An unknown woman

I saw this striking picture for the first time in the recent BBC-TV programme 'The Victorians', fronted by Jeremy Paxman. But nothing was said to identify the painting; and even more frustratingly it did not appear in the 'book of the series'. Other enquiries led to nothing. Finding out on the internet what a particular image is remains hard, despite the introduction of Google's 'similar pictures' feature this week: you still need to know what the first image is to find it. But after much searching on the internet, I finally tracked it down in the Bridgeman Art Library, a very useful resource which can be found at http://www.bridgemanart.com/ . It is a portrait of the French singer Rose Caron, by a rather obscure artist called Auguste Toulmouche, active in France until his death in 1890. He was perhaps not in the first rank of artists; the rendering of the dress, for instance, is lifeless compared with the paintings being done by John Singer Sargent at this period. Ms Caron herself had an interesting career - unhappily married young and then divorced in 1886, she appeared in many new French operas, and became the intimate friend of the politician Georges Clemenceau. She was the mistress of the Foreign Minister Delcasse and had two children, both predeceasing her. She is buried in the small town of Monnerville, south of Paris. Researching this also led me to the wonderful websites of Alice Guy Jr, whose site on Rose Caron is at http://rose-caron.blogspot.com/ . There are links on that to her many other sites. The site includes another picture of Rose Caron:

in one of her roles. Not many people know about Rose Caron today, but she is not forgotten.