Series II encompasses the better part of Arnold Genthe's career as a photographer, and fills Boxes 3 through 9. Arranged alphabetically by sitter. Unidentified persons are listed at the end, alphabetically by description.
Genthe began shooting portraits while still living in San Francisco, in 1906; most of his portraiture, however, was done in New York City, where he resided from 1911 until just before his death in 1942. Some of the portraits are classic studio shots, the subjects posed with studio draping (satiny or filmy wraps for the women) against curtained backdrops. These more "serious" portraits include such society and political luminaries as Mary Astor, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman, the latter a color portrait (probably taken between 1935 and 1942) in which the then-U.S. senator is seated in a garden with Josef Stalin and other leaders. Actors and artists figured largely both as Genthe's subjects and as his friends, and these portraits are among his most playful and affectionate. Henry Miller mugs in Revolutionary-era costume. A young Jack London, in white shirt and tie, is handsome and rumpled, looking thoroughly modern. Mary Pickford is all flowers and lace, very much "America's Sweetheart." The actress Jeanne Eagels, in flowing robe, laughs with delight as she holds aloft a small dog. A bearded Ezra Pound looks fierce and independent, an artist of no pretension sitting for his portrait in plaid shirt and woolly vest. But perhaps most striking and enduring in this series are Genthe's portraits of Greta Garbo and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The great Garbo is, as ever, her dramatically aloof self; in one exquisite shot she is seen in profile, head tilted back, neck impossibly long; in another, she faces forward, a tragedian with hand grasping throat. The poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, in an early portrait, is luminous in a simple, sailor-style linen dress, framed by a magnolia tree in bloom. Prints in the series range from about 6 by 5 inches to 17 by 14 inches.
