Box 1

COLLECTION DESCRIPTION From the Collection: Postcards portraying cross-dressing and female and male impersonators in France, Sweden, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Romania. Postcards include photographic and photomechanical prints, some hand-colored. All are printed between circa 1900 and 1930 and depict performers on amateur, café-concert, music-hall, and legitimate stages at the high-point of cross-dressing as a form of entertainment. Many depict gallant visual narratives of...

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Montage of three portraits of Vernassier showing his transformation from middle-aged man to grand dame.

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Vernassier was a popular music-hall performer.

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Louis Vernassier had a long and prolific career as a music-hall female impersonator whose act involved playing numerous musical instruments (this postcard lists 12 different ones, plus "tous les instruments excentriques").

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Inscription: Addressed to Mlle Marguerite Beaujean. Black-and-white reproduction of a watercolor illustration signed Espinasse. Sarah Bernhardt appearing in one of her most celebrated trouser roles as the son of Napoleon in La Aiglon (1900) by playwright Edmond Rostand, who wrote the role for her.

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Comic actor and singer Jeanne Bloch dressed as a portly, bearded man wearing a top hat and carrying a cane. Inscription at upper left on the recto indicates that Bloch was appearing at La Scala, a music hall in Paris open from 1874 to 1936.

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Stage and silent-film actor Clara Faurens appearing at the Theatre de la'Odeon (Paris) in the role of Pierrot, the commedia della arte stock figure of the lovesick clown. Inscribed verso: Brief note to Jeanne Gorno signed E. Hacquet.

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Suzanne and Blanche Mante, lead dancers for the Opera de Paris, enact a variation of an 18th-century galant scene.

Scope and Contents Set of two postcards portraying the De Tender sisters, both music-hall performers. Alice de Tender appeared at the Folies-Bergere, the Eldorado and the Moulin Rouge; she also appeared in silent films, including the feature La Veuve Joyeuse (1913) and a number of shorts. "La Matchiche"was a popular song debuted in a music-hall show in 1902; the painter Kees van Dongen borrowed the title for a 1904 oil representing dancers at the bal populaire Le Moulin de la Galette (collection of the Musee...

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Series of three postcards.