CM: Frances Rich was attracted to the challenge of sculpting portraits of people that were dear to her. Rich was so close to Hepburn that she had the opportunity to do portraits of her time and again. The Bas-Relief Tondo of Katharine Hepburn is one of Rich's most accomplished portraits. Within the circular ground Rich succeeds in comfortably including references to all the senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. The particularly successful composition shows the sitter in a pensive moment: her gaze is lost in thought, her left hand placed sensitively on her chin. The beautiful hairdo with its swirling upward movement is somehow echoed on the textured background. Being life-size, this relief is a close likeness of Hepburn's face, which is characterised as much by humanity as prominence. The high collar supporting her head creates an upper-class style. Hepburn had a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) upbringing that wielded cultural and social power. The Hepburns genealogy has been researched through the Whittier line back to France's King Louis IX, a great grandson of King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom Hepburn played in The Lion in Winter (1969). She is also listed as one of the descendants of the Mayflower Compact (1620) author William Brewster. Hepburn stated (in her 1973 interview on The Dick Cavett Show) that although she agreed with Christian principles and thought highly of Jesus Christ, she did not believe in religion or the afterlife. Her paternal grandfather, Sewell Snowden Hepburn, was an Episcopal clergyman, but she told another journalist (this time a Ladies Home Journal reporter) in October 1991: "I'm an atheist and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people." Above all, Hepburn was a terrific actress full of class and with great taste. Rich hit it off with Hepburn, and travelled together to Greece in 1958 and the Near East in 1961.
[Megakles Rogakos 01/2009]
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
ROGAKOS, MEGAKLES Frances Rich - La Gazelle 2010 The American College of Greece - ACG Art, Athens
