Eugenia Errázuriz

Eugenia Huici Arguedas de Errázuriz (15 September 1860 – 1951) was a Chilean patron of modernism and a style leader of Paris from 1880 into the 20th century.

[1] Her circle of friends and protégés included Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, and the poet Blaise Cendrars.

She was one of 13 children of Ildefonso Huici y Peón, a Chilean silver magnate who fled civil war and moved his family to an estate in La Calera, Chile on the banks of the Aconcagua river, then a village some 60 kilometres (37 mi) northeast of Valparaíso; Her mother Manuela Arguedas was Bolivian.

Eugenia married José Tomás Errázuriz, a young and wealthy landscape painter from a well-known winemaking family.

Her first years of marriage were spent at Panquehue Errázuriz, the family's wine estate, where she had a son who died soon after birth; the couple eventually had three surviving children: Maximiliano, Carmen, and María.

The couple settled in Paris, where Eugenia attracted a prominent following, including friends in the circle of the Subercaseauxes: the American heiress Winnaretta Singer; the composer Gabriel Fauré; French painters Joseph-Roger Jourdain, Ernest Duez, and Paul Helleu; and the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.

She establishing friendships with creative figures such as Walter Sickert, Baron Adolph de Meyer, Jean Cocteau and Cecil Beaton.

She was also painted by Jacques-Emile Blanche, Giovanni Boldini, Paul Helleu, Augustus John, Ambrose McEvoy and Pablo Picasso.

[1] José Tomás Errázuriz fell sick with tuberculosis and spent much time in Switzerland; the couple became estranged before he died in 1927.

[6] Le Corbusier was commissioned c.1930 to design her a beach house in Viña del Mar, Chile, but it was never built.

He also wrote of her in The Glass of Fashion: Her effect on the taste of the last fifty years has been so enormous that the whole aesthetic of modern interior decoration, and many of the concepts of simplicity...generally acknowledged today, can be laid at her remarkable doorstep.She banned matched suites of furniture, potted palms and clutter.

[16] The designer Jean-Michel Frank was her leading disciple from the 1920s, mixing the Louis XVI style with modern fittings.