Romaine Brooks (born Beatrice Romaine Goddard; May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970) was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing on her own original aesthetic inspired by the works of Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats. She is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.
Although her family was wealthy, Brooks had an unhappy childhood after her alcoholic father abandoned the family; her mother was emotionally abusive and her brother mentally ill. By her own account, her childhood cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as a poor art student, then inherited a fortune upon her mother's death in 1902. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects. She often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.
Although she lived until 1970, it is erroneously believed that she painted very little after 1925 despite evidence to the contrary. She made a series of drawings during the 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" techniques predating automatic drawing. She spent time in New York City in the mid 1930s, completing portraits of Carl Van Vechten and Muriel Draper. Many of her works are unaccounted for, but photographic reproductions attest to her ongoing artwork. It is thought to have culminated in her 1961 portrait of Duke Uberto Strozzi.
Beatrice Romaine Goddard was born in Rome, the youngest of three children of the wealthy American Ella (Waterman) Goddard and her husband Major Henry Goddard who was also American. Her maternal grandfather was the coal mining multi-millionaire Isaac S. Waterman Jr. Her parents divorced when she was small, and her father abandoned the family. Beatrice was raised in New York by her unstable mother, who abused her emotionally while doting on her mentally ill brother, St. Mar. According to one source, Goddard had to tend to St. Mar, because he attacked anyone else who came near him. According to her memoir, when she was seven, her mother fostered her to a poor family living in a New York City tenement, then disappeared and stopped making the agreed-upon payments. The family continued to care for Beatrice, although they sank further into poverty. She did not tell them where her grandfather lived for fear of being returned to her mother. Other sources record that she attended a girls' school in New Jersey, an Italian convent and a Swiss finishing school.
After the foster family located her grandfather, he arranged to send Beatrice to study for several years at St. Mary's Hall (now Doane Academy) an Episcopal girls boarding school in Burlington, New Jersey. Later, she attended a convent school, in between times spent with her mother, who moved around Europe constantly, although the stress of travel made St. Mar harder to control. In adulthood, Goddard Brooks referred to herself as having been a "child-martyr".
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