Pierre-Paul Prud'hon nait à Cluny, le 4 avril 1758, septième et dernier enfant de Christophe Prudon, maître tailleur de pierre.

A dix-neuf ans, ​Prud'hon épouse le 17 février 1778, Jeanne Pennet, la fille d'un notaire. Ce mariage ne sera pas très heureux mais il en aura un fils, Jean, né en 1778, qui deviendra aussi peintre et graveur.

Il poursuit ses études, et vient, en 1780, à Paris où il est adressé au graveur Wille par son compatriote le baron de Joursanvault, qui est aussi son bienfaiteur, et pour lequel il illustre une Méthode de basse et une Méthode de blason. 

En 1783, revenu à Dijon, il y concourt bientôt pour le Prix de Rome régional des états de Bourgogne. Prud'hon part pour Rome où il arrive le 3 janvier 1783 avec son camarade Pierre Petitot. Cependant, malgré ses amis, malgré la sollicitude du cardinal de Bernis, de Canova, il y vit dans la solitude, dans la mélancolie, et parfois dans la gêne. Il voyage en Italie de 1784 à 1788.

Revenu à Paris, il acquiert une certaine renommée avec quelques tableaux allégoriques repris dans des gravures, mais son amitié avec Robespierre l’oblige à quitter Paris et il part vivre en Franche-Comté de 1794 à 1796.

Il vit alors de portraits et d’illustrations pour l’éditeur et imprimeur Pierre Didot. Il est élu membre associé de l’Institut en 1796 et revient alors à Paris où sa carrière prend un nouvel essor. Le Louvre met à sa disposition un atelier pour réaliser La Sagesse et la Vérité descendant sur la terre de 1798 à 1799. Il peint également pour l’hôtel du financier de Lannoy, des décors allégoriques qui sont beaucoup appréciés, et des plafonds au Louvre.

Le gouvernement lui attribue un atelier à la Sorbonne où sa femme Jeanne vient le harceler. Pour lui échapper, le peintre demande la protection de Vivant Denon, directeur des musées. En 1808 il peint La Justice et la Vengeance Divine poursuivant le Crime.

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (April 4, 1758 – February 16, 1823) was a French Romantic painter and draughtsman best known for his allegorical paintings and portraits such as Madame Georges Anthony and Her Two Sons (1796). Notably, he painted a portrait of each of Napoleon's two wives.

He was an early influence on Théodore Géricault.​

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon was born in Cluny, Saône-et-Loire, France. He received his artistic training in the French provinces and went to Italy when he was twenty-six years old to continue his education. On his return to Paris, he found work decorating some private mansions. His work for wealthy Parisians led him to be held in high esteem at Napoleon's court.

His painting of Josephine portrays her not as an Empress, but as a lovely, attractive woman, which led some to think that he might have been in love with her. After the divorce of Napoleon and Josephine, he was also employed by Napoleon' s second wife Marie-Louise.

Prud'hon was at times clearly influenced by Neo-classicism, at other times by Romanticism. Appreciated by other artists and writers such as Stendhal, Delacroix, Millet and Baudelaire for his chiaroscuro and convincing realism, he is probably most famous for his Crucifixion (1822, Louvre), which he painted for St. Etienne's Cathedral in Metz. 

The young Théodore Géricault had painted copies of work by Prud'hon, whose "thunderously tragic pictures" include his masterpiece, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, where oppressive darkness and the compositional base of a naked, sprawled corpse obviously anticipate Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa.

Peter Seamus O'Toole was a British stage and film actor of Irish descent. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began working in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic and with the English Stage Company before making his film debut in 1959.

He achieved international recognition playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for which he received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was nominated for this award another seven times – for Becket (1964), The Lion in Winter (1968), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), The Ruling Class (1972), The Stunt Man (1980), My Favorite Year (1982), and Venus (2006) – and holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations for acting without a win. In 2002, O'Toole was awarded the Academy Honorary Award for his career achievements.[1] He was additionally the recipient of four Golden Globe Awards, one British Academy Film Award and one Primetime Emmy Award.

1950s: Shakespeare and George Bernard shaw

O'Toole attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1952 to 1954 on a scholarship after being rejected by the Abbey Theatre's drama school in Dublin by the director Ernest Blythe, because he couldn't speak the Irish language. At RADA, he was in the same class as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford.

​O'Toole described this as "the most remarkable class the academy ever had, though we weren't reckoned for much at the time. We were all considered dotty.

O'Toole began working in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic and with the English Stage Company from 1956 to 1958, appearing in productions of King Lear (1956), The Recruiting Officer (1956), Major Barbara (1956), Othello (1956), and The Slave of Truth (1956).

