Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

Adah Isaacs Menken as 'Mazeppa' NPG x13339

© National Portrait Gallery, London

by Charles Reutlinger

A startling example of the poet as celebrity, Menken was also an actor who rose to fame in the early 1860s in the melodrama Mazeppa (1861-66), a role that saw her wearing flesh-coloured tights whilst strapped to a horse. A savvy self-promoter, she made sure her photographic image was circulated widely. She enjoyed scandal-provoking relationships with Algernon Charles Swinburne and Alexandre Dumas, père. Her poetic volume, Infelicia (1868) was published posthumously, following her untimely death, aged thirty-three.

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

Images are printed in their original proportions, within a white border.