Earle Forbes Two Extra Rare Photographs of Dancer Francisco Moncion in Ballet Sebastian 1944.

A pair of extraordinary very rare photographic portraits by Earle Forbes (1897-1970) of principal dancer Francisco Moncion in choreographer Edward Caton’s ballet “Sebastian”. Photographs were taken in 1944 and are signed by the photographer.  

Photographs are gelatin silver richly toned on heavy photographic paper, 11 x 14 inches with a white quarter inch boarder, in excellent condition. Provenance:  from Francisco Moncion’s personal photographic collection. 

Earle Forbes, an accomplished former dancer with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn’s Denishawn dance company, made his transition into the visual arts in the 1940s. He taught himself photography using a simple box camera and soon developed a niche for capturing figure, form, and movement. His black-and-white portraits and dynamic action shots primarily focused on athletes, bodybuilders, and dancers. Forbes’s work from the 1940s and 1950s is celebrated for its posed elegance and focus on human anatomy and performance.

Francisco Monción (1918 – 1995) was a Dominican-born American ballet dancer and choreographer who was a charter member of the New York City Ballet. Moncion historically was one of ballet’s most expressive dancers thus, over the course of his long career, spanning some forty years, he created roles in 22 major works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins for NYCB. He worked with artist including Marc Chagall, Picasso and Salvador Dalí during his performance career and, as well as a dancer, was a highly sought after model in the mid-20th Century posing in ballet studies and nude portraits for photographers Carl van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, Earle Forbes, and for Italian-American artist Corrado Cagli among many others.