Evelyn Nesbit

Evelyn Nesbit (December 25, 1884 – January 17, 1967) was the professional name of Florence Evelyn Nesbit, a popular American chorus girl and artists’ model whose liaison with renowned architect Stanford White immortalized her as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing."

In the early part of the twentieth century, the figure and face of Evelyn Nesbit was ubiquitous, appearing in mass circulation newspaper and magazine advertisements, on souvenir items and calendars making her a cultural celebrity. Her career had begun in her early teens in Philadelphia and continued in New York posing for a cadre of respected artists of the era, James Carroll Beckwith, Frederick S. Church, and notably Charles Dana Gibson, who idealized her as a “Gibson Girl.” She had the distinction of being an early “live model,” in an era when fashion photography as an advertising medium was just beginning its ascendancy.

As a stage performer, and while still a teen-ager, she garnered the attention of the then forty-seven year old architect and New York social lion Stanford White, who became her lover and dedicated benefactor. Nesbit achieved world-wide notoriety when her jealous husband, multi-millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, shot and murdered Stanford White on the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 25, 1906, leading to what the press would sensationalize as “The Trial of the Century.”