Ida Brun

Adelaide Caroline Johanne Brun (known as Ida Brun and later as Ida (de) Bombelles; 20 September 1792 – 23 November 1857) was a Danish singer, dancer, and classical mime artist in the genre known as mimoplastic art or "attitude". The literary scholar, Henning Fenger (1921–1985), described Brun as "a shapely, classic blond whose mimoplastic art captivated Europe".

Brun was born in 1792 at Sophienholm, the family estate in Lyngby. She was the youngest daughter of Constantin, an affluent merchant, and Friederike Brun, an author and salon hostess. She was one of five children; her siblings included Carl Friedrich Balthasar Brun (1784–1869), Charlotte Brun (b. 1788), and Augusta (Guste) Brun (1790). From an early age, she exhibited the ability to perform as a singer and dancer, thanks to the encouragement of her mother who had been impressed by the "attitudes" (or "living sculptures") developed by Lady Emma Hamilton, whom she had seen in Naples in 1796. Together with her mother, Ida travelled to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy from 1801 to 1810. Wherever she went, she was trained in singing, music, and dance by the best possible instructors, already performing for Goethe in Jena in 1803 at age 5. In her performances, she would move delicately into each position, freezing for a few seconds before gracefully draping herself in the folds of her tunic so as to represent classical figures such as Iphigenia, Galatea, Eurydice, Diana, Aurora, and Althaea. Her postures are recorded in drawings by the German Christoph Heinrich Kniep and in the poems of Alphonse de Lamartine, as well as in her mother's correspondence and in her 1824 biography "Idas ästhetische Entwickelung" (Ida's Aesthetic Development).

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