Audrey Munson (1891-1996) was an American showgirl, model and actor.  Approached by the artist Felix Herzog in 1909, while window-shopping with her mother on Fifth Avenue in New York City, she was recruited by him to pose.  This led to her being sculpted, painted and photographed in the nude.  She was also the first woman to appear naked in a film.

Munson was the original “supermodel” and was known as “Miss Manhattan”, the  “Panama-Pacific Exposition Girl” and the “American Venus”.  She was the model for numerous statues in New York City (Columbia University, the Frick Museum, Central Park, the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge), the Panama-Pacific Exposition (most of the sculptures) and the Wisconsin State Capitol, as well as many other state capitols.  Among others, she posed for William Leftwich Dodge, Daniel Chester French, Charles Dana Gibson and Arnold Genthe.  Munson appeared in four silent films, though only Purity has survived.  Treated horribly by the men who managed her career, she suffered a breakdown in 1931 and spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum and then a nursing home until her death at the age of 104.

Audrey Munson was a classically beautiful woman, who appears unclothed, to this day, at many sites across America.  A breath-taking beauty.

A quote:

That which is the immodesty of other women has been my virtue – my willingness that the world should gaze upon my figure unadorned.

S. Gray