Equine Venus: Elke Sommer

We haven't had a Lady Godiva-type Venus on horseback for a while so here, from 1970, is German actress Elke Sommer. Elke turns 70 this November and deserves proper treatment in another post so we will return to her in the future.

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Equine Venuses: Lady Godiva in the Cinema 1: Maureen O'Hara

Moving into the world of films we continue our look at the world's most famous naked lady on a horse.

Actually, according to Hollywood in 1955 she was the world's most famous ride (and you thought that was Marilyn Monroe).

Maureen aged 22 in The Black Swan

Irish (really!) born Maureen O'Hara (FitzSimons, to give her her real name) was utterly gorgeous in one of Agent Triple P's favourite pirate films, the Black Swan (1942) with Tyrone Power.

She was, however, (by Hollywood standards) getting on a bit (35) when she made Lady Godiva of Coventry (to give it its full name). Nevertheless, her cheekbones saw her in good stead and that was about all you could see given her cover-all wig.

The only colour still we could find.

Here she is preparing to be filmed for the riding sequence itself. It was filmed on a closed set with only 14 technicians; 11 of whom were women.

Maureen still looking good at 35

Maureen is still around and now 88 years old.

Maureen four years ago at the age of 84. Can't beat good cheekbones!

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Centrefold Venus of the Month: Joelle Corio, Penthouse October/November 1966

Due to a request from a reader (we're frankly amazed that there are any at all!) we present all of the  pictures of Mlle Joelle Dorio from Penthouse from 1966.

This was the fourteenth issue of Penthouse and was labelled October/November.  As the magazine was launched in march 1965 this should have been the twentieth issue but Guccione was struggling to get an issue out a a month at this point.

They had been having  problems with printing enough copies, due to the high demand for the new magazine. Penthouse wouldn't manage 12 issues in a year until 1968.

These pictures were taken in Corsica by Philip O Stearns, the magazine's art director. Although this was the fourteenth issue Joelle was only the thirteenth Penthouse Pet as the first Pet of the Year, Amber Smith, had also been Pet in September 1966 as well as her original pictorial in October 1965. In the first year the Pet of the Year replaced the Pet of the Month and wasn't in addition to her as in later years.

This was the first time Penthouse had shot a pictorial abroad. The magazine must have been making money! This picture is also  the first time a Penthouse Pet had been photographed in water!

Joelle was from Brittany and was nineteen when these pictures were taken. Rather depressing to think that she would be over sixty now!

There was lots of nonsense about this being her horse and it being called l'Aiglon (eaglet) which was a nickname of Napoleon's son.  All too much Corsican coincidence, we feel.  Never mind, there's nothing like a naked French girl astride a stallion.

Here is Joelle displaying the sort of extreme tan lines that Agent DVD likes so much.

This is a nice painterly photograph!

It's really nice to see a Penthouse Pet outside somewhere obviously warm instead of the waterfall at Virginia Water or Richmond Park as they had inflicted on the poor girls previously!

A nice smile to finish!

We never expected to find any more pictures of Joelle as most of Penthouse's early Pets were amateurs and never posed again.  In fact, early on, they could only be Pet of the Month if they hadn't posed for another men's magazine.  But here, in Men Only from July 1967 we have another centrefold pictorial featuring the lovely Joelle.

Now the Penthouse pictorial was shot in Corsica and claimed Joelle was of Breton stock.  The Men Only pictorial says she is from Corsica but now lives in Paris where she works as a model and actress.  Both could be correct, of course.  

Anyway, here she is skipping about in fishnet tights and a mini dress and acting as a distraction to artists.

Here she is looking pensively Gallic inside.  These pictures were taken by the great French photographer Serge Jacques of Paris-Hollywood magazine fame.  He also took some famous shots of a young Brigitte Bardot at the Cannes film festival.

Amazingly Jacques is still taking pictures of beautiful, naked women having worked for just about every major men's magazine and having been working for six decades.

Jacques manages to get some lovely smiles out of Joelle and here she is just the sort of fantasy French woman you would want to see having a cup of coffee in your apartment in the morning.

Men Only's centrefold girls were all shown in black and white, apart from the centrefold shot itself at this time.  Penthouse had gone full colour a year before and, indeed, Joelle's Pet of the Month pictorial was only the third all-colour one.

So here she is in her lovely colour centrefold shot displaying her 38-25-36 figure to splendid effect.

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Look & Learn style Venus: Lady Godiva

The first Look & Learn we owned, from 1967

Agent Triple P learnt much of what he knows about the world from the splendid magazine Look & Learn which he subscribed to from about 1967 until 1978. Indeed, much of our current knowledge about science has never really progressed beyond that period leaving us still believing that a Brontosaurus (which now no longer ever existed!) needed to stand in water to help support its weight. We should have had a Mars mission years ago, domestic robots and all sorts of other splendid things predicted for the world of the future (i.e. about 1999).

The best thing about Look & Learn, for a budding artist like Triple P, were the wonderful paintings on the cover and inside.

Artists Like Ron and Gerry Embleton and Angus McBride were the top illustrators of the time and produced some memorable covers with even more memorable headlines such as this one by Gerry Embleton entitled "captured by Chinese bandits!", one of my favourites.

We are lucky enough to own an original McBride, painted for Look & Learn of another famous woman from British history, Boadicea (none of this revisionist Boudicca nonsense). Best of all was the brilliant comic strip The Trigan Empire illustrated by Don Lawrence, original paintings of which now sell for thousands of pound. Sadly, the magazine folded in 1982 but recently a company acquired the rights to the magazine and the illustrations and came out with a 48 issue reprint of selected articles which Agent Triple P was very happy to be a founding subscriber to.

