ISADORA DUNCAN LIFE HISTORY

Born in California in 1877, Duncan's childhood was as chaotic as it was sublime. Her mother, Dora Angela Duncan, a self-educated cultured woman, provided her four children with classical underpinnings that instilled a love and respect for art and language and a reverence for the past. Her father, Joseph Duncan, a banker-aesthete, abandoned the family when Duncan was quite young. However, even in absentia, he prophetically heralded Duncan's formative concepts of a Greek sensibility through his published poem, "Intaglio: Lines on a Beautiful Greek Antique," in which he wrote, "Greece is living Greece once more." (Duncan, Art of the Dance, 144; quoting Bret Harte, ed., Outcroppings: Being Selections of California Verse. San Francisco: A. Roman, 1866).

Duncan's family moved often, eventually traveling across America and then to Europe. They arrived in London the summer of 1899, where Duncan, then age 22, immersed herself every day for four months in the vast holdings of the British Museum. (Duncan, Original Notebook from the Arnold Rood Collection, n.d., Special Collections, Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, without pagination. Courtesy of Barbara Kane.)

Thereafter, they left for Paris, where Duncan was introduced to the Louvre's collection of Greek vases and their iconography. In her autobiography, Duncan recalls that her brother, Raymond, sketched every red or black-figured vessel in that collection. Duncan subsequently danced from their inspired images, while Raymond photographed her. (Duncan, My Life, 67-68.) It was their self-proclaimed mission to attune themselves to the ancient Greek sensibility, its aesthetic and its ethos.