On October 15, 1917, a French firing squad executed Mata Hari at Vincennes, outside Paris. She was 41. Eight months earlier, the woman whose stage performances had made her famous had posed for a police photograph in a dark coat and hat.
Born Margaretha Zelle in the Netherlands, she built a career in Paris around an invented Asian identity. During the First World War, her travel, lovers and contacts attracted intelligence officers on both sides. She accepted German money and later offered to work for France. Those dealings were real; the scale of the military damage attributed to her remains disputed.
These three photographs follow the public image that made the case so easy to sensationalize: the performer, the celebrity circulated by a news agency, and the prisoner. None shows her execution. Their dates and origins matter, especially in a story where a compelling picture has so often passed for evidence.
Topic: Mata Hari; espionage; First World War
01 / 03
The Clothes She Wore at Her Arrest
Mata Hari stands in a dark, belted coat, her hat still on. The Fries Museum dates this photograph to February 13, 1917, the day French police arrested her in Paris. The plain setting gives the picture an intimacy that her publicity portraits lack, but it tells us nothing about the evidence against her. Her trial and execution were still months away. It is an arrest portrait, not a photograph of her last morning.
Photo details
Date
February 13, 1917
Location
Paris, France
Photographer
Unknown photographer
Archive / collection
Fries Museum collection; reproduction via Wikimedia Commons
Rights / license
Public domain, as marked on the Wikimedia Commons file record; photographer unidentified.
Unknown photographer / Fries Museum collection, via Wikimedia Commons
02 / 03
A Paris Stage Identity, 1906
The jeweled headdress, metal breast ornaments and carefully arranged drapery belong to the stage character she had built in Paris. Margaretha Zelle came from Leeuwarden in the Netherlands; Mata Hari was the name under which audiences knew her. This 1906 portrait predates her arrest by eleven years. Its elaborate pose helps explain her celebrity, though the exotic biography sold with that celebrity should not be mistaken for her own origins.
Photo details
Date
1906
Location
Exact studio location not recorded
Photographer
Unknown photographer
Archive / collection
Bettmann Archive image, reproduced on Wikimedia Commons
Rights / license
Public domain: Wikimedia Commons marks the original photograph PD-France and PD-US-expired.
Unknown photographer / Bettmann Archive image, via Wikimedia Commons
03 / 03
A Celebrity Filed by a News Agency
A name written across the top of this glass-negative reproduction identifies her as “Mata Hari (Lady Macleod).” The Bain News Service preserved a theatrical portrait, complete with ornamental headdress, for use in the picture press. The Library of Congress holds the negative in its George Grantham Bain Collection. The caption card does not record when the portrait was taken, so it cannot safely be read as an image from her final year. The agency label tells us how the picture was filed, not when she sat for it.
Photo details
Date
Undated; no date recorded on the caption card
Location
Location not recorded
Photographer
Bain News Service, publisher; original photographer unidentified
Archive / collection
Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection; LC-DIG-ggbain-25495
Rights / license
No known restrictions on publication; public-domain Bain News Service image, as recorded by the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.
