Item 16: "Study of a Summer Girl" (1901)

For late-nineteenth-century actresses, attaining celebrity status required working either on New York’s Broadway or in London’s West End. Florence Kahn, a Jewish girl from Memphis, Tennessee, went to both cities but achieved only minor success onstage despite years of striving. Three years before meeting Beerbohm in 1904, at what should have been the height of her career, she was still merely an anonymous model—a “Summer Girl”—in a 1901 glamour shot taken by the New York-based portrait photographer Zaida Ben-Yusuf. Then in 1910, she accepted Max Beerbohm’s marriage proposal and moneysaving plan to move to a small town in Italy for a life of relative social seclusion.