Doug Matthews Art Collections

Power of Beauty

This is a subject I have been wanting to tackle for a long time - my own personal photographic interpretation of what some of the famous - and occasionally infamous - women of history may have looked like. These are the women whom history has extolled as exceptionally beautiful and who exploited that beauty to influence those in power - the true "femmes fatales" as we have come to call them. Perhaps they indeed were the ones in power themselves. Occasionally they might have been entirely sexual, at other times politically astute, or even ruthless. Never, though, did they go unnoticed. The concept here is not so much to do a modern interpretation but more to use the tools now available to go back in time and imagine I am the artist who is creating a likeness of them for posterity. Thus, the images in this gallery will not be typical 21st century photographs but are intended to evoke the era of the famous beauties as well as the style of art of the time. I will occasionally add a more modern interpretation of them for interest. As of 2024, depictions of these women will occasionally be my own AI creations.