BY ROGER VANDERCRUSE, CALLED LACROIX, RETAILED BY SIMON-PHILIPPE POIRIER, CIRCA 1765

Roger Vandercruse (1728-1799), known as Lacroix, maître in 1755.

ELSIE DELORA KILVERT AND SAMUEL H. KRESS
Elsie Delora Kilvert, née Bernardo (1891-1961), was hailed by the Boston Globe upon her 1909 marriage to the cartoonist B. Cory Kilvert as "the prettiest and premier model in New York". By the 1920s, she had become the long-time companion of Samuel H. Kress (1853-1955), the retail magnate who assembled one of the most important collections of European art in the twentieth century and helped establish the National Gallery of Art. Mrs. Kilvert accompanied Kress on annual visits to Italy in the 1920s and 1930s and assisted in selecting works to furnish his duplex penthouse at 1020 Fifth Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Museum and just a few blocks north of Mrs. Aitken's apartment. Her contribution to the Kress Collection may even have included its very genesis: a November 1953 profile in Life magazine recounts that his collecting began around 1920, when she began bringing him to art galleries, having determined "to get Sam interested in beautiful things".