The Swiss artist August Benziger, according to AJ Philpott in the 1916 Boston Globe, "knows and understands the big things of the world, and he is an admirer of the men and women who are associated with the big things of the world." 

If this sounds like propaganda, that's because it is. It was working for the communists on the other side of the world, and people didn't know the term "PR" because Mad Men wasn't on yet. One of the two sources on Benziger that I could get my hands on is a 58-page ad, produced by the flashy Benziger (he dressed like Cab Calloway), scion of the great Benziger publishing dynasty and, according to his own carefully selected newspaper clippings, one of the greatest portraitists. All fifty-eight pages are a celebration of his twenty-fifth anniversary as an artist, and they're filled with reasons not to be the last kid on the block without a Benziger portrait of your very own. After all, he studied at the Académie Julian with William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and then with Léon Bonnat at the Ecole de Beaux Arts. 

An unsigned 1907 "special cable from Paris," for example, begins by telling you that "you confess your intense desire for a glimpse" of Benziger's portrait of President Teddy Roosevelt. Not done with the second person perspective yet, it goes on to say that, for some reason, "You are in Washington talking with the President. 'Good gracious,' you ejaculate, 'the picture is alive.'" That's right, Benziger's portrait is so good you might mistake it to actually be the real President! He even looks like he's stepping down from the canvas, like Samara from The Ring. Benziger is, in the apocryphal words of McKinley, a soul dealer.

But according to that logic, Benziger never poised to stand a chance against the much-more-photorealistic product of the photographer. Indeed, perhaps the reason Benziger has no Wikipedia article is that almost all journalists who publish on Benziger make you feel like the best thing about him is that his portraits are "convincing.“ If you didn't know he was an artist, you might mistake him for a lawyer or a politician. Though of course "convincing" is the word in a headline which Benziger himself chose to highlight.

With department store heiress Gertrude Lytton, the artist is the father of Marieli Benziger, who is also his biographer. Benziger the Younger writes in novelistic terms about her father courting her mother, finally revealing to Gertrude Lytton, "it's you I'm interested in," before "sweeping her" into his arms and kissing her "with fervor."