So we were amused to find this picture of Lady Godiva which has a real Look & Learn feel to it. Perhaps if Britain had been more like France in the 1960s Look & Learn would have used more naked women in their paintings! No doubt it would have looked something like this:

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Equine Venuses: Lady Godiva on camera

As we have noted the image of a naked girl on a horse is a strong one and sometimes pops up in photography, but not as often as you would think. Probably because not only do you need a girl who's happy to take her clothes off but you also need a girl who feels comfortable on a horse. We have a few examples in our collection:

Bo Derek (whatever happened to her?) in Bolero (1984)

We were never entirely convinced by Bo Derek. She had rather thin lips for our taste and her body was a bit straight up and down, apart from having her bust stuck on the front in an unconvincing way. I think it is a bust/waist/hip proportion problem. Her shoulders were too large for her hips to look right.

Secondly, we have Joelle Dorio, Penthouse Pet of the Month for October 1966, photographed by Philip O Stearns in Corsica. Joelle presents an altogether more harmonius prospect we feel.

Here is Liz Stewart, Playboy playmate of the Month for July 1984 on her horse on a rather gloomy looking Californian beach. This is what the beach always looked like in Baywatch, as it was always filmed in the off-season. Brr!

This young lady demonstrates the danger of searching "naked girl" and "horse" because although she looks quite presentable here the rest of her pictorial promised that she would be "interacting" with the horse. Er, yes. Not really our thing. She's probably a German.

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French Anglo Saxon Venus: Lady Godiva by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre

Lady Godiva (1890) by Jules- Jacques Lefebvre. 19th Century print from the painting (original now lost)

There are surprisingly few paintings featuring Lady Godiva, given the primal appeal of a naked lady on a horse. Lord Leighton had a go in 1892 but his picture is a disappointment (at least as far as Venus Observations goes) as he chose to portray the moment when Godiva decided to do the ride so she is, annoyingly, clothed (nice braided hair, though).

Lady Godiva (1892) by Lord Leighton

George Frederick Watts' version is unlike any other, depicting what we take to be an emotionally drained Godiva being helped from her horse by her maids. Either that or she appears to have ridden herself into a massive orgasm (obviously not riding side-saddle). One can never be quite sure with Watts.

Lady Godiva (1880) by George Frederick Watts

Later, and rather surprisingly, Salvador Dali had a go at the subject a couple of times.

Lady Godiva (1976) by Salvador Dali


Lady Godiva (1982) by Slavador Dali



Lefebvre in his studio

One of the few other painters in the nineteenth century to produce a Lady Godiva picture was Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911). His Lady Godiva pre-dates Collier's by seven years and she rides, more decorously, side saddle. His version of Dark Ages Coventry looks more like medieval Paris but then, although he got closer, Collier's version has her riding through late Norman architecture when her husband died nearly ten years before the Norman invasion. Real Anglo Saxon houses would have looked like this:

Lefebvre is not well known in the UK but we like this quote from a reviewer of his exhibition at the Paris Salon in 1881: “It is sufficient to just mention his name in order to immediately evoke the memory and the image of the thousand adorable creatures of which he is the father.... Jules Lefèbvre, better than anyone else caresses, with a brush both delicate and sure, the undulating contour of the feminine form.” Quite right M. Enault.

Chloe (1875)

Unlike the aristocratic Collier, Lefebvre was the son of a baker, but he sent Lefebvre fils to Paris to study under Léon Cogniet and at l'École des Beaux Arts. His first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1855 and then spent some years trying to win the coveted Prix de Rome; the aim of every young painter as the prize was five years of study in that city and a succesful reputation. He came second in 1859 and won in 1861.

Femme couchee (1868)

During his time in Rome he painted his fiorst female nude (in 1863). On his return to Paris his approach to painting was transformed and he started to work much more from life. His reclining nude exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1868 was much praised.

La Verite (1870)

In 1870 his painting, La Verite, became his first major success. She is lit in such a way that your eye is drawn to her voluptuous torso before following up her carefully shadowed arm until reaching the mirror (the symbol of truth) itself; caressing her with your eyes as Lefebvre himself has caressed her with his brush, to echo M. Enault. The model for this painting was a French actress, Sophie Croizette. This picture won him the Légion d'honneur.

Sophie Croizette. the model for La Verite

Mary Magdalen in the Grotto (1876)

Lefébvre sensibly started to concentrate on nudes and soon came to rival Bouguereau, although unlike the latter, who we will feature shortly, he used many different models. The author Alexandre Dumas was a big fan of his work and bought at least one nude from him.

l'Odalisque (1874)

In the 1870s he became a teacher at the Academie Julien where he insisted on absolute precision in life drawing from his students.

One of his most celebrated paintings was La Cigale (the grasshoper). Whilst this may look like a picture of a rather grumpy looking girl it was based on the Aesop fable The Grasshopper and the Ant where the grasshopper spends all summer dancing and singing whilst the ant prepares for the winter. When the winter arrives the grasshopper is cold, hungry and unprepared.

La Cigale (1872)

The girl is the grasshopper suddenly realising her folly. The picture was painted just after the Franco-Prussian War and was an allegorical attack on Napoleon III whose unpreparedness led to the disaster of the Paris Commune uprising in 1871.

Lefebvre painted two more versions of it as miniatures.

Jules-Jacques Lefèbvre died on February 24th 1911.

Pandora

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