Iris Tree
{{short description|English poet, actress, and art model (1897–1968)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=June 2019}}
{{Use British English|date=June 2019}}
Iris Tree (27 January 1897 – 13 April 1968) was an English poet, actress, and art model,{{cite web |author=Tate|url=http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bell-iris-tree-l02306 |title=Display caption: Iris Tree (1915) by Vanessa Bell |year=|accessdate=20 January 2016|work=Tate}} described as a bohemian, an eccentric, a wit, and an adventurer.
Biography
File:Amedeo Modigliani 060.jpg.]]
Iris Tree's parents were actors Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Helen Maud, Lady Tree. Her sisters were actresses Felicity and Viola Tree. An aunt was author Constance Beerbohm, and her uncles were explorer and author Julius Beerbohm and caricaturist and parodist Max Beerbohm.
Iris was sought after as an art model while a young woman, being painted by Augustus John, simultaneously by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry, and sculpted by Jacob Epstein, showing her bobbed hair (she was said to have cut off the rest and left it on a train) that, along with other behaviour, caused much scandal.{{cite web |author=Rachel Cooke |author-link=Rachel Cooke |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/21/the-rainbow-picnic-daphne-fielding-iris-tree |title=The Rainbow Picnic by Daphne Fielding - one bright young thing on another |date=21 September 2015|accessdate=20 January 2016|work=The Guardian}}{{cite web |author=|url=https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/iris-tree-18971968-41665 |title=Iris Tree by Duncan Grant|date=|accessdate=20 January 2016|work=Art UK}} The Epstein sculpture {{asof|2000|lc=y}} is displayed at the Tate Britain.{{cite web |author=Toby Treves|url=http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/epstein-portrait-of-iris-beerbohm-tree-t07051/text-summary|title=Portrait of Iris Beerbohm Tree (1915) by Sir Jacob Epstein |date=September 2000|accessdate=20 January 2016|work=Tate}} She was often photographed by Man Ray, was friends with Nancy Cunard for a time, and acted alongside Diana Cooper in the mid-1920s.{{cite journal |last1=Parker |first1=Sarah |title=Gaudy Havoc: Iris Tree's performative decadent modernism |journal=Feminist Modernist Studies |date=2022 |volume=5 |issue=2 |pages=181–209 |doi=10.1080/24692921.2022.2090193 |doi-access=free }}
Iris studied at the Slade School of Art. She contributed verse to the 1917 Sitwell anthology Wheels; her published collections were Poems (1919), The Traveller and other Poems (1927), and The Marsh Picnic (1966).
Iris married twice. Her first marriage was to Curtis Moffat, a New York artist; Ivan Moffat, the screenwriter, was their son.{{citation needed|date=June 2019}} She came to America to act in Karl Vollmöller's play The Miracle in 1925, and there met her second husband, the actor and ex-officer of the Austrian cavalry, Count Friedrich von Ledebur. The two roamed around California with their son before moving back to Europe, where they were involved in the Chekhov Theatre Studio. After their divorce, they both appeared in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick. She also appeared as a poet, essentially as herself, in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960).{{cite book |last1=Fielding |first1=Daphne |title=The Rainbow Picnic: A Portrait of Iris Tree |date=1974 |publisher=Methuen Publishing |location=London |isbn=0413285200}}
See also
{{portal|Poetry}}
References
{{Reflist}}
Further reading
- Daphne Fielding (1974). The Rainbow Picnic: A Portrait of Iris Tree, London: Eyre Methuen
- Sarah Parker (2022) "[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24692921.2022.2090193?src= Gaudy Havoc: Iris Tree’s performative decadent modernism]", Feminist Modernist Studies, 5:2, pp. 181-209
External links
{{commons category|Iris Tree}}
{{wikisource author}}
- {{IMDb name|id=0871678|name=Iris Tree}}
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20070608150921/http://www.bris.ac.uk/theatrecollection/beerbohm.html Tree archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection], University of Bristol
- {{Gutenberg author|id=43394|name=Iris Tree}}
- {{Librivox author |id=12789}}
- {{YouTube|AHT4x0SwcaA|Miss Iris Tree by Augustus John at Tate}}
- {{YouTube|D2kEZN0bVw4|The Bust of Iris Tree at Denison Museum}}
- {{YouTube|cXvEARQSprg|Historian John Julius Norwich - Iris Tree}}
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Category:English artists' models
Category:English people of Lithuanian descent
Category:English people of German descent