Pietro Annigoni: Juanita Forbes, Muse

"Portrait of Juanita Forbes"
by Pietro Annigoni

"The Wildenstein show was not an unqualified success but it brought me several commissions, among which was one that provided me with a truly inspiring model. Baron Marocchetti, a friend of my first English pupil, invited me to a luncheon party after which he took all his guests along to Wildensteins. Among them was Princess Marie-Louise accompanied by Mrs. Faridah Forbes, a sculptress, who asked me there and then if I would paint her daughter, Juanita. 'I'm sure she would be an ideal subject for you,' she said.

How often, later on, I was to hear doting mothers say that of their daughters. BUt that first time it was true. Juanita was ideal. From our first meeting I was struck, not only by her beauty but also by her personality, in which there was a quality of romantic melancholy that so captivated me that I painted her not once, but four times. I worked on the portrait for her mother over a period of two years, striving all the time to capture what I have come to call the 'third person,' that elusive product of the fusion between the painter's spirit and the secret countenance of his sitter. During the course of painting a portrait the 'third person' may appear and disappear several times, but that it should be there, fixed, at the finish is a hope that is not always fulfilled. With Juanita Forbes it was.

It was that painting which was submitted to the Queen as a sample of my work when it was proposed that I should paint her portrait. But subsequently I painted Juanita Forbes three more times - as a Sybil, as a Vision, and as a Madonna, the Madonna in a fresco on the wall of a tabernacle at Grassina, near Florence."

To be continued) 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)