Lady Mary: Beauty and Brutality
Richardson’s 1726 portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her Turkish robes hides her smallpox scars but paints in slavery…
Read MoreThe Turkish Bath by Ingres
Ingres’s painting of luxuriant nudity began as an awareness of absence. As a young man, the painter read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s dream of unscarred skin…
Read MoreLady Mary in Pictures
Before her bout with smallpox Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a famously beautiful woman. She was painted many times, before and after…
Read MoreHow I Came to Write about Smallpox
I’m often asked how I came to write about smallpox. I found Lady Mary in a literary footnote fantasizing about Circassian slaves…
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About My Blog
Occasional musings about stories, history, art, ideas, and the adventures of a writer's life...
