Interior of a flat Romaine formerly lived in during her stay in London in the 1920s when Una Troubridge posed for her in a costume of her own choosing leading to the supposition that Romaine had satirized her testy friend.
Romaine characteristically depicted what she saw and knew of Una who could turn on a dime if offended by someone. The duality of Una’s character was forcefully captured by Romaine in her 1924 portrait now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.
Try to imagine Romaine’s famous palette of grays in this appealing space and how she might have decorated it. Check out my book to get some idea of how bold and audacious yet subtle her color scheme would have been. Architectural Digest eat your heart out! I can imagine the charcoals, mauves grays and teal grays all subtly blended with touches of silver in the frames of her favorite foil leaf mercury. And huge charcoal drawings on blue or gray paper such as those that adorned her studio in the Carnegie Hall building in the 1930s.
Rediscovering Romaine Brooks 