Tarzanne

Tarzanne (Harriette Tatore; Harriette de Sanchez)
Born: July 13, 1904: New York, New York
Died: April 6, 1957: Dorset, Vermont
Alternative Names: Harriette DeSanchez; Harriette Tatore; Tarzanne [frequently misspelled first name: Harriet, Harriett, Henriette]
Before becoming an artist Harriette de Sanchez was an actress and model. She used the stage names Tarzanne (alternate spelling Tarzan), as well as, the name Harriette Tatore. She continued to use the nickname Tarzanne throughout her life. It is unclear whether the name Harriette Tatore was a stage name or if it was her given name. The name Harriette Tatore does not appear in government documents (birth or census records) until 1924, when she used the name on her marriage certificate, which records that she was born in New York City on July 13, 1904. Her parent’s names, however, were left blank on the certificate.
Harriette Tatore was a successful actress by the time she was sixteen in 1920. In 1921, she lived at 46 East 23th Street. She was cast by the director John Murray Anderson in the Greenwich Village Follies from 1920 to 1923. Some of her performances include: “League of Notions” (1921); “Jack and Jill” (1923); “Helen of Troy, New York” (1923); Inter-Theatre Arts School of Acting and Production “Loose: A Hymn of Freedom” (1925); “Madeline of the Movies” (1925). She traveled to London and Paris with John Murray Anderson to perform in 1921. A preserved film clip captures the young actress returning to New York on the S. S. Aquitania. https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/1910
See the list of her performances below.
Tarzanne was one of the “Follies Ladies” who worked at Kate Seabrook’s café “126” on Waverly Place, Greenwich Village, and was a model in Seabrook’s Fashion Shows. In 1922, Tarzanne and her fellow Greenwich Village Follies actress Dinarzade were photographed by Nickolas Muray (1892-1964) in a wedding dress advertisement for the department store Franklin Simon and Company. Ira L. Hill (1877-1937) also photographed Tarzanne for Franklin Simon and Company.
It is possible that Harriette Tatore began studying art in the early 1920s, while she was acting and modeling. A newspaper article titled, “Greenwich Village tells the World How to Dress,” features three photographs of Tarzanne, including one of her holding a drawing with the caption: “Cartoon by Tarzanne.” A Bennington Banner, June 1, 1972, article about a Harriette de Sanchez exhibition at the Dorset Library, cites why she left her acting career: “A tall, strikingly beautiful actress, she was advised to leave theatre by John Murray Anderson (Director of the Follies) who told her she was just too tall for his leading men. Mrs. de Sanchez began painting seriously thereafter, studying at the Art Students League and in Paris.”
On October 31, 1924 Harriette Tatore married Peter de Sanchez (1898-1978). His brother J.A.M. (Tony) de Sanchez was described by the writer William Seabrook as “tops in the Village upper crust.” Tony and his wife Dorothy de Sanchez were inveterate theatre-goers and frequented Katie Seabrook’s café where Tarzanne worked. William Seabrook wrote in his 1942 autobiography No Hiding Place, page 212: “Tarzanne married Tony de Sanchez’s younger brother Peter, she studied in France and is now a painter of some repute with a studio in the Vermont mountains.”
Peter de Sanchez was a writer, worked in advertising agencies (Newell-Emmett, Inc.; N.W. Ayer & Sons; Wm. H. Rankin, Wales Advertising Co.), the War Production Board, and in 1944 was Lieutenant Colonel Chief of Education and Information in the Motion Picture Service, distributing films to the European Theatre. In the 1930s Peter and Harriet de Sanchez rented an apartment in New York City. In the 1940s they rented rooms from Lewis and Elizabeth Kimball, in New Rochelle, New York. The Kimballs were fellow students at the Arts Students League, and Elizabeth was the niece of the Southern Vermont artist Henry E. Schnakenberg. In the mid-1940s to the 1950s, the couple lived in Germany and France, and periodically visited Dorset, Vermont in the summer.
At the Arts Students League de Sanchez met the artist Felicia Meyer and her husband Reginald Marsh. Harriette de Sanchez may have met Marsh as early as 1923 when he designed the Greenwich Village Follies set. Meyer introduced de Sanchez to her circle of Southern Vermont artists, including her parents the artists Herbert William Meyer and Anne Norton Meyer who summered in Dorset, Vermont. Harriette de Sanchez started showing her paintings in New York City around 1932.
See a list of her exhibitions below.
She was represented by the Macbeth Galleries by 1943, and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1938 and 1943. Robert G. McIntyre, a Dorset resident, was the Vice President of MacBeth Galleries and the President of the Southern Vermont Artists Association. As a member of the Southern Vermont Artist Association, de Sanchez was a regular contributor to their annual exhibitions from about 1937 until 1955. Harriette and Peter de Sanchez were house guests of the Meyers and rented cottages in Dorset, Vermont in the summer.
On April 6, 1957, at the age of 53, Harriette de Sanchez died of cancer in Dorset, Vermont. She is buried at the Maple Hill Cemetery in Dorset. According to the Manchester Journal, September 5, 1957, the Meyer family, with whom Harriette de Sanchez stayed during her first visit to Dorset, organized an exhibition of her work at the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester in September. “She was a fine artist with wide popularity, this exhibition expresses her insight and interpretation with an interesting manipulation and facility in execution.”
Theater Productions:
Greenwich Village Follies, 1920-1923. [Tarzanne] In the 1921 production, Tarzanne wore Robert Locher’s Black Peacock skirt based on Aubrey Beardsley’s design and “Tarzanne, the grotesque in a Wladyslaw T. Benda mask; in the 1922 production Tarzanne was one of “The Magic Cabinet Girls” and a Greer model “The Passion Flower.”
Kate Seabrook’s Fashion Show, Follies Ladies, Café at 156 Waverly Place, Greenwich Village, 1921.
Toured in London and France, 1921 with John Murray Anderson. [Harriette Tatore]
League of Notions, (An Inconsequential Process of Music, Dance and Dramatic Interlude), New Oxford, November 1921. [Harriette Tatore]
Film clip of the actress “Miss Harriet [sic] Tatore” returning from London on the Aquitania. https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/1910
“Jack and Jill” at the Globe Theatre, as a member of the ensemble, 1923. [Tarzanne]
“Helen of Troy, New York,” Selwyn Theater and Times Square Theater, 1923. [Harriette Tatore]
“Loose: A Hymn of Freedom,” Inter-Theatre Arts School of Acting and Production, 42 Commerce Street, by Eleanor Shaler and Thurston McCauley, as Mrs. Brown, 1925. [Tarzanne]
“Madeline of the Movies,” by the Dramateurs of Brooklyn, December 1925. [Harriette Tatore]
Written by Deborah Tear Haynes