Date: Sept. 1903 — Caption reads copyright 1901 by the A. S. Campbell Art Company Source: Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 18, Number 6 Author: Rudolf Eickemeyer, photographer Florence Evelyn Nesbit (December 25, 1884 – January 17, 1967), known professionally as Evelyn Nesbit, was an American chorus girl, an artists' model, and an actress. In the early part of the 20th century, the figure and face of Evelyn Nesbit were everywhere, appearing in mass circulation newspaper and magazine advertisements, on souvenir items and calendars, making her a cultural celebrity. Her career began in her early teens in Philadelphia and continued in New York, where she posed for a cadre of respected artists of the era, James Carroll Beckwith, Frederick S. Church, and notably Charles Dana Gibson, who idealized her as a "Gibson Girl". She had the distinction of being an early "live model", in an era when fashion photography as an advertising medium was just beginning its ascendancy. Nesbit claimed that as a stage performer, and while still a 14-year-old, she attracted the attention of the then 47-year-old architect and New York socialite Stanford White, who first gained the family's trust then sexually assaulted Evelyn while she was unconscious. Nesbit achieved world-wide notoriety when her husband, multi-millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, shot and murdered Stanford White on the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 25, 1906, leading to what the press would call "The Trial of the Century". The Wikipedia article goes on to describe a terribly tragic life. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Nesbit] Evelyn Nesbit was discovered at 14, becoming an artist’s model but soon turned into an overnight sensation in New York, posing for the illustrated covers of such publications as Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar as well as calendars and advertising. She also ventured in the emerging fashion photography, generating massive sales and emphasizing her popularity with portraits in exotic and graceful costumes that nonetheless delivered a feel of suggestiveness. The model to George Grey Barnard’s Innocence sculpture and to Charles Dana Gibson’s Women: the Eternal Question, Evelyn Nesbit also made it as a chorus girl on Broadway stages and in films. In 1906, her husband Harry Thaw murdered her ex-lover Stanford White - a sensational case that attracted all eyes on the icon but also ruined her reputation. Evelyn Nesbit had incarnated America’s paradoxes, being a product of its Victorian past but taking on a modern approach to life. She had been elevated as a sex symbol and fell victim to the very culture that had created and consumed her: remaining the eternal scandalous ‘girl in the red velvet swing’ - a reference to a swing Stanford White had installed in his apartment. Nonetheless, Evelyn Nesbit was revived in 1955 by Joan Collins and inspired a character in the television series, Boardwalk Empire, because although scandals can bring you down, they also nourish greedy voyeuristic needs. [https://theredlist.com/wiki-2-24-525-770-925-view-1900s-1-profile-evelyn-nesbit.html]