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Europe 1939 photograph album, 1939

 File — Box: OSx-2

Scope and Contents

The album title is inscribed on the front cover. Consists of black and white photographs with accompanying handwritten captions. Contains photographs of various people and places in Europe. Locations include: Rome, Venice, and Naples, Italy; Paris and Versailles, France; Monte Carlo; and Dubrovnik, Croatia. Venice photographs include depictions of Nazi propagandist and chancellor Joseph Goebbels participating in a gondola parade, labeled a "water fete" by Van Day Truex.

Appraiser Stuart Lutz observes, "Some of the notables who appear in the photographs include Mrs. Herbert Haseltine (wife of a prominent French sculptor), various European royals, Violet Trefusis (author, socialite and noted lesbian partner of Vita Sackville-West), Elsa Schiaparelli (Italian fashion designer), Buddy and Brooke Marshall (later to be the philanthropist Brooke Astor) and Joseph Kennedy (father of President John Kennedy) in December 1939...These albums are illustrative of European high society having a good time during their last war-free summer before Nazi Germany and Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939."

In 1939, Van Day Truex was the director of the Paris Ateliers of the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, soon to be re-named Parsons School of Design. The Ateliers closed in 1939 ahead of the outbreak of World War Two. The end of the 1939 scrapbook concludes in New York with a golf outing on Long Island with Eleanor Brown and then Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli disembarking from a small airplane by the water in December.

Dates

  • 1939