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A Popular Idol

Posted March 26th, 2009 by Paula Baxter, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Art & Architecture

Count D’Orsay. Digital ID: 1517977. New York Public Library In France, a new dandy supplanted previous notions of this masculine mode. Count Alfred d’Orsay was a sensation in London and Paris of the 1820s and 30s. His great physical beauty, dandified dress, and elegant manners had men and women stopping in the streets to stare after him. His private life—he came from an impoverished branch of French aristocracy—proved scandalous when he was “adopted” by a wealthy English Earl and his wife, and no one was exactly sure whose boyfriend he was.

[Boys, France, 1830s.] Digital ID: 802127. New York Public Library The Count’s dandyism was less restrained than Brummell’s. He favored velvets and coats cut with a dash. Like many members of the cult of celebrity, however, his popularity faded before he was ready to admit this was so. While d’Orsay epitomizes the dandy as popular idol, his fall shows just how ambivalent men felt about dandyism. Young boys across France emulated his modishness, but by the end of the 1830s masculine fashion had moved on.

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I enjoyed the cigarette card

On April 13th, 2009 A lioness (not verified) says:

I enjoyed the cigarette card post on the Count d'Orsay!

BTW, your entry talks about d'Orsay as a fashion leader in France, when, in actuality, most of his famous trend-setting took place in England. (It *is* true that he influenced men's dress on both sides of the Channel, his sister Ida being the French Duchess de Gramont and a Society beauty in her own right.)

If one looks at portraits of the Count in the late 1830s (the 1839 portrait in the British National Portrait Gallery by Hayter) and the one by Wood, c. 1840, you can see that his very dark dress of browns and blacks (described by Jane Carlyle in 1845) is very much in the sober mode and no longer of the "butterfly" colours of his younger years. You can also see the Count's receding hairline in the Wood portrait, showing that, at least, the great dandy's vanity could accept a little reality in his depiction as he approaches middle age.

P.S. The speculation--and speculation it remains--of the Count being the lover of both Lord and Lady Blessington was first proposed in a biography in the 1930s (Michael Sadleir) and it keeps popping up from time to time. The late historian Johanna Richardson doubted (in 1983) that Lady Blessington was ever Count d'Orsay's mistress.

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