In 1919, a pebble's toss from the crystalline Martian red peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges, Faun Roberts had her Road to Damascus moment. It was there in Chamonix, shortly after the Great War and skiing as sport was returning to the European cascades.
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| Hollow Persuasion, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1920 (Private collection) |
After the canons had been temporarily quelled, the Haute-Savoie became a hotbed of atheism and anarchism. It was in Alby-sur-Chéran where Guillet fled to avoid conscription and where he ultimately completed his masterful Bildungsroman "Le Problème avec les Filles." Antoine Dota, the now forgotten composer of subversive operetti, held court in Présilly, living lavishly in a sumptuous and dilapidated villa he inherited from his reactionary grandfather, Gianmaria Dota. And most famously or notoriously, it was in Marcellaz-Albanais where Rougier, Barnier and Cauvet plotted their failed assassination attempt of Ferdinand Foch.
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| Ferdinand Foch |
Faun Roberts may of may not have come across these characters, but there is little doubt that on the foot of the French Alps revolutionary change was flowing as freely as the springs of Évian-les-Bains.
It was quite by accident that the first of Roberts' so-called sapphic paintings was completed in Chamonix.
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| Anactória, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1919 (Private collection) |
Anactória began as a more or less conventional landscape when the famous blizzard of 1919 covered the area around Mont Blanc in a blanket of blinding white. Looking for relief, Roberts enlisted Marie-Claude Bidoni, daughter of the proprietor of Chalet Mercerie to pose for a portrait.
And in a hot flash of libidinous light, Saul became Paul and Faun Roberts found, at last, her subject matter.
