Emily Post Pouring Tea

Emily Post (c. October 27, 1872 – September 25, 1960) was an American author famous for writing about etiquette. Post was born Emily Price in Baltimore, Maryland, possibly in October 1872 (the precise date is disputed). Her father was the architect, Bruce Price, and her mother was Josephine (Lee) Price of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. After being educated at home in her early years, Price attended Miss Graham's finishing school in New York after her family moved there.

The New York Times' Dinitia Smith reports, in her review of Laura Claridge's 2008 biography of Post,

“Emily was tall, pretty and spoiled. [...] She grew up in a world of grand estates, her life governed by carefully delineated rituals like the cotillion with its complex forms and its dances — the Fan, the Ladies Mocked, Mother Goose — called out in dizzying turns by the dance master.”

Price met her future husband, Edwin Main Post, a prominent banker, at a ball in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Following their wedding in 1892 and a honeymoon tour of Europe, they lived in New York's Washington Square. They also had a country cottage, named "Emily Post Cottage", in Tuxedo Park, which was one of four Bruce Price Cottages she inherited from her father. The couple had two sons, Edwin Main Post Jr. (1893) and Bruce Price Post (1895).

Emily divorced Mr. Post in 1905, because of his affairs with chorus girls and fledgling actresses, which made him the target of blackmail.

14" x 11" original silver print with Halsman's stamp on the reverse. No date noted.