Havelock Ellis (Primary Title)
Man Ray, American, 1890 - 1976 (Artist)
Man Ray’s cavalcade of illustrious visitors to his Montparnasse studio included the English physician and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), who sat for this portrait in June 1924 during a visit to Paris. The artist fondly remembered the portrait session with the sixty-five-year-old pioneer of the emerging field of sexology, whose “patriarch’s head” was seemingly “at odds with his baggy tweeds.” Ellis became internationally famous through his best-selling studies of human sexuality, such as The Erotic Rights of Women, Sex in Relation to Society, and the six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Man Ray’s portrait focused on Havelock Ellis’s aged features and scraggly beard, which according to Sylvia Beach, the American owner of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, lent him the air of an Apostle, “out of which had come all those volumes on sex to enlighten a whole generation.”
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