Misia Sert

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Misia Sert (1872-1950) born Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska[1] was a Polish-French pianist, patron and friend of numerous artists. She is best-known as a host of a literary-artistic salon in Paris.

Her father, Cyprian Godebski (1835-1909), was a Polish-born sculptor. Her mother, Zofia Godebska née Servais, was half-Belgian and half-Russian, daughter to a noted musician Adrien-François Servais. She died at giving birth to her March 30, 1872, in Tsarskoye Selo in Russia, where Godebski was engaged in reconstruction of the tsarist palace.

Early in her youth Misia was discovered as a gifted pianist. Before she was 16, she married Tadeusz Natanson, a Polish emigree politician and journalist, later to become the editor of La revue blanche magazine. After Natanson was almost bankrupt, the newspaper magnate Alfred Edwards saved him, on condition that he surrender his wife. She began living with Alfred Edwards in 1903. Around that time she started hosting a literary-artistic salon in Paris. She acquired considerable influence in Parisian musical and artistic circles. Stéphane Mallarmé, Claude Debussy, as well as painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, and Pierre Bonnard were among her guests. She was a confidante of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, an early patron of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and a close friend of the designer Coco Chanel.

Misia's third marriage was to the Spanish painter José Maria Sert (1876-1945). She loved Sert, and gave him up when he fell in love with another woman, Roussadana Mdivani.

Misia was a noted beauty who was painted many times. She was one of the models for Toulouse-Lautrec's poster for La revue blanche in 1896, in which she is shown as a skater. A portrait of Misia by Renoir is now in the Tate Gallery.[1]

Ravel dedicated "Le Cygne" (The Swan) in Histoires naturelles, and La Valse (The Waltz) to her.

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