Baron Adolf (Gayne) de Meyer

(b Paris, 1868; d Hollywood, CA, 6 Jan 1949). French photographer. He was brought up in Paris and during the 1890s also became established in London as part of a circle of aristocrats and socialites. In 1899 he married Olga Caracciolo, whose godfather was the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). He soon became noted for his elegant photographic portraits, such as that of his wife Olga de Meyer (c. 1900; Rochester, NY, Int. Mus. Phot.). He had started exhibiting in London and Paris in 1894 and in 1898 was elected to the LINKED RING. This rapid success was due to the influence of Whistler and the Aesthetic Movement in his works: he used diffuse back-lighting and soft focus to give an air of unreality both to his portraits and to his still-lifes (e.g. Still-life with Flowers, Providence, RI Sch. Des., Mus. A.). In 1901 Meyer was made a baron by Frederick-Augustus III, King of Saxony, at the request of his cousin Edward VII.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Meyer, Adolphe Gayne (from 1916) de (Demeyer Watson; 1868-1946), portrait and fashion photographer of Franco-British origin. Little is known of his early life, although he was active in pictorialist amateur circles in the 1890s. In 1899 marriage to Olga Caracciolo, an illegitimate daughter of Edward VII, brought him the title of a (Saxon) baron and a position in London high society, where he blossomed as a celebrity portraitist. Abandoning his earlier, rather sombre style he used shimmering concoctions of soft focus, gauzy backgrounds, and backlighting to bathe his sitters in romantic glamour; the glowing halo of hair or feathers became a particular hallmark. Outstanding in this phase of his career were images such as Vaslav Nijinsky as Le Spectre de la rose (1911), and portraits like that of the Marchesa Casati. (He also experimented with the autochrome process.) His mentor since the 1890s had been Alfred Stieglitz, who published his pictures in Camera Work (1908 and 1912), and exhibited them at Gallery 291 (1907 and 1909).

De Meyer's high-pictorialist artifice, also brilliantly deployed in still lifes and flower studies, lent itself to fashion and advertising work, especially as contemporary advertising doctrine, with Hollywood on the horizon, was abandoning mere product illustration for associations of escapism and fantasy. By 1914 de Meyer was chief fashion photographer for Vogue; between 1922 and 1934 he held the same position at Harper's. By the 1930s, however, his style was passé, superseded by the harder-edged images of photographers like Steichen. De Meyer's last years, in southern California, were spent in poverty and obscurity.

— Zoë Whitley/Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• A Singular Elegance: The Photographs of Baron Adolphe de Meyer (1994)