Adolf de Meyer

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Adolf de Meyer (1 September 1868 - 6 January 1949) was a Paris born photographer who became world famous for his elegant photographic portraits of famous people. Born to a German father and Scottish mother, he was educated in Dresden, and in 1893 joined the Royal Photographic Society, moving to London in 1895. He took the surname Meyer-Watson in 1896 but from 1899 called himself Baron Adolph de Meyer. In 1899, he married in Chelsea Olga Caracciolo, whose godfather was Edward VII. It was a marriage of convenience more than love, as de Meyer was homosexual, and his wife Olga was bisexual. ^[1]. From 1898 to 1913 he lived in fashionable Cadogan Gardens, London, and between 1903 and 1907 his work was published in Alfred Stieglitz's quarterly Camera Work, Cecil Beaton dubbing him "the Debussy of photography". In 1912 he photographed Nijinsky in Paris.

Although de Meyer used the title Baron and Whitaker's Peerage from 1898 to 1913 said that this had been granted by Frederick Augustus III of Saxony in 1897, no evidence has been found of any such creation by him or any other authority^[2].

In 1914, on the outbreak of World War I, he and Olga moved to New York City, where he became a photographer for Vogue, 1914-21, and Vanity Fair. In 1922, having adopted the forename Gayne to mark his spiritual rebirth, de Meyer accepted the offer to become the Harper's Bazaar chief photographer in Paris, spending the next sixteen years there. On the eve of World War II in 1938, de Meyer returned to the United States, and found that he was a relic in the face of the rising modernism of his art. He died in Los Angeles in 1946, his death being registered as 'Gayne Adolphus Demeyer, writer (retired)'^[3]. Today, few of his prints survive, most having been destroyed during World War II.

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