A rare large original November 1892 program for the great Polish-American actress Helena Modjeska in Henry VIII. She acted opposite Edwin Booth, Maurice Barrymore, and other greats of the 19th century stage. Eight pages. Dimensions thirteen and a half by ten inches. Light wear and edgewear otherwise fine. See Helena Modjeska's extraordinary biography below.
Shipping discounts for multiple purchases. Credit cards accepted with Paypal. Inquiries always welcome. Please visit my other eBay items for more early theatre and historical autographs, photographs and programs and great singer, actor, and actress cabinet photos and CDV's.
From Wikipedia:
Helena Modrzejewska (Polish pronunciation: [mɔdʐɛˈjɛfska]; born Jadwiga Benda, 12 October 1840 – 8 April 1909), known professionally as Helena Modjeska, was a renowned Polish actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles.
Helena Modjeska was born in Kraków, Poland, on 12 October 1840.[1][2] Her name was recorded at birth as Jadwiga Benda, but she was later baptized Helena Opid, being given her godfather's surname.[1]
The question of her origins is a complicated one. Modjeska's mother was Józefa (Misel) Benda, the widow of a prosperous Kraków merchant, Szymon Benda.[3] In her autobiography, Modjeska claimed that her father was a musician named Michael Opid.[4] While it is true that the Benda family did employ a music teacher named Michal Opid, who later stood as Helena's godfather, Opid was not the father of Józefa Benda's two youngest children.[3]
There is evidence to suggest that Helena and her older brother Adolf were the results of an affair between Józefa and Prince Władysław Sanguszko, a wealthy and influential Polish nobleman.[1][3] Helena also had a younger sister, Josephine, and several half-brothers from Józefa's first marriage. Helena and Josephine were primarily raised by their great-aunt Teresa.
Also glossed over in Modjeska's autobiography were the details concerning her first marriage, to her former guardian, Gustave Sinnmayer (known in Poland as Gustaw Zimajer). Gustave was an actor and the director of a second-rate provincial theater troupe.[5] The date of Modjeska's marriage to Gustave is uncertain. She discovered many years later that they had never been legally married, as he was still married to his first wife when they wed.[6] Together the couple had two children, a son Rudolf (later renamed Ralph Modjeski), and a daughter Marylka, who died in infancy.[7]
Gustaw Zimajer used the stage name "Gustaw Modrzejewski."[8] It was the feminine version of this name that Modjeska adopted when she made her stage debut in 1861 as Helena Modrzejewska.[9] Later, when acting abroad, she used a simplified version of her name ("Modjeska"), which was easier for English-speaking audiences to pronounce.[10]
In her early Polish acting career, Modrzejewska played at Bochnia, Nowy Sącz, Przemyśl, Rzeszów and Brzeżany. In 1862 she appeared for the first time in Lwów, playing in her first Romantic drama, as "Skierka" in Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna. From 1863 she appeared at Stanisławów and Czerniowce, in plays by Słowacki.
In 1865 Zimajer tried to get her a contract with Viennese theaters, but the plan came to naught due to her poor knowledge of the German language. Later that year Helena left Zimajer, taking their son Rudolf, and returning to Kraków.[11] Once there she accepted a four-year theatrical engagement. In 1868 she began appearing in Warsaw; during her eight years there, she consolidated her status as a theater star. Her half-brothers Józef and Feliks Benda were also well regarded actors in Poland.
An incident illustrates the circumstances under which Polish society then labored. At one of Modrzejewska's Warsaw performances, seventeen secondary-school pupils presented her with a bouquet of flowers tied with a ribbon in the red-and-white Polish national colors. The pupils were accused by the Russian Imperial authorities of conducting a patriotic demonstration. They were expelled from their school and banned from admission to any other school. One of the pupils, Ignacy Neufeld, subsequently shot himself; Modrzejewska attended his funeral.[12]
Helena Modjeska was born in Kraków, Poland, on 12 October 1840.[1][2] Her name was recorded at birth as Jadwiga Benda, but she was later baptized Helena Opid, being given her godfather's surname.[1]
The question of her origins is a complicated one. Modjeska's mother was Józefa (Misel) Benda, the widow of a prosperous Kraków merchant, Szymon Benda.[3] In her autobiography, Modjeska claimed that her father was a musician named Michael Opid.[4] While it is true that the Benda family did employ a music teacher named Michal Opid, who later stood as Helena's godfather, Opid was not the father of Józefa Benda's two youngest children.[3]
There is evidence to suggest that Helena and her older brother Adolf were the results of an affair between Józefa and Prince Władysław Sanguszko, a wealthy and influential Polish nobleman.[1][3] Helena also had a younger sister, Josephine, and several half-brothers from Józefa's first marriage. Helena and Josephine were primarily raised by their great-aunt Teresa.
