Item 15: Florence Kahn (1912)

Beerbohm’s marriage to Florence Kahn (1876– 1951) at the late age of 38 was the culmination of years of flirtations with—and even engagements to—a series of stage performers, from the music hall headliner Cissie Loftus to London’s West End star Constance Collier. Each of these relationships featured Beerbohm’s romantic talk and swoony letter-writing, but his biographers have speculated that none of his relationships with women were sexual. Women’s beauty appealed powerfully to him, though in the same way as the faces of models in Pre-Raphaelite art. What attracted Beerbohm to Kahn was indeed her Pre-Raphaelite appearance, with the red-gold hair found in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings. Beerbohm drew her as sylphlike and androgynous, in multiple poses reminiscent of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s painting, The Golden Stairs (1880).