Album photographique d'Anna Gould, héritière américaine de la Belle-Epoque

The Photo Album of a Belle époque American Heiress, Anna Gould
An album consisting of 46 original unpublished photographs, 30 in postcard format (10.7 x 16.5 cm), and the other 16 in visiting card format (6.2 x 10.4 cm). All pasted down on card from various photographic studios in America, principally New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Brown grained leather, a little rubbed, spine with four imitation raised bands continued on covers as a black fillet, endpapers and pastedowns with gold motifs inside a gold dentelle frame, a.e.g, brass clasps. The photographs are mounted and inserted onto card pages, the largest ones singly, the smaller ones four to a page. A few of the mounts have tears repaired with tape.

A unique photographic album belonging to the fabulously wealthy American heiress Anna Gould, sadly noted for her unattractive appearance, the only witness to the years of her youth before her noted arrival- remarked upon especially by the young Marcel Proust – in the Paris of the Belle époque.

The second daughter of railway magnate and self-made man Jay Gould (1836-1892), Anna Gould (1875-1961) had a gilded youth, surrounded by numerous friends in New York and Boston whose portraits are immortalized in this album: Irene Goodwill, Elizabeth Falconer, Lucie Elizabeth Taylor Hagenbuch, Beatrice R Kilmer, Olivia Clifford Harriman, and others. When her illustrious father fell ill, she was sent to a boarding school for wealthy girls in Philadelphia. At the prestigious Ogontz School for Young Ladies, she met a number of other friends whose photographs – signed on the back by their subjects – appear in this album: Mathi Hutchinson, Frances E. Thompson, etc. Some of the photographs from this time bear the manuscript note “Ogontz” on the verso and are dated between 1890 and 1893. Having lost her mother and oppressed by the shackles of her family, the young Anna seems to have been surrounded in this school by a genuine sense of sisterhood. This impression is strengthened by the absence, in this album, of family photographs, except for two. One is of one of her elder brother – Edwin Gould (1866-1933) – in uniform. In 1923, he established the Edwin Gould Foundation, for disadvantaged children.

At the time of his death in 1892, Jay Gould – in possession of one of the biggest fortunes in America – left his children a considerable inheritance. The young Anna, then aged 18 and engaged to the actor Harry Woodruff, was forced, at the behest of her brother George, to give up this match. Their father had, as a condition of the significant inheritance he left them, laid down that if any of his descendants married against the wishes of their brothers and sisters, they would be forced to give them one half of their portion of his estate. On the 4 March 1895, Anna Gould thus married Count Boniface de Castellane, known as Boni, with great pomp in New York. She had met the Count in the spring of 1894 at the house of Fanny Read, a friend of the Gould family. The newspapers praised the good looks of the bridegroom but remained silent on the subject of Anna.
The harshness of the terms her contemporaries used to describe her – Robert de Montesquiou said that “she [had] the eyes of a monkey, a monkey someone had caught and captured” – contrast with the unpublished photographs in this album, of a young woman posing proudly, sometimes surrounded by her friends.

Setting aside these happy images of her past, she was painted for posterity in the unattractive physical attitude that has today become one of her dominant biographical traits: “Small, badly put together, with short legs, a rounded back, her head squished down between her shoulders. But the most upsetting thing is her face: what would her wan complexion matter, or her wavy black hair, her prominent nose, her thin lips, her prominent chin or her black eyes with the heavy lids surmounted by ebony eyelashes, if only her features were illuminated by even the shadow of the slightest smile, the tiniest flame of life, of joy, of curiosity” (Laure Hillerin, Pour le plaisir et pour le pire. La vie tumultueuse d'Anna Gould et Boni de Castellane, Flammarion, 2019).
Dreaming of a life in Paris that would liberate her from the scrutiny of her family, Anna left New York for France with her husband, impatient to be introduced to the aristocracy of Paris. This interest-based marriage was never happy and Boni, a dandy, quickly spent his wife's fortune, at the same time putting her down, saying she was “attractive, if you look at her dowry.”
Weary of the infidelities and excesses of Boni, who gave extravagant parties for le Tout-Paris in their famous Villa Rose, Anna got a divorce in 1906 and remarried two years later to Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord (1859-1937), a cousin of her first husband. This second marriage did not escape the attention of Proust – who had meanwhile become a friend of Boni de Castellane's – who said, in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn: “But I believe that for him Gould is above all Gold” (3 janvier 1908). This marriage, no happier than the first, was to last more than 30 years.

Overwhelmed by trials and misfortunes – the suicide of one of her sons and the death of Hélie in 1937 – Anna returned to live in the US at the dawn of World War II. In deference to her daughter, she did not return to Paris until May 1961, only to die there a few months later.