Also glossed over in Modjeska's autobiography were the details concerning her first marriage, to her former guardian, Gustave Sinnmayer (known in Poland as Gustaw Zimajer). Gustave was an actor and the director of a second-rate provincial theater troupe.[5] The date of Modjeska's marriage to Gustave is uncertain. She discovered many years later that they had never been legally married, as he was still married to his first wife when they wed.[6] Together the couple had two children, a son Rudolf (later renamed Ralph Modjeski), and a daughter Marylka, who died in infancy.[7]
Gustaw Zimajer used the stage name "Gustaw Modrzejewski."[8] It was the feminine version of this name that Modjeska adopted when she made her stage debut in 1861 as Helena Modrzejewska.[9] Later, when acting abroad, she used a simplified version of her name ("Modjeska"), which was easier for English-speaking audiences to pronounce.[10]
In her early Polish acting career, Modrzejewska played at Bochnia, Nowy Sącz, Przemyśl, Rzeszów and Brzeżany. In 1862 she appeared for the first time in Lwów, playing in her first Romantic drama, as "Skierka" in Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna. From 1863 she appeared at Stanisławów and Czerniowce, in plays by Słowacki.
In 1865 Zimajer tried to get her a contract with Viennese theaters, but the plan came to naught due to her poor knowledge of the German language. Later that year Helena left Zimajer, taking their son Rudolf, and returning to Kraków.[11] Once there she accepted a four-year theatrical engagement. In 1868 she began appearing in Warsaw; during her eight years there, she consolidated her status as a theater star. Her half-brothers Józef and Feliks Benda were also well regarded actors in Poland.
An incident illustrates the circumstances under which Polish society then labored. At one of Modrzejewska's Warsaw performances, seventeen secondary-school pupils presented her with a bouquet of flowers tied with a ribbon in the red-and-white Polish national colors. The pupils were accused by the Russian Imperial authorities of conducting a patriotic demonstration. They were expelled from their school and banned from admission to any other school. One of the pupils, Ignacy Neufeld, subsequently shot himself; Modrzejewska attended his funeral.[12]
Chłapowski
On September 12, 1868, Modjeska married a Polish nobleman, Karol Bożenta Chłapowski.[1][13] Best known in America as "Count Bozenta," he was not a count. His family belonged to the untitled landed gentry (ziemiaństwo). In the United States he adopted the stage name "Count Bozenta" as a ploy to gain publicity. "Bozenta" was easier for an English-speaking audience to pronounce than "Chłapowski."[14]
At the time of their marriage, Chłapowski was employed as the editor of a liberal nationalist newspaper, Kraj (The Country), which was owned by Adam Sapieha and a Mr. Sammelson.[15] Modjeska wrote that their home "became the center of the artistic and literary world [of Kraków]." Poets, authors, politicians, artists, composers and other actors frequented Modjeska's salon.[15]
Emigration
In July 1876, after spending more than a decade as the reigning diva of the Polish national theater, for reasons both personal and political, Modjeska and her husband chose to emigrate to the United States.[16]
Once in America, Modjeska and her husband purchased a ranch near Anaheim, California. Julian Sypniewski, Łucjan Paprowski, and Henryk Sienkiewicz (winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905), were among the friends who had accompanied them to California. It was during this period that Sienkiewicz wrote his Charcoal Sketches (Szkice węglem). Originally the artists Stanisław Witkiewicz (father of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) and Adam Chmielowski (the future St. Albert) were also to have come with Modjeska's group, but they changed their plans.
Modjeska intended to abandon her career and envisioned herself living "a life of toil under the blue skies of California, among the hills, riding on horseback with a gun over my shoulder."[17] The reality proved less cinematic. None of the colonists knew the first thing about ranching or farming, and they could barely speak English.[18] The utopian experiment failed, the colonists went their separate ways, and Modjeska returned to the stage, reprising the Shakespearean roles that she had performed in Poland.[1][19] Perhaps the best account of daily life on the ranch is Theodore Payne's memoir, Life on the Modjeska Ranch in the Gay Nineties.
