John Graham (1881-1961)

In this portrait, the sitter is depicted in the pose of Mona Lisa; this pose had also been copied by Raphael in his portrait of Maddelena Doni. Raphael and Leonardo were two of Graham's favorite artists, and the similarity cannot be coincidental. Indeed, the portrait of Doni is in the Palazzo Pitti, and on at least one other occasion, Graham used a female portrait by Raphael at the Pitti as a source of inspiration for his work.

The present picture, like so many of Graham's female portraits from the 1940s and 1950s, seems to have been inspired by his relationship with Marianne Strate. But in no sense is the picture a portrait of her; rather it seems to depict an imaginary, even mythic, female. It is worth noting that Mona Lisa, too, was thought of as a kind of timeless and semi-divine figure. In one of the most famous passages of nineteenth-century art criticism, Walter Pater wrote about Mona Lisa:

All the thoughts and experience of the world have been etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fall day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids. (W. Pater, The Renaissance, London, 1873)

It is this kind of sublime ideality to which Graham aspired.

Leonardo, as artist and magus, was a model for Graham, who once wrote, "There were only six universal men: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo, Pico della Mirandola, H.P. Blavatska and I" (quoted in E. Green, op. cit., p. 43).