The Daily Valdemar No. 19: March 31

Valdemar Andersen, Full-page in the satirical magazine Klods-Hans, October 8, 1909

Today's moment of calm is the fluttering lightness of a human butterfly.

She was but 21 years old when Valdemar Andersen drew her on stage at a vaudeville theatre in Copenhagen. She was known by the name Lily Farfalla and debuted at the age of 12 at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, she had since then been a performer at Moulin Rouge and moved on to do acts of her own performing with her mandolin, as she told when a Danish paper interviewed her in 1907. Here too she underlined that her parents were traveling with her wherever she was performing, making it understood that she was not any stereotypical burlesque performer.

The interviewer asked her if the french cartoonist of piquant women, Henry Gerbault, had drawn her, which she refused on the spot, stating that the painter of the bourgeois Parisian street scene, Joan Roig Soler, would make her portrait for the Paris salon the following year.

Neither of piquant nor bourgeois interest to Valdemar, he focused on her professionalism as a music entertainer and played with her name of Farfalla, i.e. butterfly. She is lightness in a dress with pompoms and floating underskirts and curls with bow to one side. She has no clear outline nor is she solid within dressed in an intricately busy embroidered dress and stockings. She is moving and floating with next to weightlessness. She is hardly even grounded composed, as she is of three triangles all three points of which meet at the head of her mandolin.