Descending Night (2015)

When Audrey Munson was born—on June 8, 1891, to Katherine and Edgar Munson, in Rochester, New York—her life was expected to take the typical course of the life of a woman born in a rural area at that time. Perhaps it was a story she believed in, a fated tale that explained how a girl from nowhere had become the it-girl of the 1910s, “the Queen of the Artists’ Studios,” “Miss Manhattan,” “the most perfectly formed woman in the world,” a teenage model who found immortal success as the body that served as inspiration for the best artists and sculptors of the beaux arts era, who created work that catches one’s eye in New York City to this day. Eventually the city’s heights were crowned by Audrey’s face and body, cast in gilded copper, but by the time her likeness came to stand guard over all five boroughs, Audrey had left New York City and was living out the final sixty years of her life behind the walls of a mental institution, alone and forgotten.

Source: believermag.com