Sert ( born March 30, 1872 in Saint Petersburg, † October 15th 1950 in Paris) was during the first half of the 20th century, the muse, friend and supporter of numerous well-known artists in Paris.

Life

She was born under the name of Maria Sophie Godebska in St. Petersburg. Her father was a Polish sculptor Cyprian Godebski, her mother Sofia was the daughter of the Belgian cellist Adrien- François Servais. The mother died at birth, she spent her childhood with her grandmother at first, Sophie, born Féguine, near Brussels. Even here she learned as a child and received many artists know, musically very gifted piano lessons.

With her ​​father and his new wife, Matylda, née de la Rose Frenaye, they eventually came to Paris and was housed for several years in the convent of the Sacré -Coeur, from whose narrowness she fled to London at age 14. A short time later, she returned to Paris and married, 15 years old, Tadeusz Natanson.

Now she found what she had learned at her grandmother: an open house for artists. Her circle of friends included, among others, the painter Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec, Pierre- Auguste Renoir and Pierre Bonnard, and later Pablo Picasso. She made acquaintance with the writers Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, André Gide and Jean Cocteau, with the singer Enrico Caruso, with the musicians Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky. There were other friendships with artists from the world of theater, ballet and fashion, such as with Coco Chanel.

In 1905 she married a second time, and indeed the millionaire Alfred Edwards. Your fulfillment Misia Sert was from 1908 and from 1920 as a mistress in her third marriage with Josep Maria Sert, a leading painter of the Spanish art scene, who had married in 1927, with their consent, the Georgian Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani. After his death in 1945, she withdrew more and more from social life back and died on 15 October 1950 in Paris.

She was immortalized in novels of Proust and Cocteau, on a poster by Toulouse- Lautrec for the magazine La Revue blanche and on some oil paintings by Renoir, Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton.