Photographs of 1930s society ladies in costume, as rediscovered in 1990

‘Society ladies as you’ve never seen them’ titillated the 6 May 1990 cover, trailing a spread of otherworldly 1930s portraiture from the experimental photographer Madame Yevonde.

There are, indeed, no Agas, chocolate labs or wellies in these surreal shots of titled bright young things as figures from classical mythology. Lady Milbanke (‘a frequent dancing partner of the Duke of Windsor… she married the grandson of Tsar Alexander III’) is Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, porcelain flesh pierced by arrows. Viscountess Tiverton (‘renowned for her dry sense of humour and practical jokes’) makes a sublime Europa in golden drapery, one perfect cheek leaning against a highly decorated and seemingly stoical bull. Diana Mosley looks quite bored, frankly, as a languid Venus in a shell headdress. Some suffered for Yevonde’s art: Lady Malcolm Campbell as grieving matriarch Niobe was subjected to ‘hefty applications of glycerine until, in real pain, the sitter gave Yevonde the agonised effect she sought.’

The Observer paints Madame Yevonde, born to a wealthy Streatham family and educated by Belgian nuns, as a woman out of time. ‘Repelled by the meaningless social life common to women of her position,’ she yearned for independence, joining the women’s suffrage movement before settling on a career in photography, mainly of women. ‘Men, she believed, were drab beings, afraid of admitting vibrancy to their monochrome world.’ The creative potential of colour – widely considered by the public and her peers ‘brash, unnecessary and unnatural’ – set her alight. ‘Strawberry blondes in corn-coloured dresses against yellow drapes… studio lights infused flesh tones with a blue marmoreal pallor.’

The surviving nymphs and goddesses from the shoot gave their very human verdicts. Diana Mosley couldn’t remember being involved (‘Did she take me?’ she asked. ‘I had so many photographs taken.’) Nadine, Countess of Shrewsbury, pictured as Ariadne, bare-shouldered with a basilisk stare and glittering sword, was scathing: ‘No thank you. I think they’re terrible.’