The return of the weekly portrait: Christina Stead

I am enjoying Cotter's England so much, there is simply nothing else for it. Here is a picture of its author, Christina Stead. More of it and her later ...

The Weekly Portrait: Winter in Berwick Church

Still reeling from our visit to Berwick Church, this week's portrait is the lovely "winter" from Duncan Grant's Four Seasons mural which can be found on the chancel screen where it was painted on in 1944. I wonder which local people posed for this?

The Weekly Portrait: Golden Face

Because I am still pondering our lovely visit to Hampton Court Palace, and because sometimes, you can't beat a bit of bling.

The weekly portrait: Harold Monro

I have searched and searched and I cannot find a portrait of the poet Harold Monro (1879-1932) other than this which is, as you can see, that featured on the cover of his biography. I was tickled to find out a bit about him after reading the following in Marjorie Todd's memoir Snakes and Ladders:

"Most of the young men did actually work at one thing or another, I think, though there were always a few playboys among them. I once overheard a conversation between two of them, and so did the poet Harold Monro who was sitting next to me, leaning blindly forward with both hands on his stick.

After a while he asked them quietly, "what do you do?"

"Oh" one of the young men answered airily, "I drink you know, and I fornicate."

"For which firm do you fornicate?" asked Harold Monro."

So, on that note, I may have to find out more about him.

The Weekly Portrait: Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry

This painting is called "Woman" but the model is Nina Hamnett, who has appeared in this blog more than once (infact, at least twice) and it was painted in 1915.

Some years later, in her wonderful autobiography Snakes and Ladders, Marjory Todd describes how Hamnett introduced her to her mentor C. K. Ogden:

""This is C. K. Ogden, my dear. Ogden, this is Blackie".... "very rich man, my dear! He is going to give me a marvellous dinner!"

But a little later Ogden said to me "You are dining with me" and bore me off to the Etoile. Nina never showed the slightest resentment about this sort of thing. She always brought a most unfemenineblandness into everything, and yet, I am afraid, in those days as in later years, she often ended the evening alone".

Portrait of the Week: John and Myfanwy Piper

Partly because I loved Frances Spalding's double biography but never got around to reviewing it and partly in anticipation of reading Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns; here are this fascinating twosome.

(Group) Portrait of the Week: gas masks!

This was, needless to say, not the standard issue!

The Weekly Portrait: Lee Miller, by Man Ray

For more on this legendary lady, watch this blog....

The Weekly Portrait: Anne Boleyn

Because I am so enjoying Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, for more on which, watch this space...

The (return of the) Weekly Portrait: Adam and Eve

A slightly perculiar image, courtesy of a house in Moret sur Loing, Ile de France.

Bon weekend!

The Weekly Portrait: Isadora Duncan; dancer, lover, femme fatale

The Weekly Portrait: Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell (1912)

This week, a portrait, without a face:

The Weekly Portrait: Mary Stuart, Queen of France, Queen of Scots, in the Jardin de Luxembourg, Paris

Because portraits are not all about paint on canvas

The Weekly Portrait: Gwen John (self portrait)

The (slightly scary) Weekly Portrait: Le departs des fruits et legumes du coeur de Paris le 28 Fevrier 1969 by Raymond Mason

It is Friday 13th and I am feeling a bit silly, so what is there to do apart from post odd pictures on the internet?

The Weekly Portrait: Lytton Strachey, reading by (Dora) Carrington, 1916

For this portrait - a quotation from my current read Frances Partridge, the biography by Anne Chisholm

“Their sexual relationship, hardly surprisingly, did not endure; but the intimacy and affection between them was to grow. Lytton was a natural teacher, and Carrington became his devoted and enthusiastic pupil. Together they read English and French history, Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets; above all, she loved to listen to him read his own writing. He encouraged her to work; during 1916 she painted his portrait lying back on a cushion, reading. It is an image of reverence for an intellectual, a bearded, bespectacled man deep in his book; his skin glows and his beautiful translucent hands with their slender fingers are painted with veneration as well as skill”

For more on Anne Chisholm’s excellent writing... watch this blog.

The Weekly Portrait: Nancy Mitford by Mogens Tvede

Going bananas on Nancy Mitford. Well, only for this week.

The Weekly Portrait: Ellen Terry by George Frederick Watts

Welcome to this, the first of what I hope will be a regular feature: the weekly portrait, in which I share images of and by people who interest me and most of whom reflect some of my reading. Here we have a youthful Ellen Terry painted by her first husband, George Frederick Watts in circa. 1864