He also acted in George Bernard Shaw's plays: as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion (1957), as Tanner in Man and Superman (1958), a performance he would reprise often during his career.

O'Toole made his London debut in a musical Oh, My Papa and gained fame on the West End in the play The Long and the Short and the Tall, performed at the Royal Court starting January 1959.

O'Toole made his television debut in 1954, and at the beginning of 60s, he made a few films, but his major break came in November 1960 when he was chosen to play T. E. Lawrence in Sir David Lean's $12 million epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), after Marlon Brando proved unavailable and Albert Finney turned down the role.

His performance was ranked number one in Premiere magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Performances of All Time. The role introduced him to US audiences and earned him the first of his eight nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor. 

She was born Pauline Potter at 10 rue Octave Feuillet in the Paris neighborhood of Passy, to wealthy expatriate American parents of Protestant background. Her mother was Gwendolen Cary, a great-grand-niece of Thomas Jefferson, Potter was a member of several families that were prominent in the American South since the 17th century.

In 1930, in Baltimore, Maryland, Pauline Potter married Charles Carroll Fulton Leser (1900–1949), a grandson of one of the city's leading newspaper publishers. He was also an alcoholic and a homosexual. Soon after their marriage they moved to Majorca, Spain, but they separated in 1934, and divorced in 1939.
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After she and Leser separated, Pauline Potter was romantically involved with a number of prominent men, including Paul-Henri Spaak (a Prime Minister of Belgium), American diplomat Elim O'Shaughnessy (1907-1966), French horticultural heir André Levesque de Vilmorin (1907-1987), Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch Romanov of Russia, and producer-director Jed Harris. For a period of years she also was the lover of Isabelle Kemp, an heiress to a New York drug-store and real-estate fortune.

In the early 1930s, Pauline Potter worked as a personal shopper in New York City, acting as a fashion advisor to wealthy socialites too busy to shop or too unsure of their personal style. Later, after moving to Spain with her first husband, Pauline operated dress shops on Majorca. She also worked for the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in London and Paris and often was seen in society columns dressed in the firm's latest creations.

In the early 1940s, Pauline Potter and a friend, Louise Macy, a former editor of Harper's Bazaar, opened Macy-Potter, a short-lived fashion house, in New York City. The firm was bankrolled by a monetary settlement from Macy's former lover, millionaire John Hay Whitney, who had left her to marry Betsey Cushing, a former daughter-in-law of President Franklin Roosevelt. Though Macy-Potter's first (and only) collection was a critical and financial disaster, Potter went on to design a collection for Marshall Field and later to direct the custom-fashion division of Hattie Carnegie, the New York fashion company, succeeding Jean Louis, who left in 1943 to become chief fashion designer for Columbia Pictures.

Pauline remained at Hattie Carnegie for nearly a decade and was known professionally as Mrs. Fairfax Potter. Among her clients were the Duchess of Windsor, automotive heiress Thelma Chrysler Foy, actress Gertrude Lawrence, actress Ina Claire, and prominent others. She also designed the women's costumes for John Huston's Broadway 1946 production of No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, starring Ruth Ford and Annabella. The gown she designed for Ford is in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

Potter also worked briefly as an uncredited fashion model. One assignment for Harper's Bazaar had her posing in the latest Grecian-style gowns for the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe.

On 8 April 1954, Pauline Potter became the second wife of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, the owner of the fabled French winery Château Mouton Rothschild.

This second marriage transformed her, not only from Pauline Potter the stylish woman to Baronesse Pauline de Rothschild the style icon. 

All of her early years of modelling, styling, selling and designing clothes had developed and nourished her sense of style, and now, as a Rothschild, she had the means to acquire and wrap herself in cloths of her style, the couturiers like Balenciaga, Courreges and Saint Laurent who are able to accommodate her needs, the venues to show, and the presses and photographers to immortalise "le style Pauline".

In more than a decade, she transformed herself into one of the most elegant women in the world, and in 1969, she achieved the highest honour a society lady could have: She was admitted to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame, the only woman that year,  alongside elegant men like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cary Grant, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

But "le style Pauline" was much more than how she dressed, or how she carried herself, it would increasingly mean the way how she decorated her houses in Paris, London, and Bordeaux, Chateau de Mouton.

Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Pauline's second husband, a descendant of the Rothschild banking dynasty, was a race-car driver, a screenwriter, a playwright, a theatrical producer, a film producer, a poet, a wine maker, and a famed playboy. In fact, Pauline was only one of his mistresses for many years before their marriage, but after they got married, the Baron read, wrote and translated poetry with his wife, and provided her with a stage--Chateau de Mouton, for a woman of taste, energy and determination like Pauline, to act out the best role in her life.

