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Olympe Pélissier (9 May 1799 – 22 March 1878) was a French artists' model and courtesan and the second wife of the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini. She sat for Vernet for his painting of Judith and Holofernes .
Olympe Pélissier was a French artists' model and courtesan and the second wife of the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini. She sat for Vernet for his painting of Judith and Holofernes. Honoré de Balzac described her as "the most beautiful courtesan in Paris".
Olympe Pélissier (née Olympe Louise Alexandrine Descuilliers [1] à Paris le 9 mai 1799 et morte le 22 mars 1878 à Paris) était le modèle du peintre Horace Vernet.
The soirees continued, and Olympe Pélissier went on masterminding his life with her usual rigour. Rossini’s last official offering came in 1868, when King Victor Emanuel II nominated him for the Grand Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy.
Olympe Pélissier had taken an apartment in Paris’s quartier Montmartre, to which only their closest friends were admitted: Count Frederic Fillet-Will, Baron Lionel de Rothschild, Daniel Auber, Michele Carafa, and Francesco Sampieri.
It is not clear when Rossini and Olympe Pélissier first met. Whenever that was, the relationship itself appears to have taken root in 1832. A letter to Honoré de Balzac in January invited him to supper in the company of Rossini.
We look at the ups and downs of the relationship between Giaochino Rossini and his second wife, Parisian courtesan Olympe Pélissier.
