PRINCE PIERRE TROUBETZKOY (1864-1936)
                                                                                                                                    Portrait of a Gentleman, detail
                                                                                                                                    Signed "PTroubetzkoy" lower right
                                                                                                                                    oil on canvas

My photographer friend, stopping by the other weekend and seeing Mrs. Astor Regrets on my nightstand, returned that afternoon with Archie and Amelie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age by Donna M. Lucey (New York: Three Rivers, 2006) which I have enjoyed thoroughly, not so much for its account of the awful way the Astors treat each other (which they do) but for the story of Amelie's second husband, the tall "brawny" athletic-looking painter Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy.  I admit, I'm often drawn to secondary characters; alas, it's even been my fate to fall for the younger brother, not his elder sibling who inherits the title and the house.  And I'm not good at cards either.  Unlucky in love and games of chance too.  It's tough.

Poor Archie (poor but immensely rich - his mother was an Astor) fell in love with the seductively beautiful Southern belle novelist Amelie Rives who subsequently drove him mad, or so his Astor relatives decided when they had Archie committed to Bloomingdale Asylum.  He eventually escaped but by 1904 was writing friends to borrow money (Lucey, p. 256).

Archie never got over Amelie, but months after divorcing him in 1895, Amelie had moved on and married Prince Pierre, although they would live for most of their marriage separately, with Pierre keeping studios in New York or in Washington while Amelie stayed at Castle Hill, her family home near Charlottesville, Virginia.  High society rushed to be painted by the handsome thirty-two year old prince whose "slightly accented English and touch of a lisp lent him an intriguing aura." (Lucey p. 253).  Over six feet tall with a forty-eight inch chest, the artist was elsewhere described as a "magnificent specimen of manhood." 

What's interesting to me is that, while my photographer neighbor had his photo shoot here the other day, hanging in the background was a picture of an unknown gentleman I'd found in an estate auction over twenty-five years ago, while I was a young man myself living the bohemian life in New York.  SIgned "PTroubetzkoy" which meant nothing to me at the time.

Now thanks to a friend and a little help from Google I know a bit more, although I still can't tell you who the sitter is, and I can't even take a proper photograph without picking up the glare from the glaze, but it does feel good knowing that whoever he was he was painted by a handsome prince with a breathtaking physique and a slight lisp, married but living separately from a beautiful and rich Southern belle, and that Prince Troubetzkoy also painted a portrait of Lady Serena Lumley as a child in 1906 (Christie's South Kensington, sale of the Principal Contents of St. Nicholas, Richmond, North Yorkshire, 16 May 2001, sold by order of the Executors of the Late Lady Serena James) and a lovely three quarter length portrait of Evangeline Brewster Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, (sold Sotheby's New Bond Street, November 2008, provenance of the sitter, Princess Evangeline Xalessky, New Milford Connecticut), not to mention a number of other famous sitters, like the prime minister William Gladstone. 

Don't get me wrong, though.  Without a good provenance or the sitter's identity, as they say in the auction world it's "Decorative Value Only,"  or "NSV" for short ("No Sale Value"), so my heirs can relax.  However, my sister has said she hopes I'm keeping my blog posts in a safe place -- she mistrusts the Internet, and so I will do that, I guess.  I'll put all this information in one place so that the picture that's hung silently watching in the background of so many of her brother's escapades and adventures will be ready at hand for whomever it ends up being given to, once I've shuffled off.  

And If I told you the number of times I'd finish off a busy evening with a nightcap (or two) while I regaled this unknown fellow with an account of my exploits, with a meandering discourse on the meaning of life and what I intended to do one day, once this or that or the other had been properly dealt with...  Ah youth.  What a patient, attentive listener my anonymous buddy was in those days, what a kind and unjudging and uncommunicative confessor, putting up with the tales of woe of another young man who, like Archie Armstrong Chanler, was headed for "a much needed rest" and who just like Archie, was prone to making bad choices in love, and was probably a little crazy too, at least according to his family.