Portrait photographique

Portrait of the “monstre sacré,” of whom the critic Sarcey could write (Charivari, December 6, 1896): “Once again, Sarah can say: ‘The play, that is me!’”

She sits here in the studio of the photographer Achille Mélandri: “his studio, near the place Bréda, became the meeting place of the artists and writers of the militant school, of all those who, in Murger’s phrase, were storming the future.” (Paul Vivien, L’Hydropathe).

The actress posed there on the famous chair on which she would later be photographed again, this time standing and wearing a diadem. Mélandri was also the one who immortalized her lying asleep in her coffin, in a staging of her own invention: another scandal for the woman nicknamed, quite fittingly, “la scandaleuse,” when not “la divine.”

Sarah Bernhardt was fifty years old when she gave this portrait of herself; an identical print, bearing only the actress’s signature, is held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.