Although credited by their married names at the time of publication, both subjects would re-marry and became better known as Babe Paley, the stylish socialite and “swan” of Truman Capote, and Marietta Peabody Tree, a United States Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and mother of historian Frances FitzGerald and model Penelope Tree.



Horst posed them both in Spanish couturier Balenciaga’s reinterpretation of the “montera” hats commonly worn by bullfighters, along with an enlarged reproduction of Francisco Goya’s Otra locura suya en la misma plaza (Another Madness of his in the Same Ring). This etching was part of a series of 33 works called La Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting) produced between 1746 and 1828 and has been understood as a satire directed against what Enlightenment thinkers saw as a barbaric form of entertainment.