Pierre BonnardMisia at the piano© DR
She was a musician, whose three marriages marked the three stages of her musical “career”. The young girl, born into a family of musicians, who studied piano under Gabriel Fauré, and married Thadée Natanson at the age of twenty-one, would provide the circle of friends at the La Revue blanche with the model for a musical gathering, the apotheosis of all those portraits of women at the piano, in hushed bourgeois salons where music was played and enjoyed by small groups of friends and family.
As the wife of the financier Alfred Edwards, then of the Catalan painter José Maria Sert, she would then move from music played for friends and for oneself, to the footlights and boxes of the theatre, where for twenty years she supported Diaghilev with her discerning taste, her contacts and her wealth. Not as a patron like the Princesse de Polignac, nor as a salon hostess like Madame de Saint Marceaux, but as both Princesse Yourbeletieff and Madame Verdurin, as if, in the words of Proust, "the taste for novelty" should be embodied " in some hitherto unknown mistress of the house", so that "each age thus finds itself personified in new women, in a new group of women, who, closely identified with the very latest objects of curiosity seem, by their dress, to appear only now, at this moment, like an unknown species born of the last flood, the irresistible beauties of each new Consulate, each new Directory."