Dorothy Dene

Dorothy Dene (1859 – 27 December 1899), born Ada Alice Pullan, was an English stage actress and artist's model for the painter Frederick Leighton and some of his associates. Dene was considered to have a classical face and figure and a flawless complexion. Her height was above average and she had long arms, large violet eyes and abundant golden chestnut hair.

Biography

Dene was born in New Cross, London, in 1859; he birth name was Ada Alice Pullen. She came from a large family of girls, a number of whom earned their living from acting on stage. She lived with her four sisters in an apartment in South Kensington, London.

Career as a model

She lived with her four sisters in an apartment in South Kensington, London. According to a story published in 1897, Leighton chose her as the one woman in Europe whose face and figure most closely tallied with his ideal. Leighton searched Europe for a model suitable for his 1894 painting Cymon and Iphigenia, eventually finding Dene in a theatre in London. However, the story about her being found in a theatre is contradicted in Leighton's biography, written by Emilia Barrington right after his death. According to Barrington, Dene was spotted by the artist at the doorstep of a painter's studio close to Leighton's. The studio mentioned was probably that of Louise Starr Canziani in Kensington Green where she was already working as a model. She sat for Leighton when he painted Bianca in 1881.

Dene

The Dene people (/ˈdɛneɪ/ DEN-ay) (Dené) are an aboriginal group of First Nations who inhabit the northern boreal and Arctic regions of Canada. The Dené speak Northern Athabaskan languages. Dene is the common Athabaskan word for "people" (Sapir 1915, p. 558). The term "Dene" has two usages. More commonly, it is used narrowly to refer to the Athabaskan speakers of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada, especially including the Chipewyan (Denesuline), Tlicho (Dogrib), Yellowknives (T'atsaot'ine), Slavey (Deh Gah Got'ine or Deh Cho), and Sahtu (the Eastern group in Jeff Leer's classification; part of the Northwestern Canada group in Keren Rice's classification). But it is sometimes also used to refer to all Northern Athabaskan speakers, who are spread in a wide range all across Alaska and northern Canada. Note that Dene never includes the Pacific Coast Athabaskan or Southern Athabaskan speakers in the continental U.S., despite the fact that the term is used to denote the Athabaskan languages as a whole (the Na-Dene language family). The Southern Athabaskan speakers do, however, refer to themselves with similar words: Diné (Navajo) and Indé (Apache).

Dene (valley)

A dene, derived from the Old English denu and frequently spelled dean, used to be a common name for a valley, in which sense it is frequently found as a component of English place-names, such as Rottingdean and Ovingdean.

In the English counties of Durham and Northumberland a dene is a steep-sided wooded valley through which a burn runs. Many of the incised valleys cut by small streams that flow off the Durham and Northumberland plateau into the North Sea are given the name Dene, as in Castle Eden Dene and Crimdon Dene in Durham and Jesmond Dene in Tyne and Wear.

See also

References

Dene (disambiguation)

The Dene are an aboriginal group of First Nations in northern Canada.

Dene may also refer to:

People

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Surname