A view of Parisian rooftops that has not been seen since 1944.
Archives: Persephone Post
If you think of all the planning and prepping that goes into most gatherings of world leaders – and this one just happened, and happened with admirable calm and efficiency (apparently). This in itself was very heartening.
At Persephone Books we are sustained by two crucial beliefs: Do as You Would be Done By, and Live and Let Live. Running a small business in central London for fifteen years has not been all flowers, classical music, cake for tea and animated literary chat, however it may seem. This week on the Post: Je suis Charlie – because over the next few days there will be no other pictures anyone will want to look at. This photograph shows the staff that remain at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
Female police officers and Inspector Mary Allen, a former suffragette, at the Women’s War Work exhibition, London, 1916. There are more examples of Christina Broom’s work at the Museum of London site here, including many inspiring suffragette pictures. NB the Guardian here and in the paper tomorrow has the ten best suffragette books and includes our (fascinating and important) No Surrender.
An Irish Guards machine-gun team in 1914 – not a single soldier survived. (Mollie Panter-Downes’s father was in the Irish Guards and died at the Battle of Mons in the first days of the war.)
This photograph of two soldiers (?brothers) from the Household Battalion was taken at Waterloo Station in 1914.
Christina Broom photographed Christabel Pankhurst at The Women’s Exhibition held at the Princes’ Skating Rink, Knightsbridge in May 1909.
Christina Broom was the first woman to have a career as a press photographer and she and her husband ran a stall near Buckingham Palace selling her photographs. The archive has been acquired by the Museum of London and there is to be an exhibition in June. Here she is on her stand at the Women’s War Work exhibition, London in May 1916.
And the final portrait in the pink theme (after yesterday’s break for the New Year’s Day holiday): Gerald Brockhurst’s undated Portrait of a Lady sold at Bonham’s last March. Brockhurst is an acquired taste but one or two of the portraits are superb; it’s just that he often didn’t seem able to resist the saccharine,
For the last day of the year: a portrait which focuses on the same red as the two previous paintings this week. This extraordinary and beautiful 1944 painting by Duffy Ayres is of our heroine Tirzah Garwood. She was married to Eric Ravilious and was as brilliant an artist as him but was almost completely ignored in her lifetime. There is a very good book but it is a collector’s item; and there was an exhibition in 2012; but we would like more recognition for Tirzah. And for Duffy, who is going to be 100 in 2015 (and apparently lives/lived in Bloomsbury). The beauty and wit and insight, and indeed timelessness, of this portrait sums up, we hope, some of what Persephone Books stands for. Happy New Year to all Persephone readers!