We are honored to be your one-stop, 5-star source for vintage pin up, pulp magazines, original illustration art, decorative collectibles and ephemera with a wide and always changed assortment of antique and vintage items from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Mid-Century Modern eras. All items are 100% guaranteed to be original, vintage, and as described. All sell no reserve! This stunning, oversized, hand developed photograph is by the trailblazing female M-G-M photographer Ruth Harriet Louise and is a provocative and stunningly gorgeous 1929 portrait of Damita after she was lured to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn. Her long tousled, unkempt hair, undone clothes, and wildly sultry pout give this photograph a passionately erotic allure. Truly this is a remarkable photograph and beautiful historical Hollywood artifact with great provenance that we are thrilled to be offering. Paper caption press snipe on verso reads: A BEAUTIFUL HOYDEN… Is Lily Damita, in some of her lighter moments as’La Perricholi’ in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s filmization of Thornton Wilder’s Peruvian novel’The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Measures 10″ x 13″ with margins on a glossy, double weight paper stock. Photographer’s blind stamp in bottom, right. Photographer’s ink stamp on verso. CONDITION: Fine+ condition with visible corner/edge wear that would not be visible once the photograph were matted and framed. Please use the included images as a conditional guide. Lili Damita (July 10, 1904 March 21, 1994) was a French actress who appeared in 33 movies between 1922 and 1937. Born Liliane Marie-Madeleine Carré in Blaye, France, she was educated in convents and ballet schools in several European countries, including France, Spain andPortugal. At 14, she was enrolled as a dancer at the Opera de Paris. By the age of 16, she was performing in popular music halls, eventually appearing in the Revue at the Casino de Paris. She also worked as a photographic model. Offered a role in film as a prize for winning a magazine beauty competition in 1921, she appeared in several silent films before being offered her first leading role in Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925) by Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz. She was an instant success, and Curtiz directed her in two more films: Fiaker Nr 13 (1926) and Der Goldene Schmetterling (1926). Damita continued appearing in German productions directed by Robert Wiene (Die Grosse Abenteuerin; 1927), G. Pabst (Man Spielt nicht mit der Liebe; 1926), and British director Graham Cutts (The Queen Was in the Parlour; 1927). In 1928, at the invitation of Samuel Goldwyn she went to Hollywood, making her American debut in a film titled The Rescue. Leased out to various studios, she appeared with stars such as Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant, and James Cagney. Her films included the box office successes The Cock-Eyed World(1929), the semi-silent The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), and This Is the Night (1932). In 1935, she married a virtual unknown who would become Hollywood’s biggest box office attraction, Errol Flynn, with whom she had a son, Sean Flynn (born 1941). Following the marriage, she retired from the screen. The couple divorced in 1942. Barbara Hershey portrayed her in the TV film My Wicked, Wicked Ways [1985] based on Errol Flynn’s autobiography. While living in Palm Beach, Florida, Damita married Allen Loomis, a retired Fort Dodge, Iowa dairy owner, and spent part of each year living there. During the Cambodian Civil War (Khmer Rouge Reign), her son Sean Flynn was working as a freelance photo journalist under contract to Time magazine when he and fellow journalist Dana Stone went missing on the road south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 6, 1970. DNA testing was conducted on remains found in Cambodia and turned over to the U. Embassy in March 2010. However, the results, released June 30, 2010 by JPAC, showed the remains were not those of Sean Flynn. Lili Damita died of Alzheimer’s disease on March 21, 1994, in Palm Beach, Florida, aged 89. She was interred in the Oakland Cemetery in Fort Dodge, Iowa, her second husband’s hometown. Biography From: Wikipedia Born Ruth Goldstein on January 13, 1903 in New York City. She was raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her father was a rabbi. In the summer of 1925, at the young age of 22 years old, she was hired by Metro Goldwyn Mayer as chief portrait photographer–the only woman doing so for the Hollywood studios at the time. From 1925 to 1930, she many hopefuls, starlets and major performers including Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Norma Shearer, Lili Damita, Buster Keaton, Myrna Loy, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Bessie Love, Lillian Gish, and Anna Sten. About Bull’s relationship with Louise from’Glamour of the Gods’ book: After Clarence Sinclair Bull was doing the most time-consuming gallery sessions, Ruth Harriet Louise was hired in 1925 as MGM’s portrait photographer. Still, Louise and Bull seem not to have