This painting by Renoir was painted in Naples in 1881. Its fascinatingly ordinary and yet we all love it - there is a short video on youtube here . Only another five weeks until we can see the real t...
This Manet will be at the Royal Academy - its Interior at Arcachon 1871. Another novel – about a mother and son perhaps? Is he reading to her but longing to be in the sea? And what is the symbolism o...
Here is Francine fifty-five years before the opening of the Clark, in costume on the Paris stage in 1900. Who amongst us feels a biography coming on? Or perhaps a novel called Francine and Sterl...
Shortly after Sterling Clark arrived in Paris he met Francine Clary (1870-1960), a French actress and, herself illegitimate, the mother of an illegitimate daughter, Viviane. Sterling and Franci...
The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute is in Western Massachusetts; its quite inaccessible for most Persephone readers but definitely vaut le detour for anyone in the US. It was built in...
The last picture from Our Mothers brings us back to Lambs Conduit Street: we often imagine the mothers walking up to the Foundlings Hospital on their last harrowing journey before they hand over thei...
And, like yesterdays governess. a reminder that women have been working outside the home for centuries - the difference being that until the 1960s they almost always (although of course not invariabl...
Creating an impression - the new governess arrives (1892). There are three good books about governesses: Other Peoples Daughters: the Life and Times of the Governess by Ruth Brandon, The Vi...
The Waning Honeymoon: Those persons who have experienced a lune de miel know that there is a risk in suddenly placing two people in constant, isolated companionship for thirty days. Rapid travelling ...
Persephone Books focuses on mid twentieth-century women writers, but the late nineteenth century is where it all began since so many of our authors were born around then. This week on the Post we cel...
This kind of picture is particularly out of place at the Getty! Jeanne Kéfer was painted by Fernand Khnopff in 1885, however, when one looks at this site and this it is clear that the domes...
The Sisters Zénaide and Charlotte Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David 1821. The sisters are reading a letter from their father Joseph who was exiled to the United States; they lived in Belgium.
The Getty says that this Head of a Woman by Michael Sweerts c. 1654 is rather extreme because of her loose skin and thinning hair. In fact she is very beautiful (her eyes especially) and she ha...
There is a Zoffany exhibition at the Royal Academy but they dont have this painting because its at the Getty. Its a touching and beautiful painting - the wooden horse on the right and the father admo...
A week in Los Angeles and one morning we went to the Getty, the challenge being to find five paintings that would provide a parallel in pictures to the world of Persephone Books in a building which i...
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958), who wrote Persephone book No. 7, The Home-Maker, about raising children in 1920s America, was a friend of Maria Montessori and introduced her teaching methods in ...
Although her brothers received a better education than she, Molly Hughes did not resent them. Emily Davies (1830-1921), on the other hand, is said to have resented the restrictions placed on her and ...
Molly Hughes (1866-1956), who wrote A London Child of the 1870s (Persephone book No. 61), was a well-known educationalist. She trained women teachers at Bedford College in London and was a found...
Last week we read The Young Pretenders (Persephone book No. 73) for the Wednesday evening book-group. Although the book predates Maria Montessoris theory for child education (it was fi...
The last oddment before one of the Persephone Books team goes to Los Angeles for a week - where the highlight will be the first-ever showing of the 1931 film of Brook Evans (please ring the office if...
May Wedderburn Cannan, the sister of Joanna Cannan, was a poet. Like Vera Brittain, her fiancé was killed in the First World War. She wrote about this in Grey Ghosts and Voices (1976). Here is her po...
Monet Tulips 1883, happy to say that there are some not dissimilar tulips in the garden at the moment. But nothing to rival Jane Brockets or Ben Pentreaths of course. The pink tulips in the office wi...
And here is the same view but from the garden. It always seems extraordinary with these kind of domestic paintings that so little has changed in two hundred years – doesnt one feel one could happily ...
A great favourite at Persephone – a painting by Thomas Pole called In the Library, St Jamess Square, Bristol c. 1805-6 © Brist ol City Museum and Art Gallery.
And something completely different: the paper place mat for the Second Avenue Deli in New York (which, confusingly, moved a few years ago to 162 East 33rd). The painting is, at a guess, 1960s so its ...
Walter Langley (a Newlyn School painter) A Quiet Read c. 1880-90 © Private Collection/Bridgeman; its rather touching that his subject looks as though she has had a long day and has put...
Sent by a friend when she was in Edinburgh to see the Scottish Colourist Exhibition: Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell Afternoon 1917 © Private Collection/Scottish National Gallery of M...
George Walton (1867-1933) designed this 54 inches wide tapestry in 1930. Its called The Grill. There are articles about his relationship with Sir James Morton, who ran Morton Sundour Fabrics and &nbs...
Oddments for the next couple of weeks, some sent to us by Persephone readers and some old favourites. Here is something in the latter category: a 1950s photograph (possibly in Dublin because the door...
You can read about Millicent Fanny Sutherland Leveson-Gower (1867-1955), known first of all as Lady Millicent St. Clair-Erskine, in the DNB here (free if you type in your local library card number).&...
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