American career
On 20 August 1877 Modjeska debuted at the California Theatre in San Francisco in an English version of Ernest Legouvé's Adrienne Lecouvreur. She was seen by theatrical agent Harry J. Sargent who signed her for a tour on the east coast where she made her New York debut.[20][21] She then spent three years abroad (1879–82), mainly in London, attempting to improve her English, before returning to the stage in America.[22] In 1880, she visited the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall and on hearing that the parish church of Ruan Minor was in need of an organ she collaborated with Mr J Forbes-Robertson to put on a performance. Romeo and Juliet was performed on a temporary stage in the vicarage garden and watched by many local people. A resident of Penzance and soon to be, member of parliament for the St Ives constituency, Charles Campbell Ross played the part of Friar Laurence.[23]
Despite her accent and imperfect command of English, she achieved great success.[24] During her career, she played nine Shakespearean heroines, Marguerite Gautier in Camille, and Schiller's Maria Stuart. In 1883, the year she obtained American citizenship, she produced Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in Louisville, Kentucky, the first Ibsen play staged in the United States. In the 1880s and 1890s, she had a reputation as the leading female interpreter of Shakespeare on the American stage.[25]
In 1893 Modjeska was invited to speak to a women's conference at the Chicago World's Fair, and described the situation of Polish women in the Russian and Prussian-ruled parts of dismembered Poland. This led to a tsarist ban on her traveling in Russian territory.[26]
Modjeska suffered a stroke and partially was paralyzed in 1897, but recovered and soon returned to the stage, continuing to perform for several additional years.[27]
During her last stay in Poland, from 31 October 1902 to 28 April 1903, she appeared on the stage in Lwów, Poznań, and her native Kraków.
On 2 May 1905, she gave a jubilee performance in New York City. Then she toured for two years and ended her acting career, afterward only appearing sporadically in support of charitable causes.
Modjeska died at Newport Beach, California on 8 April 1909, aged 68, from Bright's disease.[28] Her remains were sent to Kraków to be buried in the family plot at the Rakowicki Cemetery.
Her autobiography Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska was published posthumously in 1910. A Polish translation ran the same year in the Kraków newspaper Czas (Time). The last Polish edition of the book appeared in 1957.
Modrzejewska's son, Rudolf Modrzejewski (Ralph Modjeski), was a civil engineer who gained fame as a designer of bridges.
William Ordway Partridge (April 11, 1861 – May 22, 1930) was an American sculptor, teacher and author. Among his best-known works are the Shakespeare Monument in Chicago, the equestrian statue of General Grant in Brooklyn, the Pietà at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, and the Pocahontas statue in Jamestown, Virginia.He was born in Paris, the younger son of George Sidney Partridge, Jr. and Helen Derby Catlin.[2] His father was the Paris representative for the New York City department store A.T. Stewart.[2] His mother was a cousin of the painter George Catlin.[2] His brother, Sidney Catlin Partridge, became a bishop of the Episcopal Church.[2]
Education
Partridge's family returned to New York City in 1868, and enrolled him in Cheshire Academy in Connecticut, followed by Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn.[2] He entered Columbia University in autumn 1881, but had to withdraw because of poor health.[1] He traveled to Europe in 1882,[2] and studied in Florence in the studio of Fortunato Galli,[1] where he became friends with the young Bernard Berenson.[3] Although he never formally enrolled at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, he audited classes there in autumn 1883, and studied briefly in the Paris studio of sculptor Antonin Mercié.[1] He returned to New York City in Spring 1884, and enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.[1] He appeared in a New York City production of David Copperfield,[2] and moved to Boston, where he supported himself by giving dramatic readings of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets.[1] He continued to sculpt, and received encouragement in this from his cousin, the sculptor John Rogers.[1]
In 1887, he married Augusta Merriam, a wealthy widow from Milton, Massachusetts, who was 15 years older.[1] They traveled to Europe that year, where he studied briefly in the Paris studio of painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. There he formed a close friendship with the neo-Gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram.[4] The couple moved to Rome, where he studied in the studio of Polish sculptor Pio Welonski.[1] They returned to Milton, Massachusetts in 1889, where he established his own studio.[1]
Sculptures
Partridge created two larger-than-life bronze statues of Alexander Hamilton, executed 15 years apart. The first was commissioned by the Hamilton Club of Brooklyn, installed in front of the club's headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, and dedicated on October 4, 1893.[5] For months before and after that dedication, Partridge's full-size plaster model of Hamilton was on exhibition at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.[5] The bronze statue stood in Brooklyn until 1936, when it was relocated to The Grange, Hamilton's country house in northern Manhattan.[5] The second Hamilton statue was commissioned by the Alumni Association of Columbia College [now University].[6] It was installed on campus in front of Hamilton Hall, and dedicated on May 27, 1908.[6] Both Hamilton statues stand in northern Manhattan, less than 1.5 mi (2.4 km) apart.