With the help of her husband, Pauline de Rothschild renovated the war ruined estate of Rothschild in Bordeaux into one of the best wine museums in the world. A big project that took years, it showed her taste more than all the dresses she worn during those years.

If Chateau de Mouton which was designed as museum was Pauline's grand stage given to her by her husband, where family history as well as culture heritage needed needed to be considered, then their apartment in Paris and flat in London were more like her playground, like Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon, where she can indulge much more freely her intimate and personal taste.

Pauline de Rothschild died on 8 March 1976, of a heart attack in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, in Santa Barbara, California. She previously had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone open-heart surgery for a deteriorated valve in 1975. Rothschild's health problems were exacerbated by Marfan's syndrome, a genetic abnormality.

Articles

• Baroness Pauline de Rothschild dies
• Pauline de Rothschild's Secluded London Apartment

Books

​Patrizio Buanne was born in Vienna, Austria to Neapolitan parents and has from an early age spent his childhood living and traveling (due to his parent’s restaurant business) between these two grand, historical cities that shaped his upbringing and personality:

This multi-cultural upbringing sparked in Patrizio an early passion for languages, and by the age of 17 he already spoke fluent Neapolitan, German, English, French and Spanish. It seemed obvious for Patrizio and his parents for him to become an interpreter, and after graduation from school he went on to study Roman and Slavic languages at University and that way he could add fluent Italian and Polish to his language tool kit.

But whilst his aptitude for languages is admirable, a much greater gift, apparent even from the age of 4, was emerging – his gift to be able to sing and entertain people.

At the age of eight Patrizio received his first guitar which further encouraged his interest in entertaining his family and friends in the “Buanne home”.
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At the age of eleven, Patrizio had the first of his many appearances in talent contests. With the conviction at such an early age to, ultimately, become a singer and actor he ended up winning all the competitions he ever participated in.

Pierre Balmain is a French couturier who created his couture house in 1945, and one of the most prominent couturiers during the 50s who revitalized the Paris couture after the Second World War, together with Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Jacques Fath. Unlike some of them, however, Pierre Balmain owned his couture house and personally directed it until his death in 1982, never  closing it or selling to someone else.

Pierre Balmain was born in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, ​France, during the Second World War, he was called to the military service. When Paris was liberated, he went to work for Lucien Lelong, where he made a little crepe dress called ¨Petit Profit¨, which Lucien Lelong did not want to make but was quite successful commercially and more than 300 pieces were sold. 

It was in couture house of Lucien Lelong that he met and worked alongside Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy, both of whom who would create their own couture houses.

In 1945, with the help of his mother and some ex-workers of Balenciaga, Bierre Balmain launched his own couture house, and presented his first collection: dresses and suits that fit the bodyshapes, all in dark and sober colors which would become his trademark. The launch was an immediate success, people like Duchess of Windsor ordered from the collection. Balmain began to travel a lot, embodying the French elegance of that time. 

In 1946, Balmain created his first perfume "ELYsées 64-83", and then in 1947 his second perfume "Vent Vert¨(green wind) and his last "Jolie Madame¨(pretty woman) in 1949, which would also be the name of his 1952-1953 autumn-winter collection.

Balmain was active in promoting himself internationally from the early days – touring Australia in 1947 and designing a line to be produced in the country. He expanded operations to the United States in 1951, selling ready-to-wear clothes that earned him a prestigious Neiman Marcus Fashion Award in 1955. He was, by this stage, designing clothes worn by Vojislav Stanimirovic and stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn.

Such was Balmain's reputation that he was chosen to design the wardrobe of Queen Sirikit of Thailand during her 1960 tour of the United States. In 1968, he created outfits for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble and he also designed outfits for both TWA and Malaysia–Singapore Airlines' (later Singapore Airlines) cabin crew in the 1960s and '70s. Air France's first female pilot in 1975 wore a uniform by Balmain.

Erik Mortensen, a student of the Danish designer Holger Blum, began as a design assistant at Balmain in 1948. He and Balmain worked well together, and Mortensen quickly went from assistant to collaborator. He and Balmain worked together for the rest of Balmain's life. Margit Brandt worked as a young designer with Pierre Balmain in the early 1960s. Balmain also spotted the talent of Karl Lagerfeld, hiring him in 1954 after judging a fashion competition that the young German designer won.

Pierre Balmain also designed many dresses for French singer Dalida.