A friend suggests my convoluted brain does a lot of mind yoga. For example, a month of sundays for June 9th. The post began as a delve into what the date was dedicated to; evolving out to awareness/celebratory week and month. (That post might yet appear before the end of June).

But, I got caught up in a new-to-me artist, Frederic Leighton, and his exquisite portrait, Flaming June. (And, no,  I don’t miss the irony of the term flaming within the LGBT community, and that June is Pride Month. In addition to the unclear nature of Leighton’s sexuality and his rather unusual-in-the-Victorian-era house design.) 

The Wikipedia article on the painting suggests:

“While the body of the woman remains a mystery, there is speculation that the face is that of either of Leighton’s two favourite models in the 1890s, Dorothy Dene or Mary Lloyd.”

Mind yoga posing continues:

“. . . the playwright George Bernard Shaw was rumored to have been inspired by the dynamic between Leighton and his favorite model, Ada Alice Pullan, [Dorothy Dene] to write Pygmalion (later to be adapted for [Broadway and] the film My Fair Lady), and not only by a classical myth.

. . . The phonetics professor Henry Higgins’s fascination in tutoring and molding the working-class Cockney woman Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady perhaps mirrors how Leighton found Pullan’s working-class background and undeveloped character appealing to his slightly obsessive and controlling personality, Pérez d’Ors said during his lecture at the Frick on June 10[, 2015].”

GBS and Pygmalion, the original cast album of My Fair Lady, and the movie, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, are all smoothing stones. [a small, smooth stone rubbed between thumb and fingers; also called soothing or worry stone]

A selection of other art works with June in the title.

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