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Dimensions: 9 5/8 by 7 5/8 in. (24.4 by 19.3 cm.)

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Provenance: Joanna Steichen, the photographer's widow

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Acquired by the present collection from the above, 2002

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Literature: For another photograph from this sitting see:

Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography, (New York, 1963), pl. 28

Steichen the Photographer (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 27

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895-1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 79

Barbara Haskell, Edward Steichen (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art), p. 79

Peter Galassi, American Photography 1890-1965 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), p. 125

Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee, Vanity Fair: A Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s (New York, 1960), p. 151

Diana Edkins, Vanity Fair: Photographs of an Age, 1914-1936 (New York, 1982), p. 83

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Notes: The photograph offered here is one of a series of portraits of Swanson made by Steichen for Vanity Fair. The best-known image from this sitting was published in the February 1928 issue of the magazine with the caption 'Gloria Swanson: The star has made a film version of Miss Thompson, the Maugham story which is better known as Rain.' 'Rain,' concerning a prostitute and a reformer, was one of Maugham's most famous stories, and was made into a film three times: the first starred Swanson, the second, Joan Crawford, and the third, Rita Hayworth. As Diana Edkins points out in her notes for the published photograph, Swanson was, by the end of the 1920s, the highest-paid woman in the world. In addition to her persona as a femme fatale, she was also a businesswoman who produced her own films for more than a decade.

In his autobiography, A Life in Photography, Steichen gave a vivid description of the sitting:

'The day I made...[these pictures]...Gloria Swanson and I had had a long session, with many changes of costume and different lighting effects. At the end of the session, I took a piece of black lace veil and hung it in front of her face. She recognized the idea at once. Her eyes dilated, and her look was that of a leopardess lurking behind leafy shrubbery, watching her prey. You don't have to explain things to a dynamic and intelligent personality like Miss Swanson. Her mind works swiftly and intuitively' (A Life in Photography, Chapter 8, unpaginated).

Edward Steichen was one of the few photographers to have a made a seamless transition from the artistic realm of the Photo-Secession to the lucrative world of commercial photography. Like Swanson, he was at the top of his field, and as chief photographer for Condé Nast, continued the incisive, dramatic portraiture he had begun years earlier with such sitters as Eleanora Duse and J. Pierpont Morgan. Even those critical of his move to the world of commerce conceded that his celebrity portrait photography was superb. Of Steichen's portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair, Beaumont Newhall wrote, 'These photographs are brilliant and forceful; they form a pictorial biography of the men of letters, actors, artists, statesmen of the 1920's and 1930's, doing for that generation what Nadar did for the mid-nineteenth century intellectual world of Paris' (The History of Photography, 1964 edition, p. 190).