Uncovers the life and influence of Florence Ruth Louchheim, the inspiration behind Spanish poet and painter José Moreno Villa’s Jacinta la pelirroja.

In 1926, Spanish poet and painter José Moreno Villa met a recent Radcliffe graduate at the Residencia de Estudiantes who changed his life forever and inspired the verses of his most famous book of poems, Jacinta la pelirroja (1929). He never revealed the true identity of his muse, and for many years all that was known about her was that she had come to Madrid to attend the summer courses for foreigners held at the Residencia, where Moreno Villa lived between 1917 and 1936, serving as an informal tutor to students like García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí. 

A passionate romance soon blossomed, leading the couple to make plans for marriage. However, after a trip to New York for her father—a Wall Street millionaire—to meet her future husband, the couple’s breakup was sealed. In this book, Christopher Maurer, an authority on Spanish poetry, recounts the life and fortune of the mysterious Jacinta, whose real name was Florence Ruth Louchheim, an ardent defender of modern art who, in later life, would confront her social class and put her money at the service of painting. The Spanish artist’s tumultuous relationship with Florence, his visit to New York, and his clash with American pragmatism marked a turning point in his life—a sort of "beautiful lightning" reflected in his later pictorial and literary works, created both in Madrid and, after his exile due to the civil war, in Mexico, where by chance he met Florence again. 

In Beautiful Lighting that Lasts, the love story is intertwined with the teaching of art in Harvard’s fabled Museum Course, the unsettling encounter of a Spaniard with the religious and racial differences of American modernity, and Florence’s life as collector in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1940s and 50s. Profusely illustrated, this co-publication with Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes also offers the first selection in English from Jacinta la pelirroja, translated by Lauren Szenderski.