got along, and he never mentioned her in interviews or his writings after she left MGM in 1929. Louise’s work, however, did influence Bull, who started to emulate her soft-focus pictorialism in 1927. Perhaps challenged by Louise’s talent and craft, by the end of the 1920s Bull had matured as a photographer. Though sometimes outshone by Louise in the late 1920s, and later by his colleague Hurrell in the early 1930s, at his best Bull was equal to both. Bud Graybill, who shot stills under Bull’s supervision for over twenty years starting in the mid-1930s, described him in a letter to Kobal (dated 29 January 1978) as’the quintessence of photographers. His negatives were near perfect in exposure… The imaginative work he did over a period of roughly 40 years was never topped. After Louise left MGM at the end of 1929, Bull distinguished himself as Garbo’s principal photographer, which must have made him the envy of his peers regardless of studio. She decided to retire from her career in 1930 to marry director Leigh Jason. Sadly, after ten years of martial bliss, she died on October 12, 1940 from complications from childbirth in Los Angeles, California. From the book’Glamour of the Gods’, it further adds to Louise’s biography: Louise’s brief reign as portrait studio chief lasted from mid-1925 to the end of 1929. To Louise goes the credit of being the photographer who fashioned Garbo’s face into the timeless visage still immediately recognizable worldwide. Just twenty-two when she joined MGM in summer of 1925, Louise lost her job to George Hurrell four years later. Throughout the 1930s she occasionally took private commissions photographing stars such as Anna Stern (in 1932) and Myrna Loy (in 1935). Louise died in childbirth in 1940, utterly forgotten by an industry she had worked assiduously to document. John Kobal avidly collected her original prints and acquired hundreds of her negatives. Of all the photographer’s he introduced in his book in “The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers, ” Louise’s career was most in need of rehabilitation. Even her gender, which set her apart from all her contemporaries, had been insufficient reason to keep her memory alive. Louise was among the first Hollywood photographers to break away from the old-fashioned convention of staid portrait shots and introduce the nuance of her sitter’s personality. When she photographed stars in costume she attempted to find something of the character being portrayed. Kobal noted that she was’in the vanguard of the photographers who would revolutionize Hollywood portrait photography. Hollywood portraiture before Louise documented strong personas: Swanson’s glamour, Chaplin’s tramp, Pickford’s waif. Louise took the screen personas of her favorite sitters, such as Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford, and in her photographs humanized them while never letting their star luster diminish. There is about Louise’s work,’ wrote Kobal in 1980,’delicacy, a shy, appealing privacy, that established an immediate bond with the viewer, Her subjects liked her and trusted her, including the elusive Garbo. The two young women worked together, starting with Garbo’s first portrait session in Hollywood, two months before she appeared on the set, through her ascent as MGM’s greatest female draw. Louise’s sensitive touch, along with the work of MGM’s brilliant cinematographers combined to create the face that enthralled moviegoers. There has been discussion in Hollywood literature as to how much Louise relied on full-length shots, which she would then crop to make half-length or close-ups portraits. Kobal may have started this notion when he wrote about Louise. Although cropping was and remains a useful tool in most photographers’ practice, in fact Louise took as many close-ups and (especially) medium shots as any of her contemporaries. Kobal identified correctly that many of Louise’s famous compositions were derived from cropped negatives that found their final form in the darkroom. But Louise’s surviving negatives (numbering in the thousands)demonstrate without question that Louise shot regularly in close-up and medium shots and these also formed the basis for many of her most important photographs. A couple of her relatives were also notables in Hollywood: her brother was director Mike Sandrich (he directed many Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals) and her cousin was silent film actress, Carmel Myers. She took over 100,000 photographs during her stint at MGM and now she is considered on equal turf with other great photographers such as George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull among others. Biography From: VintageMovieStarPhotos (dot) BlogSpot (dot) com. The item “Provocative Jazz Age Beauty Lili Damita Oversized 1929 Vintage Photograph Superb” is in sale since Monday, April 25, 2016. This item is in the category “Entertainment Memorabilia\Movie Memorabilia\Photographs\Pre-1940\Black & White”. The seller is “grapefruitmoongallery” and is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This item can be shipped worldwide.

• Size: 10″ x 13″
• Country/Region of Manufacture: United States