Book Description

The portraits of Ganna Walska span most of the twentieth century. Recording her beauty were famous artists from the Belle Époque, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and the Modern eras-they also span several countries and continents. She lived fully in an interesting period of history and knew a great many people. As she writes in her autobiography Always Room at the Top, "My life has touched the lives of people in almost every country on the globe." The lives of people from Poland, Russia, France, England, and the United States were intertwined with hers. It was an age of portraits, when one had as many portraits painted as one could afford and fit into one's personal schedule. For decades Ganna Walska was busy with her opera career and if not for that we probably would have had a dozen more portraits, as artists loved to paint her dazzling beauty. Portrait painters were the darlings of society. Artists, such as the Italian painter Giovanni Boldini, were often begged to paint portraits. The opposite was true for Ganna-with many artists clamoring to portray her image. Those were the days when to be without several family portraits in the living room would have seemed disastrous.While Ganna may not have sat for as many portraits as other men and women of her time, the diversity of the artists and the range of her portraits are unusual and unique. From Poland to Russia to France, and from New York to California, she-in one way or another-knew a number of significant artists and celebrities that books are now written about. There is even a movie that includes her attorney Phelan Beale (Grey Gardens), not to mention biographies about several of her husbands. On the other hand, there are those who claim to have known Ganna Walska in their autobiographies simply for recognition's sake, but who never knew her at all.Ganna's sense of theater and drama for the instant impact-her philosophy of "the bigger the better"-translated into jewelry, portraits, and gardens. She lived a long and vivid life that surpassed all of her contemporaries.