In 1890, Partridge won a national competition to create a statue of William Shakespeare for Chicago, Illinois.[1] He returned to Paris, where he set up a studio to work on the project.[1] He exhibited his full-size plaster model of Shakespeare at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago,[1] along with nine other works.[a] His bronze Shakespeare was installed in Lincoln Park the following spring, and dedicated on April 23, 1894, the Bard's 330th birthday.[8] Partridge wrote a sonnet for its dedication.[b]
The Equestrian Statue of General Ulysses S. Grant (1895-1896) was Partridge's most colossal work. Commissioned by the Union League Club of Brooklyn, it was installed in the center of Bedford Avenue, in front of the Club's headquarters, and dedicated on April 27, 1896.[10] The bronze horse and rider are approximately 12 ft (3.7 m) in height, and stand upon a granite pedestal approximately 15 ft (4.6 m) in height.[10]
A bequest from Englishman James Smithson (c.1765-1829) funded the creation of the Smithsonian Institution. Partridge was commissioned in 1896 to create a bronze memorial tablet commemorating that bequest for Smithson's gravesite in Genoa, Italy.[c] He based his relief portrait of Smithson on an 1817 relief portrait taken from life by Pierre-Joseph Tiolier (formerly attributed to Antonio Canova).[11] Partridge initially made two casts of the bronze tablet, one for the gravesite and the other for the nearby Protestant Chapel of the Holy Spirit.[12] He made a third bronze cast in 1898 for Smithson's alma mater, Pembrook College, University of Oxford. The gravesite's bronze tablet was stolen, and the chapel's bronze tablet was used to make a marble copy, that was installed at the gravesite in 1900.[12] Upon learning that the Genoa cemetery was to be destroyed for the expansion of an adjacent quarry, Alexander Graham Bell, a member of the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, proposed that Smithson's remains be brought to the United States.[13] In 1904, Smithson's remains and grave monument were relocated to the Crypt of the Smithsonian's Castle Building in Washington, D.C.[13] The 1900 marble copy of Partridge's tablet was part of that move.[12] The Chapel of the Holy Spirit was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. A marble copy of Partridge's tablet was carved in 1963, and stands today at the site of the chapel.[12]
Partridge's most famous religious work is the larger-than-life Pietà he created for St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan. The dead Christ is collapsed before a seated Mary, who cradles his face with her hand. Critic Robert Burns Wilson wrote a sensitive appreciation of the work.[d] Carved from white Carrara marble, Pietà is located in the Ambulatory behind the High Altar.[15]
The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities commissioned Partridge to create a larger-than-life bronze statue of Pocahontas, the Native American princess, for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia.[16] The exposition commemorated the 300th anniversary of the founding of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Pocahontus stood in front of the Administration Building for the exposition, and APVA later loaned the statue to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[16] APVA donated the statue to Jamestown, where it was re-dedicated on June 3, 1922.[16] Queen Elizabeth II visited Jamestown in 1957 for the 350th anniversary, and was charmed by the statue. Her reaction inspired a posthumous replica to be cast, which was presented by the Governor of Virginia as a gift to the British people. Dedicated on October 5, 1958, the bronze replica was installed outside St. George's, Gravesend, the English church in which Pocahontas had been interred in 1617.[17]
Teacher
Partridge lectured at the National Social Science Association, the Concord School of Philosophy, and the Brooklyn Institute.[2] From 1897 to 1903, he lectured at what is now George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.,[2] and went on to lecture at Stanford University in California.
He wrote a manual on sculpting: Technique of Sculpture (1895).
Partridge's studio was at 15 West 38th Street, Manhattan. Lee Lawrie was among his studio assistants.
Personal
Partridge and Augusta Merriam had a daughter together, also named Augusta (d. 1916). The couple divorced in 1904.[1]
On June 14, 1905 he married the poet Margaret Ridgely Schott.[18]: p. xxx They had a daughter together, also named Margaret.[e]
Partridge died in Manhattan, New York City, on May 22, 1930.