Isabel Dutaud Nagle Lachaise

Isabel Dutaud Nagle Lachaise (1872–1957) was an American-born poet, and wife of sculptor Gaston Lachaise active in the early 20th century. Isabel Lachaise was his muse, model and the inspiration for many of his sculptures and drawings.

Early life and education

Isabel Dutaud Nagle Lachaise was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 8, 1872, to French-Canadian parents, Joseph Dutaud (also Duteau), a laborer born in 1830 in San Antoine, and Aurelia Gendron, born in 1835 in Lacadie, Canada. Whereas Isabel's older sister Adele was born in 1855 in Quebec, the family moved in 1860 to the United States, where Isabel was born. (Isabel's parents died a few months apart from each other in 1907.) Isabel and her sister were schooled in Paris. At the age of 20 Isabel married George B. Nagel (also Nagle), the older brother of her friend Elizabeth (“Daisy”) Nagel, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Revere, Massachusetts. He worked as a traveling salesman for an optical goods company. They had one son, Edward Nagle (1893–1963), and were divorced in 1916.

Later life and marriage

In about 1902 or 1903 while in Paris overseeing Edward's education, Isabel met the love of her life, a French art student, Gaston Lachaise (1882–1935).^[1] After she returned home, Lachaise followed her in 1906, then pursued his art career, saw with her frequently, and both became a naturalized American citizen and married her in 1917. Under the pseudonym Isabel Cyr, Isabel published a poem entitled "Invective" in the International A Review of Two Worlds in October 1913. Under the same pseudonym, Isabel exhibited two drawings in the Society of Independent Artists exhibition of 1917.

In 1922, five years after their marriage, Isabel and Lachaise purchased a summer home of their own in Georgetown, Maine. There, as well as in New York, Isabel, known as "Madame Lachaise," hosted "literary evenings," attended by friends and artists, including Marsden Hartley and Robert Laurent.

Both Isabel and Lachaise were dance enthusiasts, appreciating the work of artists Ruth St Denis–whom he sculpted–and Isadora Duncan, and later Anna Pavlova and Uday Shankar. In the early 1910s, Lachaise took a series of photographs of Isabel dancing nude in the woods and lying among the rocks along the Maine coast, and he made a couple of stunning gilded bronze casts of a fanciful dancing figure representing her performing a "Hindu dance".

After Lachaise's sudden death in October 1935, Isabel spent much of the rest of her life promoting and selling his art and attending to her son, who had become mentally unstable.

Foundation

In 1963, according to Isabel's will, Isabel's great nephew John B. Pierce, Jr. (1925–2006) established the Lachaise Foundation whose mission is to protect, promote and perpetuate the artistic legacy of Gaston Lachaise for the public benefit.^[2]

References

^ "Art: Radiating Sex & Soul". Time. January 17, 1964. Archived from the original on March 5, 2010.
^ "Lachaise Foundation". www.lachaisefoundation.org. Retrieved 2018-11-17.

Sources

Goodall, Donald B. (1969). Gaston Lachaise, Sculptor. Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. Massachusetts: Harvard University. OCLC 12793619.
Kramer, Hilton (1967). The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise. New York: The Eakins Press.
Budny, Virginia, "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation," The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35 (2003–2004), pp. 62–143. JSTOR 351057
Budny, Virginia. "Provocative Extremes: Gaston Lachaise's Women." Sculpture Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (n.s. 14, no. 2), Summer 2014, pp. 8-19. https://www.academia.edu/51362553/Provocative_Extremes_Gaston_Lachaises_Women. Retrieved 2024-05-02.

External links

The Lachaise Foundation official website
Isabel Dutaud Nagle Lachaise in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
Gaston Lachaise Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

[1] "Art: Radiating Sex & Soul". Time. January 17, 1964. Archived from the original on March 5, 2010.

[2] "Lachaise Foundation". www.lachaisefoundation.org. Retrieved 2018-11-17.

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