A painter in the Impressionist style, as well as an engraver, sculptor, and writer, Louise Abbéma was one of the most successful women artists of her day. Her media were etching, pastel, and particularly watercolor; as a writer, she collaborated with the journals Gazette des Beaux-Arts and L'Art. She is best remembered for her portraits and genre scenes, and for her relationship with Sarah Bernhardt, but Abbéma also painted flowers again and again. They appear throughout her oeuvre--women hold them in bunches, they fill vases, and they are the subjects of her still-lifes.
Abbéma was born in Etampes, France, the great granddaughter of actress Mlle Contat and Comte Louis de Narbonne. Through her aristocratic family, she had an early introduction to the arts. Tellingly, however, in
A twentieth-century British editor who fostered the careers of a number of important gay writers, J. R. Ackerley also wrote a small but significant body of gay literature that includes memoirs and drama.
From 1935 until 1959, Joe Randolph Ackerley edited The Listener, BBC's weekly literature and arts journal, so skillfully and so eclectically, that he came to be recognized as "one of the most brilliant editors of his generation." Under his editorship, the journal counted not only E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read, and Clive Bell among its regular contributors, but also such new talents as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. Spender commented that Ackerley "cared immensely about what books were reviewed--and