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Sunday, July 26, 2009
Interesting cover...
After finishing up The Taste of Sorrow, I pulled my old copy of Wuthering Heights off the shelf (it has my former name and homeroom penciled in on the inside cover) and noticed the heroine on the cover looked familiar. What do you think — Catherine Earnshaw as a more demure version of Madame X?
Nice catch! I can't believe that they just copied Sargent's Madame X.
ReplyDeleteWe had the same cover for our school copies of Wuthering Heights. I'm assuming they were different editions, since mine was used in Australia in the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteAnd now I know where part of the picture comes from!
My copy's a later printing of a 1959 Signet Classic edition, which says it was published in NY, Toronto, and London, so it may have been the same company. I may have gotten it through a school-sponsored reading program like RIF since I never did read it in school. This would have been late '70s-early '80s.
ReplyDeleteThat IS a good catch, pretty neat!
ReplyDeleteAnd this long before Photoshop made such "borrowing" so easy! But I love the idea of Catherine Earnshaw having a secret twin in Virginie Gautreau....
ReplyDeleteOh that is too weird. The Sargent painting is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in NYC and boy is it impressive to look at in person. It's so huge!
ReplyDeleteI'll have to make sure to see it next time I'm at the Met. I was there in May and didn't see it, but the museum's so huge -- after crossing Central Park to get there, we were tired of walking and didn't make it through the entire place!
ReplyDeleteSarah, don't feel guilty about not seeing all of the Met in a single day. I'm not sure it's humanly possible to see it all in a week.
ReplyDeleteThere was a very good popular-art history book (published a few years ago) by Deborah Davis about this portrait, the sitter, and the artist, as well as the outrage the picture itself caused at the time. The book was stuck with the cheesy title of "Strapless", which probably did it more harm than good, but the story behind "Mme. X" was fascinating.
After Mark and I got home and were watching The Thomas Crown Affair on TV (one of our favorite movies), we realized we'd missed seeing the Impressionists as well! Since BEA's in New York again next year, safe to say we'll be back.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing Strapless in stores right after I'd finished reading Gioia Diliberto's I Am Madame X, a novel about Virginie Gautreau, as the cover was so similar (fittingly so).